We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...

Preise, Einkommen, und Nachfrage – die zentralen zu erklaerenden Variablen in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften sind objektiv messbar. Daneben gibt es jedoch zwei nicht minder zentrale Groessen, Erwartungen und Praeferenzen, die sich einer direkten objektiven Messung entziehen. Es sind subjektive...

In recent literature a relevant problem has been the relationship between career/personal contact networks and different career paths. In addition, the recent advances in social capital theory have shown the way in which networks impact on personal careers. In particular women's careers appear...

Regarding complex networks, one of the most relevant problems is to understand and to explore community structure. In particular it is important to define the network organization and the functions associated to the different network partitions. In this context, the idea is to consider some new...

In this paper we calculate the Italian Cities Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Composite Index potentially useful for policy analysis and dissemination of sustainable development at local level in Italy. Structured into several dimensions representing 16 out of 17 SDGs adopted by the United...

We compare different indicators of the spread and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a novel method to adjust daily COVID-19 deaths to match weekly excess mortality. Focusing on Sweden, the only country that has good data and did not impose a lockdown, we construct counterfactuals...

This paper describes the status, challenges and scope for strengthening surveillance of chronic disease risk factors, morbidities and mortality in India. We draw upon the surveillance experience of four selected States of India namely Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Kerala and Tamil Nadu to understand...

This paper presents a detailed 2019 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Benin as a basis for policy analysis with a focus on agriculture, food processing and energy generation from byproducts. It is based on official statistics collected from national and international institutions (national...

We analyze the United Nations commodities trade database (UN comtrade), comprised of international commodities exchanges in volume and price with monthly resolution. We introduce a trade impact index to quantify the impact, in terms of distance travelled, of importing a specific food raw...

In this paper we present and describe a large quarterly frequency, macroeconomic database. The data provided are closely modeled to that used in Stock and Watson (2012a). As in our previous work on FRED-MD, our goal is simply to provide a publicly available source of macroeconomic “big data”...