Development of an Optimal Replenishment Policy for Human Capital Inventory

A unique approach is developed for evaluating Human Capital (workforce) requirements. With this approach, new ways of measuring personnel availability are proposed and available to ensure that an organization remains ready to provide timely, relevant, and accurate products and services in support of its strategic objectives over its planning horizon. The development of this analysis and methodology was established as an alternative approach to existing studies for determining appropriate hiring and attrition rates and to maintain appropriate personnel levels of effectiveness to support existing and future missions. The contribution of this research is a prescribed method for the strategic analyst to incorporate a personnel and cost simulation model within the framework of Human Resources Human Capital forecasting which can be used to project personnel requirements and evaluate workforce sustainment, at least cost, through time. This will allow various personnel managers to evaluate multiple resource strategies, present and future, maintaining near “perfect” hiring and attrition policies to support its future Human Capital assets

Education Subsidies and School Drop-Out Rates

Education, School

Intraoperative neuromonitoring versus visual nerve identification for prevention of recurrent laryngeal nerve injury in adults undergoing thyroid surgery

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess the effects of intraoperative neuromonitoring (IONM) versus visual nerve identification for prevention of recurrent laryngeal nerve injury in adults undergoing thyroid surgery

Telomere lengths in human oocytes, cleavage stage embryos and blastocysts

Telomeres are repeated sequences that protect the ends of chromosomes and harbour DNA-repair proteins. Telomeres shorten during each cell division in the absence of telomerase. When telomere length becomes critically short, cell senescence occurs. Telomere length therefore reflects both cellular ageing and capacity for division. We have measured telomere length in human germinal vesicle (GV) oocytes and pre-implantation embryos, by quantitative fluorescence in-situ hybridisation (Q-FISH), providing baseline data towards our hypothesis that telomere length is a marker of embryo quality. The numbers of fluorescent foci suggest that extensive clustering of telomeres occurs in mature GV stage oocytes, and in pre-implantation embryos. When calculating average telomere length by assuming that each signal presents one telomere, the calculated telomere length decreased from the oocyte to the cleavage stages, and increased between the cleavage stages and the blastocyst (11.12 vs 8.43 vs 12.22kb respectively, p<0.001). Other methods of calculation, based upon expected maximum and minimum numbers of telomeres, confirm that telomere length in blastocysts is significantly longer than cleavage stages. Individual blastomeres within an embryo showed substantial variation in calculated average telomere length. This study implies that telomere length changes according to the stage of pre-implantation embryo development

Spectral Clustering: An Empirical Study of Approximation Algorithms and its Application to the Attrition Problem

Clustering is the problem of separating a set of objects into groups (called clusters) so that objects within the same cluster are more similar to each other than to those in different clusters. Spectral clustering is a now well-known method for clustering which utilizes the spectrum of the data similarity matrix to perform this separation. Since the method relies on solving an eigenvector problem, it is computationally expensive for large datasets. To overcome this constraint, approximation methods have been developed which aim to reduce running time while maintaining accurate classification. In this article, we summarize and experimentally evaluate several approximation methods for spectral clustering. From an applications standpoint, we employ spectral clustering to solve the so-called attrition problem, where one aims to identify from a set of employees those who are likely to voluntarily leave the company from those who are not. Our study sheds light on the empirical performance of existing approximate spectral clustering methods and shows the applicability of these methods in an important business optimization related problem

Risk-Aware Planning for Sensor Data Collection

With the emergence of low-cost unmanned air vehicles, civilian and military organizations are quickly identifying new applications for affordable, large-scale collectives to support and augment human efforts via sensor data collection. In order to be viable, these collectives must be resilient to the risk and uncertainty of operating in real-world environments. Previous work in multi-agent planning has avoided planning for the loss of agents in environments with risk. In contrast, this dissertation presents a problem formulation that includes the risk of losing agents, the effect of those losses on the mission being executed, and provides anticipatory planning algorithms that consider risk. We conduct a thorough analysis of the effects of risk on path-based planning, motivating new solution methods. We then use hierarchical clustering to generate risk-aware plans for a variable number of agents, outperforming traditional planning methods. Next, we provide a mechanism for distributed negotiation of stable plans, utilizing coalitional game theory to provide cost allocation methods that we prove to be fair and stable. Centralized planning with redundancy is then explored, planning for parallel task completion to mitigate risk and provide further increased expected value. Finally, we explore the role of cost uncertainty as additional source of risk, using bi-objective optimization to generate sets of alternative plans. We demonstrate the capability of our algorithms on randomly generated problem instances, showing an improvement over traditional multi-agent planning methods as high as 500% on very large problem instances

Estimating a War of Attrition: The Case of the U.S. Movie Theater Industry

This paper provides a tractable empirical framework to analyze firm behavior in a dynamic oligopoly when demand is declining over time. I modify Fudenberg and Tirole (1986).s model of exit in a duopoly with incomplete information to a model that can be used in an oligopoly, and combine this with an auxiliary entry model to address the initial conditions problem. I estimate this model with panel data on the U.S. movie theater industry from 1949 to 1955, using variations in TV diffusion rates across households, market structure before the exit game starts, and other market characteristics to identify the parameters in the theater’s payoff function and the distribution of unobservable fixed costs. Using the estimated model, I measure strategic delays in the exit process due to oligopolistic competition and incomplete information. The delay in exit that arises from strategic interaction is 2.7 years on average. Out of these years, 3.7% of this delay is accounted for by incomplete information, while the remaining 96.3% is explained by oligopolistic competition

Evidence on the external finance premium from the US and emerging Asian corporate bond markets

Empirical investigation of the external finance premium has been conducted on the margin between internal finance and bank borrowing or equities but little attention has been given to corporate bonds especially for the emerging Asian market. In this paper we hypothesize that balance sheet indicators of creditworthiness could affect the external finance premium for bonds as they do for premia in other markets. Using bond-specific and firm-specific data for the United States, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Korea, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand during 1995-2005 we find that firms with better financial health face lower external finance premia in all countries. When we introduce firm-level heterogeneity we show that financial variables appear to be both statistically and quantitatively more important in the Asian market than in the US. Finally, the premium is more sensitive to firm-level variables during credit crunches, recessions and sudden stops than other periods, with stronger effects for the Asian bond market.Financing Constraints, External Finance Premium, Asian Bond Markets.

The Effect of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Randomized Lotteries

School choice has become an increasingly prominent strategy for urban school districts seeking to enhance academic achievement. Evaluating the impact of such programs is complicated by the fact that a highly select sample of students takes advantage of these programs. To overcome this difficulty, we exploit randomized lotteries that determine high school admission in the Chicago Public Schools. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that attending sought after programs provides any benefit on a wide variety of traditional academic measures, including standardized test scores, attendance rates, course-taking, and credit accumulation. This is true despite the fact that those students who win the lotteries attend better high schools along a number of dimensions, including higher peer achievement levels, higher peer graduation rates, and lower levels of poverty. We do, however, uncover evidence that attendance at such schools may improve a subset of non-traditional outcome measures, such as self-reported disciplinary incidences and arrest rates.