Cubic splines have long been used to extract the discount, yield, and forward rate curves from coupon bond data. McCulloch used regression splines to estimate the discount function, and, more recently, Fisher, Nychka, and Zervos used smoothed splines, with the roughness penalty selected by...

Despite the widespread occurrence of humanitarian emergencies such as epidemics, earthquakes, droughts, floods and violent conflict and despite the significant financial resources devoted to humanitarian assistance, systematic learning from such interventions using rigorous theory-based impact...