The national budget affects life and death via its allocations in areas such as traffic safety, flood control, public health and the like. When the cost-effectiveness of an intervention is evaluated, common effect measures are the number of lives extended (saved) and the expected lifeyears...

www.can.nl\~cool Comments: 39 pages in Word - zipped JEL: N0, Z0 EWP References: ewp-get/9604002 ewp-get/9604003 Report-no: Thomas Cool 96-05

This paper explores the links between matching, ranking, rating, Elo- rating, logit modeling, Rasch modeling, Item-Response Theory (IRT), voting, aggregation, and the like. These issues arise e.g. when testing students, or rating web pages or scientific papers. The analysis is at a very basic...

Individual labour supply is a difficult subject. My suggestion is to think along the following lines. At low productivity, one has to work 24 hours around the clock in order to survive. When productivity increases, one quickly starts working less hours, particularly since the kind of work at...

A graduated excise allows mores patial control of congestion and pollution. The cost of a detour to a scheaper gas station defines a gradient, and the integral gives an excise mountain with its top at the center of the metropolitan area. Consisntency implies that the mountain with the maximal...

Arrow's Theorem holds that no constitution can satisfy certain properties. In annex to that theorem, Arrow claims that those properties are reasonable and morally desirable. In his view there thus is the difficulty that people desire a constitution that cannot exist. While the Theorem stands as...

Analysis of road fereight transport is hindered by the lack of diecdirect observartions of the handling factor. The handling factor is the frequency of lifts of the tonnes in the supply chain from origin to destination. It is also the number of times that the same tonnes are reported to the...

Asia and the Eastern European nations are in a state of economic turmoil. An important element for improvement is that Western nations open their markets to more trade. This is in fact what the West could have done after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But petty shortsightedness of the governing...

The commonly adopted definitions of risk and uncertainty generate conceptual problems and inconsistencies, and they are a source of confusion in general. However, alternative and proper definitions are: (1) First there is the distinction between certainty and uncertainty. (2) Uncertainty forks...

There is a general misconception on the impact of marginal tax rates. Following the hypothesis of optimising economic agents, it is proper that marginal rates enter the discussion. The only issue is that the margin mu= st be computed correctly. In dynamics, one must take account of the fact tha=...