In today's Wall Street Journal, there is a very interesting and insightful article entitled "Infectious Politics" that explains why flu vaccines in particular and vaccines for infectious diseases generally are in such short supply in the United States. The contributing factors appear to involve a combination of price controls, regulation and tort lawyers. Of course, I made the latter point (concerning tort) the other day in my blog entry entitled "Impact of the tort system on flu vaccine availability in the United States".
I recommend the website http://www.electoral-vote.com/. It provides a state-by-state breakdown of electoral college vote allocations based upon current polling data, and as of this morning it has Bush leading Kerry 284 to 228, with Iowa (7 votes), New Jersey (15 votes) and New Hampshire (4 votes) too close to call. This assessment lines up well with what the prediction markets have been saying, and it respresents the midpoint of my prediction market-based 95% confidence interval, which puts the minimum number of electoral votes for Bush at 278 and the maximum number at 289. The state-by-state breakdown of electoral college vote allocations is also available as an Excel spreadsheet.
I am in the process of revising the lecture content and plans concerning chapters from Hull's textbook which I plan to cover. Tomorrow's lecture, which I have entitled "Futures, Forwards, Options and Riskless Arbitrage", is loosely organized around parts of Chapters 1-3 of the textbook (I am not assigning these chapters as readings, but you are certainly welcome to look them over anyway if you like).
I will update y'all via email by no later than next Monday (10/18) concerning the schedule for readings, lectures and problem sets for the remainder of the semester. I plan to focus primarily upon option theory, so we will primarily be dealing with reading assignments and lecture content related to Chapters 8-12 in the textbook. Our study of option theory will also involve going through my paper on the topic, entitled "Derivation and Comparative Statics of the Black-Scholes Call and Put Option Pricing Equations", and this paper also includes aspects of Chapter 14.
The first midterm scores are in. Here are the descriptive statistics:
| Midterm 1 | |
| Mean | 78.60 |
| Median | 77.50 |
| Standard Deviation | 12.75 |
| Range | 38 |
| Minimum | 58 |
| Maximum | 96 |
The course grade distribution after the first exam is as follows:
| Course | |
| Mean | 80.32 |
| Median | 82.00 |
| Standard Deviation | 13.14 |
| Range | 38.75 |
| Minimum | 55.34 |
| Maximum | 94.09 |
If letter grades had to be assigned today, based upon this distribution I would use the following curve (which would generate a class GPA of 2.70):
| A | 87.0 |
| B+ | 81.0 |
| B | 74.0 |
| C+ | 68.0 |
| C | 61.0 |
| D | 48.0 |
In my entry this past Saturday afternoon entitled "Prediction markets - who will win the Nobel Prize?", I noted that the prediction market for economics scholarship had Edward Prescott (Minneapolis Fed/Arizona State University) in the lead, followed by Robert Barro (Harvard University/Hoover Institution) and Paul Krugman (Princeton). It is interesting to note that while the prediction market was "right" about Prescott (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced today that Prescott is one of two winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economic Science; see today's Bloomberg's article), the market was "wrong" about Norweigan scholar Finn E. Kydland, who was cited today as a co-recipient of the 2004 Prize along with Prescott. Apparently, a contract had been offered on Kydland, but was never traded and consequently expired due to a result of lack of investor interest!
By the way, I highly recommend Dartmouth Professor Andrew Samwick's essay entitled "In Praise of Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott" which explains the significance of the research for which Kydland and Prescott were cited.