As a response to a changing labour market scenario and to the concerns for increasing costs and bad incentives of traditional income support policies, the last decades have witnessed, in many countries, reforms introducing more sophisticated designs of means-testing, eligibility and tagging. In...

The optimized binomial coefficient or binomial expansion has been derived from the multiple summations of geometric series. This binomial coefficient is a methodological advance in the areas of combinatorics and theoretical computer science. This paper presents a new theorem with binomial...

Index tracking has long been of interest for both industry of fund management andacademia. Various methods have been proposed and tested and various issues arediscussed throughout the past 30 years. Yet one issue remains unresolved is how toperform stock selection optimally. In this paper, I...

We introduce the market resources method (MRM) for solving dynamic optimization problems. MRM extends Carroll's (2006) endogenous grid point method (EGM) for problems with more than one control variable using policy function iteration. The MRM algorithm is simple to implement and provides...

We revisit the question whether commodities should be included in investors' portfolios. We employ for the first time a stochastic dominance efficiency (SDE) approach to construct optimal portfolios with and without commodities and we evaluate their comparative performance. SDE circumvents the...