The International Comparison Program (ICP) is one of the largest economic and statistical exercises that has ever been carried out. Detailed price surveys have been carried out every five years or so, using standardised methods, enabling the calculation of the real quantities of goods and services that are purchased in each economy. A wealth of information has been generated on the price and qu...

We examine the selection and termination of investment management firms by plan sponsors (public and corporate pension plans, unions, foundations, and endowments). We build a unique dataset that comprises hiring and firing decisions by approximately 3,700 plan sponsors over a 10-year period from 1994 to 2003. Our data represent the allocation of over $737 billion in mandates to hired investment...

We investigate asset-allocation strategies open to members of defined-contribution pension plans with a model that incorporates asset, salary (labour-income) and interest-rate risk. We propose a novel form of terminal utility function, incorporating habit formation, that uses the member’s final salary as a numeraire. The paper discusses various properties and characteristics of the optimal asse...

after the victory of constitution revolution, the context became ready for creating new institutions. one of the main elements of these institutions was making people familiar with their social and political rights. thus establishment of parliament and political and social institutions in iran clarified the necessity of political and economic independence. as one of the major concerns of parlia...

The plan mentions that ‘In the European Union alone, a subset of drug-resistant bacteria is responsible annually for some 25 000 deaths, with extra healthcare costs and lost productivity due to antimicrobial resistance amounting to at least €1500 million [2].’ The plan provides a framework for national action plans to combat antimicrobial resistance. Through adoption of the plan, WHO member sta...

As health facilities vary in type, function, size and, most importantly, the context in which they operate, it is impractical to provide a set of universally applicable recommendations for the essential components of health facility pandemic preparedness plans. A tailored preparedness plan should be developed by consultative discussions involving all key players inside and outside the facility....

An action plan to enlarge the technical areas of statistics focuses on the data analyst. The plan sets out six technical areas of work for a university department and advocates a specific allocation of resources devoted to research in each area and to courses in each area. The value of technical work is judged by the extent to which it benefits the data analyst, either directly or indirectly. T...

There has been considerable public discussion of the investment performance of the University of California Retirement Plan (UCRP). Much of that discussion has been based on simple comparisons of the realized investment returns of UCRP to those of other pension plans, such as CalPERS. Such comparisons provide no economically meaningful or statistically significant information about the quality ...

Impressive progress has been made in global surgery in the past 10 years, and now serious and evidence-based national strategies are being developed for scaling-up surgical services in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to achieving this goal requires developing a realistic country-based estimate of burden of surgical disease, developing an accurate estimate of existing need, deve...

A dynamic sampling plan among strata is a permutation of sampled items specifying which stratum is to receive the next item to be included in the sample. An optimal such plan has the property of achieving minimum variance for its cost whenever it is truncated. This article shows that optimal dynamic sampling plans exist under very general conditions, and gives a simple algorithm for constructin...