infonet-economy

Mortgage-backed securities have played a major role in the financial crisis and aren’t very popular as a result. This column documents macroeconomic benefits of these instruments, showing that economies with more developed markets for securitised mortgage debt share more consumption risk with other economies.

Companies play a central role on the way towards sustainable development. Over the last years, many approaches have emerged that attempt to measure companies’ contribution to sustainable development, i.e. corporate sustainability. Our analysis of existing approaches reveals two major shortcomings. First, value creation as a core condition for sustainability as well as for further…

Purpose. To study extraocular muscle (EOM) function, the local physiologic contraction and elongation (deformation) along human horizontal EOMs were quantified using motion-encoded MRI. Methods. Eleven subjects (healthy right eye) gazed at a target that moved horizontally in a sinusoidal fashion (period 2s, amplitude +/-20 degrees ), during MR imaging with an optimized protocol. In…

Although brand equity and customer equity are two of the most important topics to aca-demic researchers and practitioners (Leone et al. 2006), so far little is known about the relation-ship between these two concepts (e.g., Berger et al. 2006; Kumar, Lemon and Parasuraman 2006). A better understanding on how customer equity is affected by changes in customer mind-set is important, as…

In 1998 Babson College and London Business School initiated the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) program to increase our understanding of the role of entrepreneurship in national economic growth. GEM is now the largest single study of entrepreneurial activity in the world. In view of the 10th anniversary of the GEM project we seek to understand how the "heavenly"…

Stochastic processes of common use in mathematical finance are presented throughout this book, which consists of eleven chapters, interlacing on the one hand financial concepts and instruments, such as arbitrage opportunities, admissible strategies, contingent claims, option pricing, default risk, ruin, and on the other hand, Brownian motion, diffusion processes, Lévy processes,…

This paper concerns the pricing of American options with stochastic stopping time constraints expressed in terms of the states of a Markov process. Following the ideas of Menaldi et al., we transform the constrained into an unconstrained optimal stopping problem. The transformation replaces the original payoff by the value of a generalized barrier option. We also provide a Monte…

This paper explores a general model of the evolution and adaption of hedonic utility. It is shown that optimal utility will be increasing strongly in regions where choices have to be made often and decision mistakes have a severe impact on fitness. Several applications are suggested. In the context of intertemporal preferences, the model offers an evolutionary explanation for the…

This article seeks to assess whether physician payment reforms in the United States and Switzerland were likely to attain their objectives. We first introduce basic contract theory, with the organizing principle being the degree of information asymmetry between the patient and the health care provider. Depending on the degree of information asymmetry, different forms of payment…