Inventory management maximization based on sales forecast: case study

The major purpose of this paper is to present a concept for reliable planning of the sales of small firms, where the large number of product variants complicates the implementation of this kind of system considerably. First, a methodology is presented to set up sales forecasting so that it can be integrated into the inventory management process. This inventory management software interprets forecasting information and provides users with a decision support system to minimize stocks in stores while at the same time avoiding missed sales. It is best applied in company types requiring high precision inventories, notably those in the textile industry; a large range of patterns are produced with many small variations (colors, size, customizations, etc.) and these products have a limited lifetime. Inventory management is difficult due to the multitude of products to account for and the necessity to sell them quickly. The methodology is intended for inventory management at the end of the supply chain. In store, the number of references, their similarities and the necessity to minimize unsold stock greatly complicates the reordering and restocking process. These types of companies do not easily lend themselves to classic techniques of sales forecasting and require specialized methods to estimate their needs precisely.     

Administrer un monde incertain : les nouvelles bureaucraties techniques. Le cas des agences sanitaires en France

The creation of health agencies in France has stimulated public interventions in the managing of risks and emergencies. Health agencies are not mere technical organizations set up in response to a particular health crisis. They are political forms stemming from deeper social and political changes in public administration, scientific expertise and medicine. Part of a threefold trend toward opening administrative, scientific and medical doors, they have emerged out of the transformation of the public administration under the impact of theories about: new public management, the transparency of scientific expertise, and the development of public health. These processes are paradoxical however. They tend to favor the growth of new technical bureaucracies, whence questions about the latter's political responsibility. While agencies were supposed to reduce bureaucracy, they have broadened its borders and reinforced its structures. They constitute an intermediary space, where appear tensions between them and their supervisors. This arangement does singularly transform the balance between administrative and political powers. — Special issue: New patterns of institutions.     

LARGE AND MODERATE DEVIATIONS PRINCIPLES FOR KERNEL ESTIMATION OF A MULTIVARIATE DENSITY AND ITS PARTIAL DERIVATIVES

This paper studies the large deviations behaviour of the kernel estimator of a probability density f, by considering the case when the kernel takes negative values. It establishes large and moderate deviations principles for the kernel estimators of the partial derivatives of f. The estimators of the derivatives exhibit a quadratic behaviour for both the large and the moderate deviations scales, whereas for the density estimator there is a classical gap between the large deviations and the moderate deviations asymptotics.     

Slicing Up the Pie: Allocation of Central Government Funding of Care of Older People

The allocation of central government funds is a critical element in the equitable provision of local authority‐commissioned and ‐provided services. A variety of approaches to allocating funding for social services for older people have been used over the years, most recently founded on ‘needs‐based’ formulae. In 2004, the Department of Health for England commissioned research to help inform the improvement and updating of the formula. The results of individual‐level analyses were compared with the results obtained from analyses of small area (ward‐level) data on service users. Both analyses were affected by problems of data availability, particularly the individual‐level analysis, and the Department of Health and the (then) Office of the Deputy Prime Minister decided that the formula calculations should be based on the results of the small area analysis. However, despite the differences in approach, both methods produced very similar results. The correlation between the predicted relative needs weights for local authorities from the two models was 0.982. The article discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and developments that could allow a normative approach that would incorporate future policy objectives into formulae that, to date, have inevitably been based on historical data and service patterns.     

Empirical likelihood based confidence regions for first order parameters of heavy-tailed distributions

Let X₁,…,X_n be some i.i.d. observations from a heavy-tailed distribution F, i.e. the common distribution of the excesses over a high threshold u_n can be approximated by a generalized Pareto distribution G_γ,σn with γ>0. This paper deals with the problem of finding confidence regions for the couple (γ,σ_n): combining the empirical likelihood methodology with estimation equations (close but not identical to the likelihood equations) introduced by Zhang (2007), asymptotically valid confidence regions for (γ,σ_n) are obtained and proved to perform better than Wald-type confidence regions (especially those derived from the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimators). By profiling out the scale parameter, confidence intervals for the tail index are also derived.     

La science en projets : financements sur projet, autonomie professionnelle et transformations du travail des chercheurs académiques

Drawing on the literature on changes in professional work settings, this article explores the transformations of academic research in the field of electronic engineering and micro/nanotechnology. It examines how changes in funding regimes (i.e. the development of project funding) have reconfigured the “conditions of possibility” for professional autonomy, the contents of academic work and the organization of research groups.     

Mental Illness as a Barrier to Marriage Among Unmarried Mothers

This study explores how mental illness shapes transitions to marriage among unwed mothers using augmented data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing study (N= 2,351). We estimate proportional hazard models to assess the effects of mental illness on the likelihood of marriage over a 5‐year period following a nonmarital birth. Diagnosed mental illness was obtained from the survey respondents’ prenatal medical records. We find that mothers with mental illness are about two thirds as likely as mothers without mental illness to marry, even after controlling for demographic characteristics, and that human capital, relationship quality, partner selection, and substance abuse appear to explain only a small proportion of the effect of mental illness on marriage.     

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT AND CRIME IN FRANCE

In this paper we examine the influence of unemployment on property crimes and on violent crimes in France for the period 1990 to 2000. This analysis is the first extensive study for this country. We construct a regional‐level data set (for the 95 départements of metropolitan France) with measures of crimes as reported to the Ministry of Interior. To assess social conditions prevailing in the département in that year, we construct measures of the share of unemployed as well as other social, economic, and demographic variables using multiple waves of the French Labor Survey. We estimate a classic Becker‐type model in which unemployment is a measure of how potential criminals fare in the legitimate job market. First, our estimates show that in the cross‐section dimension, crime and unemployment are positively associated. Second, we find that increases in youth unemployment induce increases in crime. Using the predicted industrial structure to instrument unemployment, we show that this effect is causal for burglaries, thefts, and drug offenses. To combat crime, it appears thus that all strategies designed to combat youth unemployment should be examined. (JEL: J19, K42, J64, J65)