A vision for Nicaragua : Health services in the new century

Nicaragua is facing a crisis in health and health care, and a health futures programme has been initiated to focus concern and mobilize key actors. Two national scenario workshops have been held at which participants constructed several scenarios describing alternative health futures for the country, with particular emphasis on the organization of health services. One or these, a scenario of profound change, was selected by the participants as their vision of the preferred future. It involves more emphasis on health promotion, decentralization of health-care services, broader participation in health matters, improved training for health professionals, and a stronger role for universities and other educational and research centres. Implications of the selected scenario regarding health policies and actions have been identified, among them being the adoption and implementation of the Ottawa Charter on Health Promotion, the organization of local health service networks, and the more active involvement of health professionals in the designing of health systems.     

R&D Project Selection Strategy: an empirical study in Spain

The author has investigated the role played by project selection methods in defining a firm's technology strategy, as exemplified by a sample of innovative companies in Spain. The information was collected by a combination of questionnaire and interview with key personnel.
The author was able to classify strategies into four groups: (1) a planning strategy, essentially a negotiation comprising top-down and bottom-up elements; (2) an economic strategy in which a large number of economic criteria set in advance by top management are used to evaluate projects; (3) a market strategy in which R&D is seen more or less as an adjunct to the Marketing function, which defines the products needed and negotiates the programme with top management; (4) a technical strategy, used in circumstances in which technological innovation is essential and in which, therefore, economic factors take a subsidiary place.
The author's data show that in companies operating a planning strategy project selection methods of various, perhaps ad hoc kinds play a key role in reaching a company consensus. For those using an economic strategy the selection criteria are predetermined and selection methods inflexible. In the case of the market strategy, evaluation methods are used solely to help to rank projects prior to selection. Firms employing the technical strategy clearly base their decisions purely on the technical merit of the various projects put up for implementation.
The paper includes information on the types of selection method used, broken down by company size and other similar criteria, and comparisons with practice in the USA, France and some other countries.     

Investment option under CIR interest rates

We analyze extensively the characteristics of the solution to an irreversible investment decision when the only source of uncertainty comes from interest rates. They are assumed to be driven by the popular Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) stochastic process. Particular attention is paid to the impact that both CIR parameters and risk aversion have on the threshold rate.     

A simulation-based algorithm for American executive stock option valuation

We present an algorithm that merges a certainty-equivalence framework with the least-squares Monte Carlo algorithm to obtain the executive stock option (ESO) value for a risk-averse and undiversified agent. We account for the difference between executive’s value and firm cost of the ESO. We show how early-exercise decisions depend on executive’s preferences and its diversification degree. Because of the algorithm flexibility, it allows for multiple state-variables. As an example, we consider the case of indexed ESOs revealing a significant improvement in terms of executive’s discount respect to fixed strike ESOs.     

New models for exhaustible resource development

Minerals sector firms have joined other industries in going green, and some have used the language of sustainable development in the context of the relationship between industry, environment and community. Because of its historical practices of causing severe land disturbance, water pollution and ecosystem disruption, many have thought the concept of ‘sustainable mining’ an oxymoron. Within the context of trying to find the ‘best’ models for minerals development in the fledgling Russian democracy (specifically in Western Siberia), however, we discovered a number of possibilities for creating at least a more sustainable mining sector. This paper presents in summary form some interim results from our work on sustainable development in the extractive hydrocarbon economies of Western Siberia. We identify practices along three dimensions of sustainability – environment, community and labor – and briefly discuss the implications of these practices for Western Siberia.     

阿根廷与中国:过去、现在与未来经济合作纵论

<正>首先,我们将关注阿根廷与中国两国的贸易关系。第一部分是关于1991年阿根廷经济模式的重要变化和2007年第三、四代共产党领导人完成的"改革开放政策"。在这一部分,我们将关注1991年～2007年的经济关系。我们将这段时期分成2个阶段:从1991年～2001年;2002年～2007年。     

Community connectivity and heterogeneity: clues and insights on cooperation on social networks

While studies on the emergence of cooperation on structured populations abound, only few of them have considered real social networks as the substrate on which individuals interact. As has been shown recently [Lozano et al., PLoS ONE 3(4):e1892, 2008], understanding cooperative behavior on social networks requires knowledge not only of their global (macroscopic) characteristic, but also a deep insight on their community (mesoscopic) structure. In this paper, we look at this problem from the viewpoint of the resilience of cooperation, in particular when there are directed exogenous attacks (insertion of pure defectors) at key locations in the network. We present results of agent-based simulations showing strong evidence that the resilience of social networks is crucially dependent on their community structure, ranging from no resilience to robust cooperative behavior. Our results have important implications for the understanding of how organizations work and can be used as a guide for organization design. This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia (Spain) under grants FIS2006-13321-2 and MOSAICO and by Comunidad de Madrid (Spain) under grant. SIMUMAT-CM. S. Lozano was supported by URV through a FPU grant and by the EU Integrated Project IRRIIS (027568).     

Building a global database: consequences for the national I–O data

ABSTRACT

Global economic analysis requires consistent and balanced data, which necessitates the reconciliation of datasets from both national and international sources. In the case of the Global Trade Analysis Project Data Base, datasets supplied by international sources are considered preferable to national input–output (I–O) tables. As a result, the national I–O data can experience significant adjustments during the reconciliation process due to differences between the national and international datasets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which national I–O data change during reconciliation. The results demonstrate that the I–O data are altered by the construction process, particularly from the reconciliation of the national I–O data to the international trade and energy datasets. Closer examination reveals potential issues with both the trade and energy datasets, as well as the national I–O data – illustrating the challenges associated with reconciling data from multiple sources.     

Modelling conditional heteroskedasticity: Application to the “IBEX-35” stock-return index

This paper compares alternative time-varying volatility models for daily stock-returns using data from Spanish equity index IBEX-35. Specifically, we estimate a parametric family of models of generalized autoregressive heteroskedasticity (which nests the most popular symmetric and asymmetric GARCH models), a semiparametric GARCH model, the generalized quadratic ARCH model, the stochastic volatility model, the Poisson Jump Diffusion model and, finally, a nonparametric model. Those models which use conditional standard deviation (specifically, TGARCH and AGARCH models) produce better fits than all other GARCH models. We also compare the within sample predictive power of all models using a standard efficiency test. Our results show that the asymmetric behaviour of responses is a statistically significant characteristic of these data. Moreover, we observe that specifications with a distribution which allows for fatter tails than a normal distribution do not necessarily outperform specifications with a normal distribution.     

Integration and diversity

Experimental Economics - We study a setting where individuals prefer to coordinate with others but they differ on their preferred action. Our interest is in understanding the role of link formation...