Recent evaluations of the impact of Turkish healthcare reforms on the efficiency of public hospitals suffer from simultaneous structural changes in the healthcare sector as well as from lack of data on some of the key ingredients of the reform. In this note, we analyze the major obstacles in a fair evaluation of the efficiency of public hospitals taking Sulku(2011)’s data envelopment analysis a...

The purpose of this note is to posit and discuss the concept of "competitive inhibition potential" (CIP), which is an in vivo index of the ability of a competitive inhibitor to elevate plasma concentrations of drug substrates, when the competitive inhibitor is administered at its usual and customary dose.

Can game theory aid in forecasting the decision making of parties in a conflict? A review of the literature revealed diverse opinions but no empirical evidence on this question. When put to the test, game theorists’ predictions were more accurate than those from unaided judgement but not as accurate as role-play forecasts. Twenty-one game theorists made 99 forecasts of decisions for six conflic...

Quantitative scaling into percent signal change is helpful to detect and eliminate “bad” results with abnormal extreme values. While cognitive effects give signal changes on the order of 1% (and larger in the visual and auditory cortices), signal variations of over 10% may arise from motion and other artifacts in the data. Thus, a quantitative check on measured effect size can be used to screen...

Separating Uncertainty from Heterogeneity in Life Cycle Earnings This paper develops and applies a method for decomposing cross section variability of earnings into components that are forecastable at the time students decide to go to college (heterogeneity) and components that are unforecastable. About 60% of variability in returns to schooling is forecastable. This has important implications ...

This paper uses Granger non–causality tests to analyze if channel competition exists between the companion websites of 93 German newspapers observed between I/1998 and II/2005. It provides econometric evidence for significant negative effects of companion website traffic on the print circulation of national newspapers and for significantly positive effects on local newspapers, at least for the ...

Nonchemical and chemical methods for control of drywood termites were evaluated under simulated field conditions. Specifically, we assessed the efficacy of four methods currently marketed as alternatives to whole-structure fumigation for control of drywood termites: excessive heat, excessive cold, electrocution, and microwaves. In addition, we evaluated a reduced dosage of methyl bromide synerg...