Best Selling Books by Jae Lee

This paper examines changes in property-liability insurers risktaking associated with the enactment of state guaranty fund laws. We present evidence that the risk of insurers'' asset portfolios increased following enactments. But the increase in risk is significant only for stock insurers. This evidence of increased asset risk following guarantee-fund adoptions helps explain the increase in insurer insolvencies in recent years.

mindset journal

The performance properties of recycled polymer modified asphalt (PMA) binders containing warm mix asphalt (WMA) additives at high, intermediate, and low temperatures were evaluated. First, each combination of two PMA binders (performance grade (PG) 76-22 from two different sources) and two WMA additives (i.e., Aspha-min® and Sasobit®) were blended to produce warm PMA binders. They were then artificially short-term and long-term aged through the rolling thin film oven and pressure aging vessel procedures. Second, long-term aged warm PMA binders were recycled using two virgin binders (PG 76-22 and PG 70-22), and the recycled binders were artificially aged again. Lastly, Superpave binder tests were performed through the rotational viscometer, the dynamic shear rheometer (DSR), and the bending beam rheometer (BBR). In general, the results of this study suggested that (1) the WMA additives and the aged PMA binders were found to have a significant influence on the performance properties of recycled binders (measured by the DSR and the BBR); (2) the use of PG 70-22 as a virgin binder was effective in offsetting the increase of binder stiffness due to the additives and the aged binders; and (3) the recycled warm PMA binders can result in satisfactory binder performance that meets current Superpave binder requirements.

A classic Fantastic Four villain makes her first appearance when she turns the Baxter building into a trap designed to trap and eliminate the superhero team. Then, the Four meet the Inhumans for the first time, one of whom will steal Johnny''s heart.

Finding effects of a binary treatment D on a right-censored duration Y with covariates X is an important issue in survival/failure duration analysis. This paper shows that the ratio, not the difference, of the survival probabilities of the treatment and control groups solves the random censoring problem because the censoring part is cancelled out in the ratio, as long as the censoring duration is not affected by the treatment and is independent of the main duration of interest. No parametric assumption is needed other than for specifying the propensity score E(D|X), which is just to avoid the nonparametric dimension problem. Also, an estimator flexibly specifying the cumulative hazard function, not the hazard itself, with fully time-varying parameters is proposed, which includes the popular proportional cumulative hazard as a restrictive special case. Simulation and empirical studies show that the performances of the proposed approaches are remarkably similar, despite the big difference in their origins/motivations.