The termstructure of interest rates is an instrument that gives us the necessary information for valueing deterministic financial cash flows, measuring the economic market expectations and testing the effectiveness of monetary policy decissions. However, it is not directly observable and needs...

The term structure of interest rates is an instrument that gives us the necessary information for valuing deterministic financial cash flows, measuring the economic market expectations and testing the effectiveness of monetary policy decisions. However, it is not directly observable and needs to...

Recursively identified vector autoregressive (VAR) models often lead to a counterintuitive response of prices (and output) shortly after a monetary policy shock. To overcome this problem, we propose to estimate the VAR parameters under the restriction that economic theory is not violated, while...

Structural changes in the European natural gas market such as liberalization, increasing demand, and growing import dependency have triggered new attempts to model this market accurately. This paper presents a model of the European natural gas supply, GASMOD, which is structured as a...

In this work we demonstrate the effects of different Chinese transport infrastructure investment strategies on long run marginal costs of steam coal supply in Europe. Increasing Chinese demand for steam coal will lead to a growing need for additional domestic infrastructure in China as...

A non-linear optimization model which maximizes total Ecuadorian social welfare, defined as the sum of consumers' and producers' surpluses for the four major crops (corn, bananas, rice and African palm) is developed to evaluate the tradeoff between welfare and environmental degradation in...

The pressure on land as required input in competing uses fuelled research on trade-offs in land use due to agricultural land expansion to meet food demand which is explicitly and implicitly treated in global land use modelling. Global land use studies rely on assessing the trade-offs by assuming...

This paper studies the consumption and portfolio selection problem of an agent who is liquidity constrained and has uninsurable income risk in a discrete time setting. It gives properties of optimal policies and presents numerical solutions. The paper, in particular, shows that liquidity...

Over the last decade, evolutionary and meta-heuristic algorithms have been extensively used as search and optimization tools in various problem domains, including science, commerce, and engineering. Their broad applicability, ease of use, and global perspective may be considered as the primary...

Targeting has become the buzz word in the national agri-environmental policy reform in Finland. It is generally accepted that more environmental benefits could be reaped by implementing environmental protection measures where they have the biggest positive impact. However, considering one of the...