Healthcare costs tend to increase with age. In particular, in the case of illness, the last year before death can be an exceptionally costly period as the need for healthcare increases. Using a novel private insurance dataset containing over one million records of claims submitted by individuals to their health insurance providers during the last year of life, our research seeks to shed light on the costs before death in Switzerland. Our work documents how spending patterns change with proximity to dying. We use machine learning algorithms to identify and quantify the key effects that drive a person’s spending during this critical period. Our findings provide a more profound understanding of the costs associated with hospitalization before death, the role of age, and the variation in costs based on the services, including care services, which individuals require.

In recent years, the significance of terahertz (THz) and (sub-)THz communications has grown substantially due to its promising trade-off between higher capacity compared to microwave-based communication and better resilience against weather dependent influences (e.g., fog and rain). While electronic and optoelectronic techniques have been extensively explored, each offering distinct advantages and limitations, they have predominantly been demonstrated and discussed as individual experiments, making performance comparison challenging. This paper addresses this gap by systematically benchmarking electronic and optoelectronic signal generation approaches under comparable conditions. Our experiments incorporate various receiver types, revealing that best performance is achieved by combining optoelectronic signal generation techniques at the transmitter in combination with an all-electric intradyne receiver. This results in a remarkable line rate of 200 Gbit/s over a distance of 52 m. To our knowledge, this represents the highest line rate achieved for technically relevant transmission distances for indoor access or outdoor small cell networks.

The financing of long-term care and the planning of care capacity are of increasing interest due to demographic changes and the ageing population in many countries. Since many care-intensive conditions begin to manifest at higher ages, a better understanding and assessment of the expected costs, required infrastructure, and number of qualified personnel are essential. To evaluate the overall burden of institutional care, we derive a model based on the duration of stay in dependence and the intensity of help provided to elderly individuals. This article aims to model both aspects using novel longitudinal data from nursing homes in the canton of Geneva in Switzerland. Our data contain comprehensive health and care information, including medical diagnoses, levels of dependence, and physical and psychological impairments on 21,758 individuals. We build an accelerated failure time model to study the influence of selected factors on the duration of care and a beta regression model to describe the intensity of care. We show that apart from age and gender, the duration of stay before death is mainly affected by the underlying diseases and the number of different diagnoses. Simultaneously, care intensity is driven by the individual level of dependence and specific limitations. Using both evaluations, we approximate the overall care severity for individual profiles. Our study sheds light on the relevant medical, physical, and psychological health indicators that need to be accounted for, not only by care providers but also by policy-makers and insurers.

In most industrialised countries, one of the major societal challenges is the demographic change coming along with the ageing of the population. The increasing life expectancy observed over the last decades underlines the importance to find ways to appropriately cover the financial needs of the elderly. A particular issue arises in the area of health, where sufficient care must be provided to a growing number of dependent elderly in need of long-term care (LTC) services. In many markets, the offering of life insurance products incorporating care options and LTC insurance products is generally scarce. In our research, we therefore examine a life annuity product with an embedded care option potentially providing additional financial support to dependent persons. To evaluate the care option, we determine the minimum price that the annuity provider requires and the policyholder’s willingness to pay for the care option. For the latter, we employ individual utility functions taking account of the policyholder’s condition. We base our numerical study on recently developed transition probability data from Switzerland. Our findings give new and realistic insights into the nature and the utility of life annuity products proposing an embedded care option for tackling the financing of LTC needs.

We add agency costs into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously. Despite the fact that technology shocks are uncorrelated across countries, the relative price of investment is positively correlated across countries in our model, much as it is in detrended U.S./Euro-area data. We also find that financial frictions tend to increase the volatility of the terms of trade and the international correlations of consumption, hours worked, output, and investment. We then compare this model to an alternative model that also includes risk shocks. We use credit spread data (for the United States) to calibrate the AR(1) process for risk shocks. We find that risk shocks are too small to significantly impact the model's dynamics.

Winter rape has a life cycle which necessitates rapid testing of seed quality for the seed production sector, namely between July after harvest of the previous crop and August when the next crop establishment begins. As this crop is the fourth most important crop in France, and the most important oilseed crop, the French seed testing station GEVES has managed several research programmes to study seed quality in this species. These collaborative programmes have not only associated seed science with seed technology but also informatics and electronic engineering to provide seed testing tools that are already used by the seed sector, such as conductivity, or innovative tools, such as germination time courses monitored by computer imaging. Forthcoming tools have also been looked at in order to control seed storage potential, which is often used nowadays to anticipate the next season. Biochemical markers have been studied, including seed-specific biotinylated proteins or enzymes involved in free radical (reactive oxygen species) scavenging, such as catalase. Both are well correlated with seed ageing and have been tested to provide an ELISA-like assay for seed testing laboratories. Germination monitoring by computer imaging is now used by research and breeding institutes to phenotype varying seed material, including genotype or mutant collections, primed or ageing seed lots, etc. The next step in seed quality testing in oilseed rape is to characterize variation in germination and seed vigour in order to stabilize optimal yield. This aim constitutes a new international project involving high-throughput phenotyping and genotyping of a large collection of genetically diverse rapeseed genotypes (double haploid populations or diverse cultivars).

Raman and photoluminescence spectroscopy was used to investigate radiation damage by 5 MeV He+ ions at room temperature in prototype CVD-diamond detector material. Amorphization of the diamond is not observed at fluences up to 8×1015 cm-2. A threshold behavior is seen in the formation of the H3 vacancy-dinitrogen color center. The defect is not observed for fluences in the range 1.6×1012 to 1.6×1013 cm-2; a linear behavior increase in H3 intensity is observed over the range 1.6×1014 to 1.6×1015 cm-2. The formation mechanism of the H3 color center under He+ irradiation involves a self-annealing effect that allows vacancies to diffuse to, and complex with, nitrogen complexes.