BEA's Regional Economic Accounts Program: Recent and Planned Improvements

This article highlights recent improvements and plans for further improvements to each of BEA’s major regional economic accounts programs. The improvements focus on the acceleration of release of the estimates and on the preparation of new and extended estimates. There also is a brief discussion on BEA’s research effort to improve the regional accounts.JEL Classification E010     

On the Role of Weight Restrictions in Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper examines the role that weight restrictions play in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). It is argued that the decision to include a factor (input or output) in a DEA model represents an implicit judgement that the factor has a non-trivial weight. It therefore seems perverse to allow DEA to assign a trivial weight to that factor in assessing the efficiency of a unit. There is therefore a strong case for imposing restrictions on factor weights. However, many existing methods of weight restriction are in practice unwieldy. This paper proposes an alternative approach we term contingent weight restriction which is both practical and intellectually consistent with the DEA philosophy. The paper explores the implications of alternative methods of weight restriction using simulated data from a well known production process.     

Business and games

This paper responds to the popular argument that business is like a game and is thus insulated from the demands of morality. In the first half of the paper, I offer objections to this argument as it is put forward by John Ladd in his well-known article, Morality and the Ideal of Rationality in Formal Organizations. I argue that Ladd's analysis is flawed both because it deprives us of the ability to assert that a business is acting badly or that its goals are irrational, and because it is internally inconsistent. In the second half of the paper, I give reasons for thinking that business is not like a game.Peter Heckman teaches business ethics at Santa Clara University. His publications on Nietzsche can be found inThe British Journal of Aesthetics andPhilosophy and Rhetoric.     

On the smoothness of optimal paths II: some local turnpike results

We study the local turnpike property for two classes of infinite-horizon discrete-time deterministic maximization problems which have common applications, e.g., optimal growth theory. We follow a functional-analytic approach and rely on an implicit function theorem for the space of the sequences which converge to zero. We shall assume the existence of an optimal path which is not necessarily a steady-state. Relying on material developped in Blot and Crettez (Decis Econo Finance 27:1–34, 2004), “On the smoothness of optimal paths” Decis Econ Finance, 21:1–34, 2004), we provide conditions under which a variation in the initial conditions (i.e., capital stock and discount rate) yields an optimal solution which converges toward a reference solution when time becomes infinite. We also provide new results on bounded solutions of difference equations. We gratefully thank the editor, Silvano Holzer, and two anonymous referees for remarks and advices on a previous version of this paper.     

The Division of Labor Under Homogeneity: A Critique of Mises and Rothbard

A bstract .   Even the most passionate defenders of free trade, such as Mises and Rothbard, claim that trade cannot occur under conditions of strict homogeneity of land, labor, and capital. We show that specialization, trade, and the division of labor can emerge even when resources are initially homogenous, due to "natural heterogeneity," economies of scale, and learning.     

Progressive stress accelerated life tests under finite mixture models

In this paper, progressive stress accelerated life tests are considered when the lifetime of a product under use condition follows a finite mixture of distributions. The experiment is performed when each of the components in the mixture follows a general class of distributions which includes, among others, the Weibull, compound Weibull, power function, Gompertz and compound Gompertz distributions. It is assumed that the scale parameter of each component satisfies the inverse power low, the progressive stress is directly proportional to time and the cumulative exposure model for the effect of changing stress holds. Based on type-I censoring, the maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) of the parameters under consideration are obtained. A special attention is paid to a mixture of two Rayleigh components. Simulation results are carried out to study the precision of the MLEs and to obtain confidence intervals for the parameters involved.