The ranking of scientific journals is important because of the signal it sends to scientists about what is considered most vital for scientific progress. Existing ranking systems focus on measuring the influence of a scientific paper (citations)—these rankings do not reward journals for...

Choices are frequently made from lists where there is by necessity some ordering of options. In such situations individuals can exhibit both primacy bias towards the first option and recency bias towards the last option. We examine this phenomenon in a particularly interesting context: consumer...

We build a novel stochastic dynamic regional integrated assessment model (IAM) of the climate and economic system including a number of important climate science elements that are missing in most IAMs. These elements are spatial heat transport from the Equator to the Poles, sea level rise,...

While the old systems competition took place with closed borders, globalisation has brought about a new type of systems competition that is driven by the mobility of factors of production. The new systems competition will likely imply the erosion of the European welfare state, induce a race to...

Although the official statistics imply that the rate of growth of real GDP in the United States has declined in recent years, it has still been substantially higher than the real growth rates in Europe and the other industrial countries, leading to higher real per capita incomes. This paper...

We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instruments for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions trumps' everything else. Once institutions are...

While the Sharpe ratio is still the dominant measure for ranking risky assets, a substantial effort has been made over the past three decades to find a way to account for non-Normally distributed risks. This paper derives a generalized ranking measure which, under a regularity condition,...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model to rank the health of localities. Mortality and morbidity variables empirically contribute to the resulting rank, and population and spatial correlation are incorporated into a measure of uncertainty. We use county-level data from Texas and Wisconsin...

For 35 leading painters who lived in France during the first century of modern art, this paper uses textbook illustrations as the basis for measuring the importance of both painters and individual paintings. The rankings pose an interesting puzzle: why do some of the greatest artists not produce...

Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) were one of the largest and fastest growing segments of the structured finance market, fueling the 2003-2007 boom in syndicated loans and leveraged buyouts. The credit crisis brought CLO issuance to a halt, and as a result the leveraged loan market dried...