Pension schemes versus real estate

The demographic, economic and social changes that have characterized the last decades, and the dramatic financial crisis that has taken place since 2008, have led to a demand for structural changes in the pension sector and a growing interest in individual pension products. Hence the need, for most elderly people, to liquidate their fixed assets, which are usually the homes in which they live. This highlights products such as reverse mortgages and domestic reversibility plans. Within this context, we propose a contractual scheme where an immediate life annuity is obtained by paying a single-premium in the form of real estate rights (RERs), for example by transferring to an insurer the property title of a house or a similar realty, while keeping its usufruct or a restricted bundle of rights. The level of the installments depends on the fair value of the transferred RER at the contract’s issue, the life expectancy of the insured and the expected growth rate of the real estate market value. The contract design is developed by considering the control of the financial risk inherent in the contract itself, because of the prospective changes in the value of the RERs, and the level of the insurer’s leverage. Finally, we provide some numerical evidence of the proposed contractual structure, in order to compare the level of the installments according to the house return forecasts in different European countries

Strategic Effects of Investment and Private Information: The Incumbent's Curse

We study a two-period entry model where the incumbent, privately informed about his cost of production, makes a long run investment choice along with a pricing decision. Investment is cost-reducing and its effects are assumed to differ across incumbent's types, as a result investment plays a double role as a commitment variable and, along with price, as a signal. We ask whether and how investment decisions allow the incumbent to limit entry into the market. We find that the incumbent will never undertake strategic investment to deter profitable entry, because when incumbent's costs are private information the signaling role of investment cancels out its value of commitment

Investment in early education and job market signaling

We consider a signaling model of the job market in which workers, before choosing their level of education, have the opportunity to undertake an unobservable investment in activities aimed at saving on future education costs. Suciently high levels of investments allow a low productivity worker to cut the marginal costs of signaling below the high productivity worker's. In contrast to standard results, we nd that the equilibrium outcome will depend on the relative magnitude of workers' average productivity. If average productivity exceeds a certain threshold the most plausible solution is a rened pooling equilibrium in which all workers attain the same level of over-education and are paid the same wage. Otherwise, the most plausible outcome is the standard least cost separating equilibrium in which only high ability workers are over-educated

Private Information and the Commitment Value of Unobservable Investment

The commitment value of unobservable investment with cost-reducing effects is examined in an entry model where the incumbent is privately informed about his costs of production. We show that when the price signals incumbent's costs, unobservable investment can not have any commitment value and the limit price does not limit entry. By contrast, if the price does not reveal costs, which is the more likely outcome, unobservable investment has a magnified value of commitment and a less aggressive limit price deters profitable entry

Limit Pricing and Strategic Investment

We study an entry model where an incumbent privately informed about costs can make a cost-reducing investment choice, along with a pricing decision, in order to prevent a competing rm from entering the market. We show that if limit pricing per se can not deter pro table entry, the opportunity to undertake a strategic investment does not provide an additional instrument for the achievement of this goal to the incumbent

Adaptive Input Reconstruction with Application to Model Refinement, State Estimation, and Adaptive Control.

Input reconstruction is the process of using the output of a system to estimate its input. In some cases, input reconstruction can be accomplished by determining the output of the inverse of a model of the system whose input is the output of the original system. Inversion, however, requires an exact and fully known analytical model, and is limited by instabilities arising from nonminimum-phase zeros. The main contribution of this work is a novel technique for input reconstruction that does not require model inversion. This technique is based on a retrospective cost, which requires a limited number of Markov parameters. Retrospective cost input reconstruction (RCIR) does not require knowledge of nonminimum-phase zero locations or an analytical model of the system. RCIR provides a technique that can be used for model refinement, state estimation, and adaptive control. In the model refinement application, data are used to refine or improve a model of a system. It is assumed that the difference between the model output and the data is due to an unmodeled subsystem whose interconnection with the modeled system is inaccessible, that is, the interconnection signals cannot be measured and thus standard system identification techniques cannot be used. Using input reconstruction, these inaccessible signals can be estimated, and the inaccessible subsystem can be fitted. We demonstrate input reconstruction in a model refinement framework by identifying unknown physics in a space weather model and by estimating an unknown film growth in a lithium ion battery. The same technique can be used to obtain estimates of states that cannot be directly measured. Adaptive control can be formulated as a model-refinement problem, where the unknown subsystem is the idealized controller that minimizes a measured performance variable. Minimal modeling input reconstruction for adaptive control is useful for applications where modeling information may be difficult to obtain. We demonstrate adaptive control of a seeker-guided missile with unknown aerodynamics.Ph.D.Aerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91520/1/amdamato_1.pd

Early handling and repeated cross-fostering have opposite effect on mouse emotionality

Early life events have a crucial role in programming the individual phenotype and exposure to traumatic experiences during infancy can increase later risk for a variety of neuropsychiatric conditions, including mood and anxiety disorders. Animal models of postnatal stress have been developed in rodents to explore molecular mechanisms responsible for the observed short and long lasting neurobiological effects of such manipulations. The main aim of this study was to compare the behavioral and hormonal phenotype of young and adult animals exposed to different postnatal treatments. Outbred mice were exposed to (i) the classical Handling protocol (H: 15 min-day of separation from the mother from day 1 to 14 of life) or to (ii) a Repeated Cross-Fostering protocol (RCF: adoption of litters from day 1 to 4 of life by different dams). Handled mice received more maternal care in infancy and showed the already described reduced emotionality at adulthood. Repeated cross fostered animals did not differ for maternal care received, but showed enhanced sensitivity to separation from the mother in infancy and altered respiratory response to 6% CO2 in breathing air in comparison with controls. Abnormal respiratory responses to hypercapnia are commonly found among humans with panic disorders (PD), and point to RCF-induced instability of the early environment as a valid developmental model for PD. The comparisons between short-and long-term effects of postnatal handling vs. RCF indicate that different types of early adversities are associated with different behavioral profiles, and evoke psychopathologies that can be distinguished according to the neurobiological systems disrupted by early-life manipulation