Most nations have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by locking down parts of their economies to reduce infectious spread. The optimal timing of the beginning and end of the lockdown, together with its intensity, is determined by the tradeoff between economic losses and improved health outcomes....

The literature associated with system modeling and decision-making falls short in automating policy formation for correlated multiple-policy multiple-objective (MPMO) processes. Enthused by the effectiveness of multivariable control theory, this paper proposes the implementation of a...

In this paper, we study an irreversible investment problem under Knightian uncertainty. In a general framework, in which Knightian uncertainty is modeled through a set of multiple priors, we prove existence and uniqueness of the optimal investment plan, and derive necessary and sufficient...

Adopting a probabilistic approach we determine the optimal dividend payout policy of a firm whose surplus process follows a controlled arithmetic Brownian motion and whose cash flows are discounted at a stochastic dynamic rate. Dividends can be paid to shareholders at unrestricted rates so that...

We consider a standard Brownian motion whose drift can be increased or decreased in a possibly singular manner. The objective is to minimize an expected functional involving the time-integral of a running cost and the proportional costs of adjusting the drift. The resulting two-dimensional...

In a world dominated by uncertainty, modeling and understanding the optimal behavior of agents is of the utmost importance. Many problems in economics, finance, and actuarial science naturally require decision makers to undertake choices in stochastic environments. Examples include optimal...

The literature associated with system modeling and decision-making falls short in automating policy formation for correlated multiple-policy multiple-objective (MPMO) processes. Enthused by the effectiveness of multivariable control theory, this paper proposes the implementation of a...

We consider the optimal bail-out dividend problem with fixed transaction cost for a Lévy risk model with a constraint on the expected present value of injected capital. To solve this problem, we first consider the optimal bail-out dividend problem with transaction cost and capital injection and...

We consider a price-maker company which generates electricity and sells it in the spot market. The company can increase its level of installed power by irreversible installations of solar panels. In absence of the company's economic activities, the spot electricity price evolves as an...

We study a class of infinite-dimensional singular stochastic control problems with applications in economic theory and finance. The control process linearly affects an abstract evolution equation on a suitable partially-ordered infinite-dimensional space X, it takes values in the positive cone...

We solve an infinite time-horizon bounded-variation stochastic control problem with regime switching between N states. This is motivated by the problem of a government that wants to control the country's debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio. In our formulation, the debt-to-GDP ratio...

The paper presents a transformation of a multi-stage optimal control model with random switching time to an age-structured optimal control model. Following the mathematical transformation, the advantages of the present approach, as compared to a standard backward approach, are discussed. They...

Consider a central bank that can adjust the in ation rate by increasing and decreasing the level of the key interest rate. Each intervention gives rise to proportional costs, and the central bank faces also a running penalty, e.g., due to misaligned levels of in ation and interest rate. We model...

We consider a government that aims at reducing the debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratio of a country. The government observes the level of the debt-to-GDP ratio and an indicator of the state of the economy, but does not directly observe the development of the underlying macroeconomic...

This book develops a unified treatment of the income distribution–capital–value problems with respect to actual economies, and then gradually turns to the issues of effective demand and capitalist accumulation fluctuations from both political economy and economic policy perspectives. That...

The literature on the optimal harvest of fisheries has concentrated on a single fishing area with biomass uncertainty and to a lesser degree also with price uncertainty. We develop and implement a stochastic optimal control approach to determine the harvest that maximizes the value of a fishery...

The synthetic control method (SCM) is a popular approach for estimating the impact of a treatment on a single unit in panel data settings. The "synthetic control" is a weighted average of control units that balances the treated unit's pre-treatment outcomes and other covariates as closely as...

This book presents the state of the art in the relatively new field of dynamic economic modelling with regime switches. The contributions, written by prominent scholars in the field, focus on dynamic decision problems with regime changes in underlying dynamics or objectives. Such changes can be...

This book analyses decision-making in dynamic economic environments. By applying a wide range of methodological approaches, combining both analytical and computational methods, the contributors examine various aspects of optimal firm behaviour and relevant policy areas. Topics covered include...

We study the gap between the state pension provided by the Italian pension system pre-Dini reform and post-Dini reform. The goal is to fill the gap between the old and the new pension by joining a defined contribution pension scheme and adopting an optimal investment strategy that is...

Structural econometric methods are often criticized for being sensitive to functional form assumptions. We study parametric estimators of the local average treatment effect (LATE) derived from a widely used class of latent threshold crossing models and show they yield LATE estimates...