BACKGROUND Interest in hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs) has recently spiked, partly due to an increasingly negative view toward the U.S. foreign oil dependency and environmental concerns. Though HEVs are becoming more common, they have a significant price premium over gasoline-powered vehicles. One of the primary drivers of this "hybrid premium" is the cost of the vehicles' batteries. This paper...

In this paper, we develop an integrated cost-benefit analysis framework for ozone and fine particulate control, accounting for variability and uncertainty. The framework includes air quality simulation, sensitivity analysis, stochastic multi-objective air quality management, and stochastic cost-benefit analysis. This paper has two major contributions. The first is the development of stochastic ...

Avalanches pose a threat to settlements as well as industrial and recreational areas in the Alps. As a counter measure, technical mitigation measures have been implemented since the 19th century, resulting in a raise in value of formerly endangered areas. This increase in value can be considered as a benefit due to prevented damage. This paper compares the total costs and benefits of technical ...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effects of systematic co-operation among municipal employees on the number of sick-leave days per month and the type of benefit granted by the Social Insurance Office. A further aim was to evaluate the economic consequences for society. DESIGN A 6-year follow-up study with a matched-pairs design. METHODS Days on sick-leave were calculated for each subject one year ...

The evolution of internet created new opportunities for small and medium enterprises (SME), among which are social networks. This work aims at analyzing the potential of these networks for the SME in Algarve, creating a questionnaire for the purpose. The empirical study revealed that some firms have already an integrated business strategy with social networks, as well as a group in the firm res...

Almost any new circuitry which falls under the category Design For Testability (DFT) is perceived by designers as a problem to be endured to make someone else’s job easier, i.e. that of the manufacturing engineer. After all, no net benefit is gained by simply transferring problems from manufacturing into design. Even if there is a net benefit, the designer may not derive a benefit. For a new DF...

We describe four recently developed panel data estimators for unbalanced and nested data, a common problem for economic and experimental data. We estimate a western corn rootworm damage function with each estimator, including separate parameters for random effects from year, location, and experimental errors. We then use each estimator to assess the cost of the western corn rootworm soybean var...