Determining optimal selling time of cattle: a stochastic dynamic programming application

World’s meat market conditions have forced the beef sector to look for strategies to become competitive and researchers have proved that optimal replacement decisions are one of the most important factors that affect competitiveness -- The present paper formulates a model in a discrete stochastic dynamic programming framework which describes manager’s decision-making process combining both economic and biological variables and involving uncertainty on price fluctuations: investors can use the model to support their decisions of selling or keeping a fattening animal -- The methodology developed is very general and can be used in different regions under similar production conditions by calibrating the parameters and making the required changes according to local regulations -- The paper illustrates model’s conveniences with an empirical application based on a local Colombian market, proving that researchers were right when ranked the dynamic programming as an excellent modeling tool for evaluating livestock replacemen

¿Es posible que la financiación tributaria de la salud sea más regresiva que los sistemas basados en el aseguramiento social en países de ingreso bajo y medio?

RESUMEN: Una de las funciones principales de los sistemas de salud es recaudar recursos suficientes para financiar el gasto en salud. Estos recursos provienen de diversas fuentes (impuestos, donaciones, contribuciones a la seguridad social, gasto de bolsillo), las cuales pueden tener diferentes implicaciones en términos de equidad, componente clave en la evaluación del desempeño de los sistemas sanitarios. La evidencia internacional sugiere que en los países de ingresos bajos y medios los sistemas que recaudan los ingresos fundamentalmente vía impuestos tienden a ser más progresivos que los sistemas basados en aseguramiento. Sin embargo, este resultado depende de la medida de capacidad de pago elegida y, por lo tanto, los responsables de tomar decisiones deben tener en cuenta este hecho al interpretar los resultados de los estudios sobre la progresividad en el financiamiento de los sistemas de salud.ABSTRACT: One of the main functions of health care systems is to collect enough revenue to finance health expenditures. This revenue can be obtained through different sources (taxes, social insurance contributions, out-of-pocket payments, donations), each of which has different implications in terms of equity. The equity implications of the different forms of revenue collection are an important component of health systems performance evaluation. The international evidence suggests that tax funded systems seem to be a more progressive health care financing mechanism than systems based on social insurance in low- and middle-income countries. However, progressivity results are sensitive to the choice of ability to pay measures and, therefore, policy makers must be aware of this fact when interpreting results of studies on health care financing

Matrix iterations and Cichon's diagram

Using matrix iterations of ccc posets, we prove the consistency with ZFC of some cases where the cardinals on the right hand side of Cichon's diagram take two or three arbitrary values (two regular values, the third one with uncountable cofinality). Also, mixing this with the techniques in J Symb Log 56(3):795-810, 1991, we can prove that it is consistent with ZFC to assign, at the same time, several arbitrary regular values on the left hand side of Cichon's diagram.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, article in press for the journal Archive for Mathematical Logi

Template iterations with non-definable ccc forcing notions

We present a version with non-definable forcing notions of Shelah's theory of iterated forcing along a template. Our main result, as an application, is that, if $\kappa$ is a measurable cardinal and $\theta<\kappa<\mu<\lambda$ are uncountable regular cardinals, then there is a ccc poset forcing $\mathfrak{s}=\theta<\mathfrak{b}=\mu<\mathfrak{a}=\lambda$. Another application is to get models with large continuum where the groupwise-density number $\mathfrak{g}$ assumes an arbitrary regular value.Comment: To appear in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 45 pages, 2 figure