Economics Insights @ CBS

This article provides estimates of Belgian food consumption in 1812 and 1846 using a national food balance sheet approach. These estimates are then converted into caloric intakes for adult male equivalents. Despite many accounts of an absolute pauperization of the Belgian population during this period, caloric consumption per equivalent adult male is shown to have merely stagnated between 1812 and 1846. There is indirect evidence that inequality in caloric consumption increased at the same time.

When futures contracts are settled with respect to underlying asset prices, received theory suggests that the differences between futures prices and implied forward prices (from the term structure) are strictly due to marking to market, ceteris paribus. Empirical evidence appears to indicate that such differences are small for contracts with short maturities. What happens when the futures contract settles to yields implied by future prices of underlying assets?

For 0<K'<K≤∞, we obtain a K'-capacity queue from a K-capacity queue through a random time change and a truncation, provided arrivals are Poisson or service is exponential. In the case of an M/G/1/K queue, the time change erases service intervals that begin with more than K' customers in the systems. This constructions yields a straightforward sample path proof of Keilson's result on the proportionality of the ergodic queue length probabilities in M/G/1/K queues.

This paper is concerned with the general dynamic lot size model, or (generalized) Wagner-Whitin model. Let n denote the number of periods into which the planning horizon is divided. We describe a simple forward algorithm which solves the general model in 0(n log n) time and 0(n) space, as opposed to the well-known shortest path algorithm advocated over the last 30 years with 0(n²) time.