We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk...

The Vehicle Scheduling Problem (VSP) is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem arising for bus companies in public transport. The objective is to cover a given set of timetabled trips by a set of buses at minimum costs. The Electric Vehicle Scheduling Problem (E-VSP) complicates...

In railway transportation, each train needs to have a timetable that specifies which track at which time will be occupied by it. This task can be addressed by automatization techniques both in generating a timetable and in optimizing an existing one. In this paper, we give an overview on the...

This paper analyzes peer effects among university scientists. Specifically, it investigates whether the number of peers and their average quality affects the productivity of researchers in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The usual endogeneity problems related to estimating peer effects are...

Through a survey, economic value estimates were obtained on 962 inventions made in the United States and Germany and on which German patent renewal fees were paid to full-term expiration in 1995. A search of subsequent U.S. and German patents yielded a count of citations to those patents....