Gerontocracy, retirement, and social security

Why are the old politically successful? We build a simple interest group model in which political pressure is time-intensive, showing that in the political competitive equilibrium each group lobbies for government policies that lower their own value of time but the old do so to a greater extent and as a result are net gainers from the political process. What distinguishes the elderly from other political groups (and what makes them more succesful) is that they have lower labor productivity and/or that we are all likely to become elderly at some point, while we are relatively unlikely to change gender, race, sexual orientation, or even ocupation, The model has a variety of implications for the design of social security programs, which we test using data from the Social Security Administration. For example, the model predicts that social security programs with retirement incentives are larger and that the old are more "single-minded" in their politics, implications which we verify using cross-country government finance data and cross-country political participation surveys. Finally, we show that the forced savings programs intended to "reform" the social security system may increase the amount of intergenerational redistribution. As a model for evaluating policy reforms, ours has the attractive feature that reforms must be time time consistent from a political point of view rather than a public interest point of view.

Fases estacionárias quirais para cromatografia líquida de alta eficiência

The development of Chiral Stationary Phases (CSPs) for high performance liquid chromatography has been studied by various researches around the world, especially, since 1980. This simple interest has been transformed into a tool of great technological value for the industrial community and scholars in general providing the existence of several CSPs, which act through different mechanisms of chiral discrimination. This paper describes the main types of CSPs that are used for the resolution of the majority of chiral compounds.

Análise do método de Gauss como substituto dos principais sistemas de amortização no estudo da ocorrência de anatocismo

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Atividades investigativas no ensino da matemática financeira: as estratégias empregadas com uso de planilhas eletrônicas

Pós-graduação em Educação Matemática - IGCE

Situações-problema no ensino de matemática financeira

O presente trabalho descreve uma proposta de atividade educacional direcionada para professores de Matemática, envolvendo situações-problema no ensino de Matemática Financeira para ser aplicado com alunos do Ensino Médio. Tais atividades tem como objetivo fornecer um contexto real, no qual o estudante esteja inserido. O trabalho se divide em quatro partes: a introdução de uma situaçãoproblema envolvendo juros simples, o conhecimento matemático, a resolução da situação-problema e a proposta de atividade educacional. Diferenciando-se do que usualmente é encontrado nos livros didáticos, a proposta aqui apresentada propõe estudar conteúdos matemáticos de forma articulada, envolvendo o conceito de porcentagem vinculado com funções lineares e juros simples com função afim e progressão aritmética. Dessa forma, é apresentada uma sequência de aulas envolvendo situações-problema através de atividades, adequadas para os alunos.

SC INFORMATION LETTER #16-4 (revised)

The interest rate to be applied to underpayments and overpayments of taxes is listed. The rate is compounded daily except simple interest applies to the underpayment of declaration of estimated tax.

Interest rate exposure of Spanish banks: A nonparametric analysis

Interest rate risk is one of the major financial risks faced by banks due to the very nature of the banking business. The most common approach in the literature has been to estimate the impact of interest rate risk on banks using a simple linear regression model. However, the relationship between interest rate changes and bank stock returns does not need to be exclusively linear. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the interest rate exposure of the Spanish banking industry employing both parametric and non parametric estimation methods. Its main contribution is to use, for the first time in the context of banks’ interest rate risk, a nonparametric regression technique that avoids the assumption of a specific functional form. One the one hand, it is found that the Spanish banking sector exhibits a remarkable degree of interest rate exposure, although the impact of interest rate changes on bank stock returns has significantly declined following the introduction of the euro. Further, a pattern of positive exposure emerges during the post-euro period. On the other hand, the results corresponding to the nonparametric model support the expansion of the conventional linear model in an attempt to gain a greater insight into the actual degree of exposure.

Simple and stable dynamic traffic engineering for provider scale ethernet

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Three essays on the term structure of interest rates

A PhD Dissertation, presented as part of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the NOVA - School of Business and Economics

Interacting and making personalized recommendations of places of interest to tourists

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 353

The Simple Economics of Conglomeration with Bankruptcy Costs: Separate or Joint Financing?

Which projects should be financed through separate non-recourse loans (or limited- liability companies) and which should be bundled into a single loan? In the pres- ence of bankruptcy costs, this conglomeration decision trades off the benefit of co- insurance with the cost of risk contamination. This paper characterize this tradeoff for projects with binary returns, depending on the mean, variability, and skewness of returns, the bankruptcy recovery rate, the correlation across projects, the number of projects, and their heterogeneous characteristics. In some cases, separate financing dominates joint financing, even though it increases the interest rate or the probability of bankruptcy.

Social preferences: Some simple tests and a new model

Departures from pure self interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We conduct experiments on simple two-person and three-person games with binary choices that test these theories more directly than the array of games conventionally considered. Our experiments show strong support for the prevalence of "quasi-maximin" preferences: People sacrifice to increase the payoffs for all recipients, but especially for the lowest-payoff recipients. People are also motivated by reciprocity: While people are reluctant to sacrifice to reciprocate good or bad behavior beyond what they would sacrifice for neutral parties, they withdraw willingness to sacrifice to achieve a fair outcome when others are themselves unwilling to sacrifice. Some participants are averse to getting different payoffs than others, but based on our experiments and reinterpretation of previous experiments we argue that behavior that has been presented as "difference aversion" in recent papers is actually a combination of reciprocal and quasi-maximin motivations. We formulate a model in which each player is willing to sacrifice to allocate the quasi-maximin allocation only to those players also believed to be pursuing the quasi-maximin allocation, and may sacrifice to punish unfair players.

Predicting species distribution: offering more than simple habitat models

n the last two decades, interest in species distribution models (SDMs) of plants and animals has grown dramatically. Recent advances in SDMs allow us to potentially forecast anthropogenic effects on patterns of biodiversity at different spatial scales. However, some limitations still preclude the use of SDMs in many theoretical and practical applications. Here, we provide an overview of recent advances in this field, discuss the ecological principles and assumptions underpinning SDMs, and highlight critical limitations and decisions inherent in the construction and evaluation of SDMs. Particular emphasis is given to the use of SDMs for the assessment of climate change impacts and conservation management issues. We suggest new avenues for incorporating species migration, population dynamics, biotic interactions and community ecology into SDMs at multiple spatial scales. Addressing all these issues requires a better integration of SDMs with ecological theory.

Simple holographic polarogram

A new technique capable of obtaining quantitative values of the rotation angle of the polarization vector by using holography is presented. This is a two-stage holographic process; during the recording stage a hologram of the object of interest is obtained. The reference beam is composed of two beams that form a small angle between them and keep their polarization states at right angles to each other. In the reconstruction stage of the hologram, two images from the hologram are obtained along two different angles. As a result of the interference between these two images, a set of parallel fringes is formed at the image plane. The fringe contrast on the reconstruction is related to the angle of the polarization vector of the light at each position on the image plane. Measurements of the rotation of the polarization angle of a fraction of a degree were obtained. The main application of this technique is in the study of transient phenomena, where single-shot measurements are the only means of obtaining reliable data.

Rapid LC-MS/MS quantification of the major benzodiazepines and their metabolites on dried blood spots using a simple and cost-effective sample pretreatment.

BACKGROUND: Dried blood spots (DBS) sampling has gained popularity in the bioanalytical community as an alternative to conventional plasma sampling, as it provides numerous benefits in terms of sample collection and logistics. The aim of this work was to show that these advantages can be coupled with a simple and cost-effective sample pretreatment, with subsequent rapid LC-MS/MS analysis for quantitation of 15 benzodiazepines, six metabolites and three Z-drugs. For this purpose, a simplified offline procedure was developed that consisted of letting a 5-µl DBS infuse directly into 100 µl of MeOH, in a conventional LC vial. RESULTS: The parameters related to the DBS pretreatment, such as extraction time or internal standard addition, were investigated and optimized, demonstrating that passive infusion in a regular LC vial was sufficient to quantitatively extract the analytes of interest. The method was validated according to international criteria in the therapeutic concentration ranges of the selected compounds. CONCLUSION: The presented strategy proved to be efficient for the rapid analysis of the selected drugs. Indeed, the offline sample preparation was reduced to a minimum, using a small amount of organic solvent and consumables, without affecting the accuracy of the method. Thus, this approach enables simple and rapid DBS analysis, even when using a non-DBS-dedicated autosampler, while lowering the costs and environmental impact.