Search results for "discount"
showing 10 items of 108 documents
Assessing the economic profitability of Paulownia as a biomass crop in Southern Mediterranean area
2022
The increase of renewable energy production worldwide, occurred in the last years, is also attributable to some agroforestry species cultivated according to the short rotation coppice technique. Although these species are able of enhancing abandoned or marginal land leading to numerous environmental benefits, an increasing number of farmers are introducing them in place of agricultural crops. Therefore, since for a farmer economic sustainability is one of the main factors to introduce a biomass crop, the study aimed at evaluating the profitability of Paulownia, a species that has been spreading in recent years. In particular, an economic analysis has been carried out in a Southern Italian f…
Hospital performance: Efficiency or quality? Can we have both with IT?
2015
This paper explores influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality.There is a direct effect of IT investment on service quality in hospitals.There is a moderating effect of quality on operational efficiency in hospitals.There is a U-shaped relationship between IT investments and operational efficiency.IT investments have diminishing returns beyond a certain point. The influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality are of great interest to healthcare executives as well as insurers. Few studies have examined how IT investments influence both efficiency and quality or whether there is an optimal IT investment level that influences both in the desired direction. De…
Giant reedasenergycropforSouthernItaly: An economicfeasibilitystudy
2016
Among renewablesourcesgiantreedhasattractedagrowinginterestasenergycropespeciallyin Southern Europe,thankstoitslowagronomicinputrequirements.Thispaperaimedatevaluatingthe economic feasibilityofintroductionofgiantreedplantationasenergycropintheSouthernItaly.In particular,aneconomicand financial analysiswasperformedbycomparinggiantreed(bothfor woodchip andchoppedforageproduction)withtraditionalcrops(pluriannualandannual)thatare currentlycultivatedinthesamearea,suchaswinegrape,melonandtomato.Resultsshowedthehighest profitability ofgiantreedrespecttoothercropswithcurrentmarketprices.Inparticular,giantreed destined towoodchipproductiondenotedthehighestannualgrossmarginwithavalueof647.10 € ha1, f…
Why Moving Averages?
2017
This chapter presents a brief motivation for using moving averages for trend detection, how moving averages are computed, and their two key properties: the average lag (delay) time and smoothness. The most important thing to understand right from the start is that there is a direct relationship between the average lag time and smoothness of a moving average.
Economics of climate change : sensitivity analysis of social cost of carbon
2016
Social cost of carbon (SCC) is the key concept in the economics of climate change. It measures the economic cost of climate impacts. SCC has influence on how beneficial it is to prevent climate change: if the value of SCC increases, investments to low-carbon technology become more attractive and profitable. This paper examines the sensitivity of two important assumptions that affect to SCC: the choice of a discount rate and time horizon. Using the integrated assessment model, we calculate SCC estimates with multiple discount rates and various time horizon lengths. Our results show that discount rate and time horizon have great effect on SCC. For example, the SCC estimates are drastically re…
Is the Reform of the Spanish Public Pension System of 2011 Justified from an Actuarial Point of View?
2012
The aim of this paper is basically to answer three questions about the Spanish public retirement pension system. Is the 2011 reform of the system, which will gradually come into force starting on 1-01-2013, justified from an actuarial point of view? What measures would have been adopted in the Spanish system if all the accounting principles applied in the notional account pension system in Sweden were enforced? What measures would be adopted if current legislation on defined benefit private pension plans were applied to the system? To this end we formulate a Swedish-type actuarial balance for the Spanish public retirement pension system as at 31-12-2010 and project a solvency indicator for …
Growth in Average Firm Size of U.S. Industrial Portfolios and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns
2018
This paper shows that growth in average firm size in U.S. industrial portfolios predicts future growth in average firm size. Moreover, the payoffs of industrial portfolios sorted by growth in average firm size in the previous period increase linearly as we move from lowest to highest growth in average firm size. The spread between highest and lowest growth in average firm size is economically large and cannot be explained by exposures to standard risk factors or the asset growth effect (Cooper, Gulen, and Schill, 2008). Principal component analysis reveals that this growth in average firm size effect is linked to the first principal component. Moreover, stochastic discount factor model anal…
Government Size, the Role of Commitments*
2011
We explore the hypothesis that long-term commitments affect the dynamics of government expenditure. With the aid of a simple median-voter model we interpret the pattern of increasing-then-constant tax rates observed in OECD countries in the second half of the last century: persistence of public expenditure and a lower bound on new interventions will push government size upward, and preferences of the electorate put a halt to this growth at some point. In this view, the fiscal policy variable is seen to consist of only a part of the total expenditure, the rest being predetermined by its past level.
A Top-Down Method for Long-Term Investing
2021
This paper bases long-term investing on a tradeable stochastic discount factor (SDF), relates it to the growth optimal portfolio and argues for a top-down method, where modeling efforts are directed at capturing its long-run dynamics in a generalized setting. This differs from the common, cumbersome bottom-up method of modeling many risky securities in the marketplace. Various optimal portfolio strategies can be implemented efficiently using fractional expectations of the SDF. This paper illustrates empirically for the US stock market that the proposed method leads to higher wealth, higher returns on investment and higher long-term utility levels.
Mobile Telephony in Emerging Markets: The Importance of Multi-Simming Customers
2015
Rapidly increasing sales of multi-SIM phones, mobile penetration rates above 100% and reported customer behavior all point to the fact that a signicant share of mobile customers in emerging markets tend to use more than one SIM card. A primary motive for this is to avoid making expensive o-net calls. We add a segment of exible prepaid customers, who choose to "multi-sim" in equilibrium, to the seminal model of competing telephone networks a la Laont,