A Collection of Mathematical and Statistical Routines in FORTRAN 90

The purpose of this brief note is to bring to the attention of readers a collection of Fortran routines which may be useful to readers of this journal. The author collected the routines over many years, starting while acting as a statistical consultant in CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia). Though most statistical analysis is now done using statistical packages, code in Fortran and other languages is useful for instance when developing new tests or estimates, or for finding maximum likelihood estimates in complex cases.

Inefficiency

We introduce an ordinal model of efficiency measurement. Our primitive is a notion of efficiency that is comparative, but not cardinal or absolute. In this framework, we postulate axioms that we believe an ordinal efficiency measure should satisfy. Primary among these are choice consistency and planning consistency, which guide the measurement of efficiency in a firm with access to multiple technologies. Other axioms include symmetry, which states that the names of commodities do not matter, scale-invariance, which says that units of measurement of commodities does not matter, and strong monotonicity, which states that efficiency should decrease if the inputs and outputs remain static when the technology becomes unambiguously more efficient. These axioms characterize a unique ordinal efficiency measure which is represented by the coefficient of resource utilization. By replacing symmetry (the weakest of our axioms) with a very mild continuity condition, we obtain a family of path-based measures.Efficiency Measurement, Coefficient of Resource Utilization, Ordinal, Choice Consistency, Planning Consistency, Path-based

The employment effects of Food Harvest 2020 in Ireland

peer-reviewedThis paper examines the job creation potential of the four main sectoral growth targets in the Food Harvest 2020 (FH2020) development plan for Irish agriculture, namely the growth targets for milk, beef, sheep and pigs. As well as the direct employment that would be created from an increase in activity in the agriculture sector, there would be a knock-on benefit for the rest of the economy arising out of the linkages between agriculture and other economic sectors, as well as the spending of those additionally employed on goods and services produced in the economy. Commonly this is described as the multiplier impact. Two scenarios are simulated using different assumptions to assess how employment will respond to increased output. The first scenario shows the effects of the four shocks calculated using average or direct employment coefficients. The second scenario calculates the effects using marginal employment coefficients estimated using an econometric model of the output-employment relationship. Our results are sensitive to the choice of coefficients used to simulate the employment potential of the FH2020 targets. Based on our preferred scenario using marginal employment coefficients, we estimate that achieving the FH2020 targets will create at least an additional 16,500 jobs in the Irish economy

Causation and Incentives in Updating Courts: Comment

This paper examines the negligence standard in the presence of intervening causal factors. The court observes the evidence and assigns a probability to the intervening factor in the course of evaluating the injurer\u27s negligence. The court must, under the law, put a substantial weight on the facts in estimating the intervention probability. We allow the court to also put some weight on its own prior. Under such an adaptive approach to assessing negligence, incentives for care are affected by the court\u27s inference process in addition to the usual factors. Courts can generate efficient incentives for care through the choice of prior