The German health care system has been based on the Hospital Financing Act, which the German government introduced in 1972. According to that, the federal states plan hospitals and make investments. The health insurance funds finance the operating costs. But now the Hospital Financing Act is obsolete, because both the health insurance funds and the federal states are in financial trouble and tr...

We perform a structural estimation of the preference parameters in a buffer-stock consumption model augmented with temptation disutility. We adopt a two-stage Method of Simulated Moments methodology to match our simulated moments with those observed in the US Survey of Consumer Finances. To identify the parameters we use liquid and quasi-liquid (retirement) wealth holdings at different ages as ...

The preterm⁄very low birthweight (VLBW) are at particularly high risk of neurodevelopmental impairment. The prevalence of cerebral palsy has decreased over the previous era. Recent advances in perinatal care decreased rates of major neurodevelopmental disability at preschool age. Recent data suggests that 85% of VLBW infants survive in the 2014 Korean Neonatal Network. Until recently, most of t...

THE CHRONIC HEALTH PROBLEMS OF OBESITY, DIABEtes, heart disease, and cancer commonly affect adults living in developed countries and are both difficult to treat and costly, leading experts to stress the importance of prevention. Elimination of the 3 behavioral risk factors of sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, and smoking would decrease mortality by 35%. But how do we get individuals to exercise m...

Constraint-based scheduling (CBS) is a highly efficient and widely applied method in solving resourceconstrained project scheduling problems – including job-shop scheduling problems. However, many recent studies suggest that practical problems highly differ from benchmark instances used in theoretical scheduling research, generated intentionally to challenge solvers. Although industrial problem...

I thank David Gruen for helpful comments and take responsibility for any remaining errors. The views expressed herein are mine and they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Reserve Bank of Australia.

Optimal structural design under creep conditions, initiated over 20 years ago, brings a fairly larg~ variety of problems, interesting both from theoretical and engineering point of view. Existence of the time factor leads to optimization for a prescribed lifetime and the number of independent variables in governing equations increases by one. Practical importance is connected with design of met...

The reform of the Stability and Growth Pact and the incorporation of “debt brake” rules into national legislation have heavily increased the importance of structural balances in economic policymaking in Europe. As defined by the European Commission, structural balances are calculated by subtracting the estimated cyclical component of government revenue and spending as well as certain temporary ...

In recent years, symmetry breaking for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) has attracted considerable attention. Various general schemes have been proposed to eliminate symmetries. In general, these schemes may take exponential space or time to eliminate all the symmetries. We identify several classes of CSPs that encompass many practical problems and for which symmetry breaking for various...

Accurately identifying damage is difficult after an extreme event since damage often cannot be directly measured. Sensors, however, can collect data that reflects damage by measuring changes in structural response. Therefore, damage identification becomes an inverse problem in which the goal is to find system properties using limited response information. The inverse problem is formulated as an...