This article calls attention to a difficulty with insurers' investment policies that seems to have been overlooked so far. There is the distinct possibility that insurers cannot satisfy the demands of different stakeholders in terms of expected returns and volatility. While using the capital asset pricing model as the benchmark, this article distinguishes two groups of stakeholders that impose ...

Several name changes have been made to the industries shown in the stub of table . In this table,    of tables presents detailed estimates of the foreign direct investment position in the United States on a historical-cost, or book-value, basis and of the related capital and income flows. These tables supplement an article in the June  S  C B that summar...

The adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is one of the key factors explaining growth discrepancies across countries in general and in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in particular. ICT has been the most dynamic component of investment in recent years, and until recently the explosive growth of investment in ICT has been at the center of the ‘new economy’ paradigm, shifting the...

The productivity of real-world systems is often limited by so-called bottlenecks. Hence, usually companies are not only interested in finding the best ways to schedule their current resources so that their benefits are maximized (optimization), but, in order to increase the productivity, they also conduct some analysis to find bottlenecks in their system and eliminate them in the most efficient...

The differential allocation hypothesis predicts that parents should adjust their current investment in relation to perceived mate attractiveness if this affects offspring fitness. It should be selectively advantageous to risk more of their future reproductive success by investing heavily in current offspring of high reproductive value but to decrease investment if offspring value is low. If the...

Predictability of financial time series (FTS) is a well-known dilemma. A typical approach to this problem is to apply a regression model, built on the historical data and then further extend it into the future. If however the goal for FTS prediction would be to support or even make investment decisions, prediction generated by regression-based models are inappropriate as on top of being uncerta...