Is information technology (IT) a substitute or complement for inventories? This study answers this question by understanding substitution and complementarity of IT and inventories insofar as they impact profitability of a firm. We use data on IT expenditures and inventories of U.S firms and find support for the substitution between IT and overall inventories. Because overall inventories compris...

This paper examines the inventories of publicly traded American manufacturing companies between 1981 and 2000. The median of inventory holding periods were reduced from 96 days to 81 days. The average rate of inventory reduction is about 2% per year. The greatest reduction was found for work-in-process inventory which declined by about 6% per year. Finished goods inventories did not decline. Fi...

This paper deals with a multi-period fixed charge production-distribution problem associated with backorder and inventories. The objective is to determine the size of the shipments from each supplier and backorder and inventories at each period, so that the total cost incurred during the entire period towards production, transportation, backorder and inventories is minimised. A 0-1 mixed intege...

In this paper, we put forward an information theoretic definition of the redundancy that is observed across the sound inventories of the world’s languages. Through rigorous statistical analysis, we find that this redundancy is an invariant property of the consonant inventories. The statistical analysis further unfolds that the vowel inventories do not exhibit any such property, which in turn po...

Emission inventories are an essential tool for evaluating, managing, and regulating air pollution. Refinements and innovations in instruments that measure air pollutants, models that calculate emissions, and techniques for data management and uncertainty assessment are needed to enhance emission inventories. This workshop provided recommendations for improving emission factors, improving emissi...

Inventories play an important role in business cycles. Inventory build-ups add momentum to the economy during expansions, while inventory liquidations sap economic strength during recessions. In addition, because inventory fluctuations are notoriously difficult to predict, they present considerable uncertainty in assessing the economic outlook. The role of inventories in shaping the current out...

This paper describes the development and application of web services for comparing US and global emission inventories. Web services and service oriented architectures are providing new ways to support emissions modelers and analysts as they provide a web browser based environment for accessing and analyzing emissions data and inventories. Traditional emissions data analyses that can be conducte...