Future development of low-carbon energy technologies is an important factor in determining the total cost to society of greenhouse gas mitigation. The cost trajectory of a developmental technology is highly uncertain; nevertheless, it is most often modeled as deterministic. This simplification neglects the value of flexible decision making in R&D investment and of exploratory investment in high...

How should we invest capital into a sequence of investment opportunities, if, for reasons of external competition, our interest focuses on trying to invest in the very best opportunity? We introduce new models to answer such questions. Our objective is to formulate them in a way that makes results highrisk specific in order to present true alternatives to other models. At the same time we try t...

BACKGROUND Disease management programs are expected (and usually contractually required) to reduce total costs in the diseases they manage. OBJECTIVES To discuss the appropriateness of using utilization indexes in lieu of cost and the importance of reviewing utilization trends to determine whether sufficient opportunity exists for a program to be financially effective; and to conduct an analy...

BEA is studying proposals to change the treatment of insurance services in the national accounts. There are 5 proposed changes: investment income will be added as a supplement to the premiums paid by policyholders; investment income is to include interest, dividends and capital gains; a measure of expected investment income will be incorporated; a measure of expected claims will be incorporated...

Various alternatives are available when designing a data collection system for portfolio investment (PI) statistics, in the context of balance of payments (BOP) and international investment position (IIP). Such systems differ according to the reporting agents they target, periodicity and level of aggregation, while the corresponding results vary in terms of implementation and running costs, ava...

For a set of risky financial securities whose expected return vector and covariance matrix are given, we propose the concept of a robust profit opportunity as an alternative to arbitrage opportunities. We formulate the problem of finding the “most robust” profit opportunity in a single investment period, and show that it can be solved as a convex quadratic programming problem. Furthermore, we d...

We consider a model in which any investment opportunity is described in terms of cash flows. We don’t assume that there is a numéraire, enabling investors to transfer wealth through time; the time horizon is not supposed to be finite and the investment opportunities are not specifically related to the buying and selling of securities on a financial market. In this quite general framework, we sh...