The case for high speed rail to the three cities: final report

This report has been commissioned by the East Midlands Development Agency (emda) to provide evidence on the case for the Three Cities of the East Midlands, Derby, Leicester and Nottingham to be part of a UK high speed rail network. This report outlines the economic benefits of the introduction of a high speed rail link serving the Three Cities, coupled with upgrades to the existing lines, to form a coherent strategy for the rail network over the next 20 to 30 years

Associated Regional and University Pathologists ARUP Research Internship

ARUP is a reference laboratory that is part of the University of Utah. When a physician wants to run a test on a patients blood or other fluid for diagnostic purposes, there are a few options for where the test is run. Some hospitals are equipped to run many common tests. When a test exceeds what the hospital can do however, a patient’s sample is then sent to a better equipped lab, such as ARUP. ARUP is one of the largest reference laboratories in the nation, and has hundreds of thousands of samples that are tested there every week. These samples are tested for everything from cancer markers in the blood to creatinine levels in the urine to even looking for genetic markers in blood serum. ARUP has many different laboratories that are all running very specific tests in order to help diagnose patients. Statistics show that information discovered from the tests at ARUP and other reference labs make up about 70% of a diagnosis of a patient. This is why these laboratories are so crucial for modern medicine

Regional integrated infrastructure scoping study

The purpose of the study is to consider how the Region should take infrastructure forward in an integrated way at a strategic level and to help scope further work to inform the RSS 2009 Update. It is envisaged that this scoping study is the first part of a major work stream for the Assembly to enable infrastructure to influence future locational decisions and develop a better understanding of the impact of higher levels of growth on the Region’s infrastructure

Carbon Free Boston: Buildings Technical Report

Part of a series of reports that includes: Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report; Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report; Carbon Free Boston: Technical Summary; Carbon Free Boston: Transportation Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Waste Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Energy Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Offsets Technical Report; Available at http://sites.bu.edu/cfb/OVERVIEW: Boston is known for its historic iconic buildings, from the Paul Revere House in the North End, to City Hall in Government Center, to the Old South Meeting House in Downtown Crossing, to the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, to 200 Clarendon (the Hancock Tower) in Back Bay, to Abbotsford in Roxbury. In total, there are over 86,000 buildings that comprise more than 647 million square feet of area. Most of these buildings will still be in use in 2050. Floorspace (square footage) is almost evenly split between residential and non-residential uses, but residential buildings account for nearly 80,000 (93 percent) of the 86,000 buildings. Boston’s buildings are used for a diverse range of activities that include homes, offices, hospitals, factories, laboratories, schools, public service, retail, hotels, restaurants, and convention space. Building type strongly influences energy use; for example, restaurants, hospitals, and laboratories have high energy demands compared to other commercial uses. Boston’s building stock is characterized by thousands of turn-of-the-20th century homes and a postWorld War II building boom that expanded both residential buildings and commercial space. Boston is in the midst of another boom in building construction that is transforming neighborhoods across the city. [TRUNCATED]Published versio

Optimal collective contract without peer information or peer monitoring

If entrepreneurs have private information about factors influencing the outcome of an investment, individual lending is inefficient. The literature typically offers solutions based on the assumption of full peer information to solve adverse selection problems and peer monitoring to solve moral hazard problems. In contrast, I show that it is possible to construct a simple budget-balanced mechanism that implements the efficient outcome even if each borrower knows only own type and effort, and has neither privileged knowledge about others nor monitoring ability. The mechanism satisfies participation incentives for all types, and is immune to the Rothschild–Stiglitz cream skimming problem despite using transfers from better types to worse types. The presence of some local information implies that the mechanism cannot be successfully used by formal lenders. Thus a local credit institution can emerge as an optimal response to the informational environment even without peer information or monitoring. Finally, I investigate the role of monitoring in this setting and show how costly monitoring can increase the scope of the mechanism

From Nobel Prize to Project Management: Getting Risks Right

A major source of risk in project management is inaccurate forecasts of project costs, demand, and other impacts. The paper presents a promising new approach to mitigating such risk, based on theories of decision making under uncertainty which won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. First, the paper documents inaccuracy and risk in project management. Second, it explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for a promising new method called "reference class forecasting," which achieves accuracy by basing forecasts on actual performance in a reference class of comparable projects and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first instance of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost forecasts for large transportation infrastructure projects. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1302.254