Despite favourable ecological and economic results, many developing countries have not yet adopted an integrated pesticide management (IPM). Given rising marginal costs and diminishing marginal benefits from IPM technology transfer, an optimal control framework is used to identify optimal rates...

This paper describes a method for solving a class of forward-looking Markov-switching Rational Expectations models under noisy measurement, by specifying the unobservable expectations component as a general-measurable function of the observable states of the system, to be determined optimally...

The focus of our analysis is on nexus issues among energy use, incomes, employment, investment decisions, and agricultural production for meeting food and feed demands, as well as health-related effects on rural households. As an example we investigate potential policies, such as public...

This note extends the finding of Benhabib and Rusticchini (1994) who provide a class of SDGE models, whose solution is characterized by a constant savings rate. We show that this class of models may be interpreted as a standard representative agent SDGE model with costly adjustment of capital...

These notes provide an intuitive introduction to dynamic programming. The first two Sections, which can be skipped, present the standard deterministic Ramsey model using the Lagrangian approach. Section 3 reformulates the Ramsey problem by means of a Bellman equation, while Section 4 shows how...

Workers’absenteeism due to illness represents a major concern in several countries. Absenteeism are however not very well understood in economics. This paper presents a model where absenteeism is understood in relation to health. Its main predictions are (i) intermediate welfare state...

Based on a dynamic life cycle model, this study analyzes health-related risks of consumption and old-age poverty. The model allows for health effects on employment risks, on productivity, on longevity, the correlation between health risks, productivity and preferences, and the financial...

This paper relates recursive utility in continuous time to its discrete-time origins and provides a rigorous and intuitive alternative to a heuristic approach presented in [Duffie, Epstein 1992], who formally define recursive utility in continuous time via backward stochastic differential...

We examine whether the Phelps-Koopmans theorem is valid in models with nonconvex production technologies. We show by example that a nonstationary path that converges to a capital stock above the smallest golden rule may indeed be efficient. This finding has the important implication that...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. The author applies several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities...