Measuring the Welfare Costs of Inflation in a Life-cycle Model

In macroeconomics, life-cycle models are typically used to address exclusively life-cycle issues. This paper shows that modeling the life-cycle may be important when addressing public policy issues, in this case the welfare costs of inflation. In the representative agent model, the optimal inflation rate is characterized by the Friedman rule: deflate at the real interest rate. In the corresponding life-cycle model, the optimal inflation rate is quite high: for the benchmark calibration, it is around 95% per annum. Much of the paper is concerned with understanding this result. Briefly, in the life-cycle model there are distributional consequences of injecting money via lump-sum transfers. The net effect is to transfer income from old, rich agents to young, poor ones. These transfers twist the age-utility profile in a way that agents find desirable from a lifetime utility point of view. A second issue concerns how to assess the costs of inflation in a life-cycle model. Metrics that are equivalent in the representative agent model can give very different answers in a life-cycle model.monetary policy, inflation, welfare costs, life-cycle model

Simplified Estimation of Seismic Life-Cycle Costs

Most seismic risk assessments for economic decision-making of commercial buildings are based on a risk metric called probable maximum loss (PML) that is associated with losses from an earthquake shaking severity with a 500-year return period. For various reasons, PML is a poor metric for economic performance assessment. This paper introduces an analogous measure, the probable frequent loss (PFL), defined as the mean loss resulting from shaking with 10% exceedance probability in 5 years (an approximately 50-year event). It overcomes many of the problems of PML, and offers the advantage that expected seismic life-cycle costs and expected annualized loss are approximately proportional to PFL through a seismic hazard coefficient that depends on site characteristics, fundamental period, and damage shaking threshold, and can be tabulated for ready use. A brief review is given of a building-specific seismic vulnerability method that may be used to calculate PFL

Life Cycle Assessment Practices: Benchmarking Selected European Automobile Manufacturers

With the rise of environmental concerns in the general public, re-appropriated by influential politicians, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has become a widely used set of tools for the management of all impacts on environment by industrial products. LCA is carried out at the very early stages of product research, development and design. This is particularly true in the automobile industry where vehicle manufacturers Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) are launching several new or re-vamped models each year. The automobile industry is therefore a very emblematic sector for best practices of LCA. The paper is based on available literature and interviews with top LCA professionals in Germany-based OEMsLife cycle assessment; automobile; best practices

Transportation Life Cycle Assessment Synthesis: Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series

The Life Cycle Assessment Learning Module Series is a set of narrated, self-advancing slideshows on various topics related to environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). This research project produced the first 27 of such modules, which are freely available for download on the CESTiCC website http://cem.uaf.edu/cesticc/publications/lca.aspx. Each module is roughly 15- 20 minutes in length and is intended for various uses such as course components, as the main lecture material in a dedicated LCA course, or for independent learning in support of research projects. The series is organized into four overall topical areas, each of which contain a group of overview modules and a group of detailed modules. The A and α groups cover the international standards that define LCA. The B and β groups focus on environmental impact categories. The G and γ groups identify software tools for LCA and provide some tutorials for their use. The T and τ groups introduce topics of interest in the field of transportation LCA. This includes overviews of how LCA is frequently applied in that sector, literature reviews, specific considerations, and software tutorials. Future modules in this category will feature methodological developments and case studies specific to the transportation sector

Factory Compliance Life Cycle

Nike’s strategy to enforce monitoring and compliance of labor codes in contract factories

A bike ride from cradle to grave : better decision-making by using the life-cycle-costs approach

The life-cycle costs (LCC) approach is used to gain transparency, to compare variants and to have a reliable basis for long-term-budgeting of investments, maintenance and operation with the goal of most favourable total costs of ownership (TCO) for a given level of service for reliability, availability, maintainability, safety, health and environment, functionality, comfort (RAMSHEFC)

Analyzing labour supply of elderly people: a life-cycle approach

In light of the ageing of the Dutch society, policy measures aim at increasing the participation rate of elderly workers, particularly in the age-group between 55 and 64. This paper develops a stylized numerical simulation model. This model describes consumption, savings and labour supply behaviour over the life cycle to analyze the labour-market implications of such proposals. For example, we simulate a shift in the (normal) retirement age from 65 to 67, the elimination of the Social Security premium exemption after age 65, and a premium on first-tier pension benefits if the commencement date of these benefits is postponed. Each of these reforms affect the economic outcomes via wealth effects, income effects and inter- and intratemporal substitution effects. The stylized model offers a profound theoretical underpinning which helps us to understand these policy effects over the entire life cycle of individuals. However, the numerical outcomes should be taken with some caution as the model ignores insights of behavioural economics (such as ‘framing effects’).

Exploring personalized life cycle policies

Ambient Intelligence imposes many challenges in protecting people's privacy. Storing privacy-sensitive data permanently will inevitably result in privacy violations. Limited retention techniques might prove useful in order to limit the risks of unwanted and irreversible disclosure of privacy-sensitive data. To overcome the rigidness of simple limited retention policies, Life-Cycle policies more precisely describe when and how data could be first degraded and finally be destroyed. This allows users themselves to determine an adequate compromise between privacy and data retention. However, implementing and enforcing these policies is a difficult problem. Traditional databases are not designed or optimized for deleting data. In this report, we recall the formerly introduced life cycle policy model and the already developed techniques for handling a single collective policy for all data in a relational database management system. We identify the problems raised by loosening this single policy constraint and propose preliminary techniques for concurrently handling multiple policies in one data store. The main technical consequence for the storage structure is, that when allowing multiple policies, the degradation order of tuples will not always be equal to the insert order anymore. Apart from the technical aspects, we show that personalizing the policies introduces some inference breaches which have to be further investigated. To make such an investigation possible, we introduce a metric for privacy, which enables the possibility to compare the provided amount of privacy with the amount of privacy required by the policy