Complement to a comparative analysis of heuristics for the <Emphasis Type="Italic">p</Emphasis>-median problem

A recent comparison of evolutionary, neural network, and scatter search heuristics for solving the p-median problem is completed by (i) gathering or obtaining exact optimal values in order to evaluate errors precisely, and (ii) including results obtained with several variants of a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic. For a first, well-known, series of instances, the average errors of the evolutionary and neural network heuristics are over 10% and more than 1000 times larger than that of VNS. For a second series, this error is about 3% while the errors of the parallel VNS and of a hybrid heuristic are about 0.01% and that of parallel scatter search even smaller.     

Le vent du sud: Les idées du Tiers-Monde et les marxistes quéabécois dans les années 1970

Much has been said and written about the influence (ideological as well as economic and political) of the advanced capitalist countries on the Third World. In this article, the author addresses the opposite question: What is the ideological influence of the South on the North? And he does it in a precise context: that of Quebec society during the sixties and seventies. He attempts to show that the underdeveloped world passed from the status of a new ‘pays de mission,’ during the early days of the Quiet Revolution, to that of a model for the radical nationalist left which emerged in the mid-sixties and exerted a definite influence on politics, unions, and the intellectual production of that period. His hypotheses are that 1/Third World Marxism - under its various forms, from Guevarism to Maoism - provided a language in which Quebec leftist intellectuals and activists represented to themselves the situation of the Quebecois in relation to English Canada and/or the United States and 2/ the nationalistic element included in these particular trends of Marxism is the critical factor which made it much more appealing than orthodox Marxist theory. The decline on both the national and the social fronts in the eighties made for a re-emergence of the old modernization model in a new guise. L'influence idéaologique, économique et politique qu'exercent les pays capitalistes avancés sur le Tiers-Monde a fait l'objet de nombreuses études. Dans cet article, l'auteur se pose la question inverse: Quelle est l'influence du Sud sur le Nord? Et il le fait dans un contexte précis: celui du Québec des années 60 et 70. II essaie de démontrer que le Tiers-Monde, qui conserva son statut de ‘pays de mission’ au début de la Révolution tranquille, devint par la suite un modèle pour la gauche nationaliste radicale qui émergea au milieu des années 60 et qui exerça une nette influence sur la politique, le syndicalisme et la production intellectuelle de cette période. Ses hypothèses sont les suivantes: 1/ le ‘marxisme du Tiers-Monde’ -sous ses formes variées (du guévarisme au maoïsme) - a fourni aux intellectuels et radicaux de l'époque un langage pour représenter la situation des Québécois, par rapport au Canada anglais et/ou aux Etats-Unis et 2/ l'élément nationaliste présent dans ce discours marxiste particulier a constitué l'élément-clef qui l'a     

Nash implementation of Lindahl allocations

We define a class of Nash based mechanisms that implement Lindahl allocations in standard public good economies. As those that first proved Nash implementation of Lindahl allocations, defined by Hurwicz (1979) and Walker (1981), the mechanisms provided here are continuous, feasible, and independent of agents' characteristics. In economies with two agents (e.g., bilateral monopolies, duopolies, principal-agent models), our mechanisms are also applicable, in contrast to the well-behaved mechanisms in the literature, and they satisfy favourable stability properties.     

Right-to-Die Legislation: A Note on Factors Associated with Its Adoption

Legislation allowing for some form of death prior to it naturally occurring presently exists in very few industrial democracies. This article explores what large-scale economic and social factors may be associated with the legality of right-do-die measures, namely, a nation's health care expenditures, the old-age dependency ratio, religious pluralism, and homicide and suicide rates. Using data from several sources, we find an association among these factors and right-to-die legislation. Four of the six countries with recent experience of legalized physician-aided death ranked in the top 50% of countries on our combined measure of the five factors under examination. Implications of this study and suggestions for future research of this timely issue are discussed.     

SEPARATING MORAL HAZARD FROM ADVERSE SELECTION AND LEARNING IN AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE: LONGITUDINAL EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

The identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature. In this paper, we study the identification of moral hazard from adverse selection and learning about risk within the context of a multi‐period dynamic model. We extend the model of Abbring, Chiappori, and Pinquet (2003, Journal of the European Economic Association, 1, 767–820) to include learning about risk and insurance coverage choice over time. We derive testable empirical implications for panel data. We then perform tests using longitudinal data from France during the period 1995–1997. We find evidence of moral hazard among a sub‐group of policyholders with less driving experience (less than 15 years). Policyholders with fewer than five years of experience have a combination of learning about risk and moral hazard, whereas no residual information problem is found for policyholders with more than 15 years of experience.     

PUBLIC DEBT UNDER LIMITED PRIVATE CREDIT

There is a conventional wisdom in economics that public debt can serve as a substitute for private credit if private borrowing is limited. The purpose of this paper is to show that, while a government could in principle use such a policy to fully relax borrowing limits, this is not generally optimal. In our economy, agents invest in a short‐term asset, a long‐term asset, and government bonds. Agents are subject to idiosyncratic liquidity shocks prior to the maturity of the long‐term asset. We show that a high public debt policy fully relaxes private borrowing limits and is suboptimal. This is because agents expecting such a policy respond by investing less than is socially optimal in the short asset which can protect them in the event of a liquidity shock. The optimal policy is more constrained and it induces a wedge between the technological rate of return on the long asset and the rate of return on bonds. In such a regime, agents subject to liquidity shocks are also borrowing constrained, and this expectation of being borrowing constrained induces them to invest the optimal level in the short asset.     

Welfare reform and interstate migration of poor families

The thesis of this study is that as a result of increased inequalities in welfare rules, the 1996 welfare reform act not only enhanced incentives for poor families to move but also (and perhaps more important) created disincentives for them to stay in "race to the bottom" states. In testing this thesis, we evaluated the mediating and moderating roles of state economic development and family structure. We merged data from three main sources: the 1996-1999 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and state economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Modeling both destination (pull) and departure (push) effects of welfare policy measures and selected covariates in a nested discrete-time event-history migration analysis, we found robust support for the thesis that stringency in state welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules stimulated interstate out-migration of poor families in the United States. However poor families were not drawn to states with relatively more-lenient welfare rules, although stringency in state welfare dollar benefits inhibited in-migration and state unemployment patterns may have conditioned the migration effects of welfare-reform rules on the choice of destination. Single mothers were not more directly affected by welfare-eligibility and behavior-related rules than were poor married couples.