The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 has focused considerable attention on the potential liability and the operating conduct of big oil companies. This paper shows that limiting the ability of a company to insure and diversify its risks creates incentives to internalize the welfare effects of catastrophic events, leading to a welfare improvement. We model an economy with complete financia...

Cosmic strings inside Schwarzschild black holes in teleparallel gravity are considered.Torsion flux inside the black hole is compute like a torsion vortex on a superfluid.Since some components of torsion are singular on Schwarzschild horizon and others remain finite we compute a torsion invariant to decide whether the torsion is singular and where torsion singularities located.It is found out t...

The fundamental question encountered in acquiring capacity to meet nonstationary demand over a multiperiod horizon is how to balance the trade-off between having insufficient capacity in some periods and excess capacity in others. In the former situation, part of the demand is subcontracted while, in the latter, capacity that has been paid for is rendered idle. Capacity and subcontracting decis...

Adiabatic (curvature) perturbations are produced during a period of cosmological inflation that is driven by a single scalar field, the inflaton. On particle physics grounds – though – it is natural to expect that this scalar field is coupled to other scalar degrees of freedom. This gives rise to oscillations between the perturbation of the inflaton field and the perturbations of the other scal...

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expresse...

This paper discusses some methods for guiding the search of conventional chess programs to variable depth. The motivation for investigating such methods comes from the fact that searching to a fixed depth causes difficult problems (e.g. the horizon effect). The first section deals with certain improvements of the quiescence search and a demonstration of their beneficial effects. The method of n...

The uncertainty in radar precipitation estimates is the superposition of errors of many different error sources such as ground clutter, hardware instability, beam shielding, beam broadening, variability in the hydrometeor phase and size distribution, and signal attenuation by water on the radome or in the atmosphere. In the past decade MeteoSwiss developed and implemented a series of sophistica...

This paper is the first one to: (i) provide in-sample estimates of linear and nonlinear Taylor rules, augmented with an indicator of financial stability, for the case of South Africa, and (ii) analyse the ability of linear and nonlinear monetary policy rule specifications, as well as nonparametric and semiparametric models, to forecast the nominal interest rate setting that describes the South ...

This paper introduces a formulation of the mixed risk-neutral/minimax control problem for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Drawing on results from risk-neutral control and minimax control, we derive an information state process and dynamic programming equations for the value function. Furthermore, we develop a methodology to synthesize an optimal control law on the nite horizon, and a near-opt...

We consider optimal control problems for a class of hybrid systems with switches dependent on an external event process. In the case where all event times in this process are fully known, the solution to such problems was obtained in prior work. When event times are uncertain or unknown, we propose a Receding Horizon (RH) control scheme in which only some future event information is available w...