A comment on the article by Peter C. B. Phillips in this volume. Copyright 2005 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc..

This paper provides an empirical analysis of how the U.S. Social Security and Medicare system affects the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets. The authors estimate a dynamic programming model of the joint labor supply and Social Security acceptance decision. The...

My comments on the keynote paper by Michael Keane.

This paper introduces random versions of successive approximations and multigrid algorithms for computing approximate solutions to a class of finite and infinite horizon Markovian decision problems. The author proves that these algorithms succeed in breaking the 'curse of dimensionality' for a...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of price discrimination and inventory investment under incomplete information. The model is motivated from an empirical analysis of operations of daily observations on inventories, sales, and purchases of over 2,300 individual products by a U.S. steel...

A pervasive concern with the use of self-reported health and disability measures in behavioral models is that they are biased and endogenous. A commonly suggested explanation is that survey respondents exaggerate the severity of health problems and incidence of disabilities in order to...

The authors present an empirical model of optimal operation of nuclear power plants. The optimal lifetime is the solution to an optimal stopping problem: the plant is closed when the expected discounted losses from continued operation exceed the discounted costs of decommissioning. The authors...

This paper analyzes the asymptotic convergence properties of policy iteration in a class of stationary, infinite-horizon Markovian decision problems that arise in optimal growth theory. These problems have continuous state and control variables, and must therefore be discretized in order to...