Measuring Risk Aversion and the Wealth Effect

Measuring risk aversion is sensitive to assumptions about the wealth in subjects’ utility functions. Data from the same subjects in low- and high-stake lottery decisions allow estimating the wealth in a pre-specified one-parameter utility function simultaneously with risk aversion. This paper first shows how wealth estimates can be identified assuming constant relative risk aversion (CRRA). Using the data from a recent experiment by Holt and Laury (2002), it is shown that most subjects’ behavior is consistent with CRRA at some wealth level. However, for realistic wealth levels most subjects’ behavior implies a decreasing relative risk aversion. An alternative explanation is that subjects do not fully integrate their wealth with income from the experiment. Within-subject data do not allow discriminating between the two hypotheses. Using between-subject data, maximum-likelihood estimates of a hybrid utility function indicate that aggregate behavior can be described by expected utility from income rather than expected utility from final wealth and partial relative risk aversion is increasing in the scale of payoffs

Method of forming aperture plate for electron microscope

An electron microscope is described with an electron source a condenser lens having either a circular aperture for focusing a solid cone of electrons onto a specimen or an annular aperture for focusing a hollow cone of electrons onto the specimen. It also has objective lens with an annular objective aperture, for focusing electrons passing through the specimen onto an image plane. A method of making the annular objective aperture using electron imaging, electrolytic deposition and ion etching techniques is included

Gemcitabine: Progress in the treatment of pancreatic cancer

Unresectable pancreatic cancer has a dismal prognosis with a median survival of 3-5 months in untreated disease. Since the introduction of gemcitabine, pancreatic cancer may no longer be regarded a chemotherapy-resistant tumor. Treatment with single-agent gemcitabine achieved clinical benefit and symptoms improvement in 20-30% of patients. While 1-year survival was observed in 2% of 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)-treated patients, it was raised to 18% by single-agent gemcitabine. Good treatment tolerability and low incidence of side effects are clear advantages of single-agent gemcitabine. Improvement of efficacy is, however, expected from combination treatment. Gemcitabine and cisplatin given as first-line treatment in three studies achieved a median survival of 7.4-8.3 months. One-year survival was raised to 28% as reported in one study. Comparable activity was obtained by a combination of gemcitabine with 5-FU. Nine studies using gemcitabine in combination with standard-dose or high-dose 5-FU reported a median survival ranging from 5.5 to 13 months. Notwithstanding these promising results, recommendations regarding palliative chemotherapy of pancreatic cancer remain tentative and still need confirmation by presently ongoing phase III trials. Inclusion of pancreatic cancer patients into clinical trials should be a major goal. Outside clinical trials, patients should present with an adequate PS (Karnofsky-performance index greater than or equal to 70) to qualify for chemotherapy. Copyright (C) 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel

Role of gemcitabine in the treatment of advanced and metastatic breast cancer

Gemcitabine is an antimetabolite drug with proven antitumor activity and tolerability in metastatic breast cancer. In a total of nine studies, gemcitabine monotherapy has reached response rates of up to 37% in the first-line setting, 26% in the second-line setting, and 18% or better in the third-line setting. Gemcitabine is an excellent choice for combination therapy by its unique mechanism of action and favorable toxicity profile, thus limiting the risk of pretreatment-related drug resistance and overlapping toxicity, and by its potential for synergistic interaction with some combination partners as indicated in preclinical studies. Numerous phase II clinical studies have combined gemcitabine with other active agents such as the taxanes, vinorelbine, vindesine, cisplatin, 5-fluoro-uracil, as well as anthracyclines across various regimens and conditions of pretreatment. Most of these two-drug combinations have consistently demonstrated higher efficacy than either single agent, particularly in pretreated patients. Even higher efficacy has been obtained with triple-drug regimens including gemcitabine, anthracyclines (epirubicin or doxorubicin), and paclitaxel; these regimens have yielded overall response rates of 58-92% as first-line treatment. In view of these results, gemcitabine may be regarded as a valuable alternative to the palliative treatment of metastatic breast cancer, and an excellent option for the development of effective combination treatment not only in first-line therapy, but also for intensively pretreated patients previously exposed to anthracyclines and/or the taxanes. Copyright (C) 2003 S. Karger AG, Basel

The Common Agricultural Policy and the Next EU Budget. Bertelsmann Stiftung Reflection Paper No.1: Preparing for the Multiannual Financial Framework after 2020. Paper prepared for Expert Workshop “CAP and the next MFF” Berlin, Federal Foreign Office, 30 March 2017

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was set up in a time when (a) the memory about post-war food shortage was fresh, (b) Europe was a large net importer of agricultural products, (c) agricultural production was still highly labour-intensive, (d) food was a major item in a typical consumer basket and (e) significant shares of the work-force received their major income from the agricultural sector. The CAP objectives enshrined in Art. 39 TFEU (see box) clearly reflect this historical situation. When the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, it was understand-able that the standard of living of the agricultural workforce was a major issue and that “reasonable prices” for consumers were regarded as a matter of social stability

The Drivers of Deregulation in the Era of Globalization

This paper treats the question to what extent globalization trends restrict a countryspecific regulation policy in industrial countries. The empirical analysis makes use of recently collected regulation indicators for four policy fields: financial market, product markets, labour markets and trade. After a short discussion of the link between globalization and deregulation and a descriptive view at the correlations, a panel analysis for OECD countries for the period 1975 to 2001 is executed. The evidence shows that globalization in the narrow sense of trade openness and capital mobility has a rather limited impact as an immediate driver of deregulation. However, in a wider sense globalization definitions also comprise the easier flow of knowledge and information across borders resulting in more effective cross-border learning processes. --economic policy reforms,structural reforms,regulation

E–stability and stability of adaptive learning in models with asymmetric information

The paper demonstrates how the E–stability principle introduced by Evans and Honkapohja [2001] can be applied to models with heterogeneous and private information in order to assess the stability of rational expectations equilibria under learning. The paper extends already known stability results for the Grossman and Stiglitz [1980] model to a more general case with many differentially informed agents and to the case where information is endogenously acquired by optimizing agents. In both cases it turns out that the rational expectations equilibrium of the model is inherently E-stable and thus locally stable under recursive least squares learning.Adaptive Learning, Eductive Stability, Rational Expectations