This paper examines the costs and cost-effectiveness of psychosocial treatment for personality disorder in a controlled study. Using well-validated cost and outcome measures three groups are compared: the One-Stage group (n=32) received 12 months of inpatient treatment; the Step-Down group (n=29) received 6 months of inpatient treatment followed by 12 months of outpatient therapy; and the contr...

In the United States, but not in Canada, nominal interest on residential housing mortgages is a deductible expense for the personal income tax. This suggests that changes in nominal interest rates could conceivably have differing impacts on real estate values in the two countries. The inflation component of nominal interest should have a negative impact on Canadian real estate, but its effect s...

© 2010 enclos Double-skin facades have historically been more common among European high-rises in part because energy prices are significantly higher in Europe than in the United States. The use of double-skin facades (DSF) in the United States for commercial buildings presents a variety of challenges and impediments, including a longer payback period on initial investment. An emerging trend in...

Among other things, sexual selection theory posits that in species with limited male parental investment, males should evolve biological mechanisms to competitively dominate or otherwise compete with one another. It is unclear whether such proposed mechanisms would influence status hierarchies in small human groups. We report the results of a study investigating possible effects of prenatal (in...

This paper estimates a Structural Dynamic Factor Model on a panel of 102 US quarterly series. We model economic comovements by means of 5 underlying structural shocks (oil price, productivity, aggregate demand, monetary policy, and housing demand). The results of the benchmark model (impulse responses and variance decompositions) are in line with those predicted by economic theory and usually e...

Since completing a " Trend-Delphi " based regional forecast and transportation plan in 1996, Metro has developed an integrated transportation and land use model (Metroscope). We are presently using the model to explore several regional growth management options as well as produce a new regional forecast and transportation plan. Comparing our Metroscope results to our previous forecast reveals t...

This paper presents an overview of the existing literature on the nonparametric local polynomial (LPR) estimator of the regression function and its derivatives when the observations are dependent. When the errors of the regression model are correlated and follow an ARMA process, Vilar-Fernández and Francisco-Fernández (2002) proposed a modification of the LPR estimator, called the generalized l...

Real estate appraisal is of great importance to several socio-economic stakeholders for different reasons and justifications: local governments and municipalities for taxation purposes; banks for mortgage and other credit applications processing; property valuation companies for marketing activities; and property developers and investors for sound investment decision-making. This paper summariz...

This paper provides field experimental evidence on the prevalence and determinants of discrimination and in-group favoritism in trust decisions. We observe choices of about 1,000 inhabitants of the city of Zurich who take part in a sequential trust game, in which first movers can condition their investments on the residential districts of second movers. Our main results can be summarized as fol...

The 2005 American Housing Survey reveals that 11% of residents on the west coast of the USA live in gated communities. The trend is not confined to America: just about all new housing built in China over the last 10 years is gated, with neighbourhood walls, guards, owner-governance structures, fees and neighbourhood management and investment plans based not on the municipal government model but...