At present, businesses in Finland can deduct the cost of many investment goods from taxable income only gradually over several years. Higher expensing limits would allow them to deduct investments costs faster, while full expensing would allow them to deduct the cost of investment goods in full...

When the future evolution of demographic processes is described in a stochastic setting, the challenge is to communicate the meaning of forecast uncertainty in an understandable way, to decision makers and public at large. For the purpose of risk communication, a formal setting is developed, in...

Female life expectancy has almost universally been higher than male life expectancy. But, both have increased rapidly during the past century. European countries differ as regards the magnitude and time trends of the female-male difference. In countries that can be characterised as Egalitarian...

Optimal forecasts are, under a squared error loss, conditional expectations of the unknown future values of interest. When stochastic demographic models are used in macroeconomic analyses, it becomes important to be able to handle updated forecasts. That is, when population development turns out...

We propose a new view of initial nonresponse bias in longitudinal surveys. Under certain conditions, an initial bias may "fade-away" over consecutive waves. This effect is discussed in a Markovian framework. A general contraction theorem for time inhomogeneous Markov chains is presented. The...