In the Red or In the Black?: Understanding the Relationship Between Household Debt and Assets

In the Red or In the Black? looks at whether household savings serve to protect families from incurring unsecured debt, and in turn, whether the presence of unsecured debt acts as a barrier to savings and wealth accumulation

Borrowing to Make Ends Meet: The Rapid Growth of Credit Card Debt in America

Americans carry over $800 Billion in credit card debt. Using most recent data from the Federal Reserve Board's Survey of Consumer Finances, Borrowing to Make Ends Meet exposes this and other disturbing trends, and also provides detailed data based on age, race and income demographics

Study of the Effect of Hot Rolling Processing Parameters on the Variability of HSLA Steels

The effect of different hot mill processing parameters and their influence on the variability of mechanical properties of HSLA steels has been studied. This work presents an analysis of the relative contribution of the different hot mill processing parameters to the variability of HSLA steels. The experimental design includes variation of Reheating, Roughing, Finishing, and Coiling temperatures, as well as Cooling Rate through the austenite to ferrite transformation, and from coiling to room temperature. The variation in finishing and coiling temperature results in an average variation of 12% in mechanical properties. The variation of the cooling rate, through the austenite to ferrite transformation, and from coiling to room temperature, has the largest impact on the variability of microstructure and properties. A correlation between the various microstructural features, dislocation densities and precipitation behavior, with mechanical properties is presented

Online classifier adaptation for cost-sensitive learning

In this paper, we propose the problem of online cost-sensitive clas- sifier adaptation and the first algorithm to solve it. We assume we have a base classifier for a cost-sensitive classification problem, but it is trained with respect to a cost setting different to the desired one. Moreover, we also have some training data samples streaming to the algorithm one by one. The prob- lem is to adapt the given base classifier to the desired cost setting using the steaming training samples online. To solve this problem, we propose to learn a new classifier by adding an adaptation function to the base classifier, and update the adaptation function parameter according to the streaming data samples. Given a input data sample and the cost of misclassifying it, we up- date the adaptation function parameter by minimizing cost weighted hinge loss and respecting previous learned parameter simultaneously. The proposed algorithm is compared to both online and off-line cost-sensitive algorithms on two cost-sensitive classification problems, and the experiments show that it not only outperforms them one classification performances, but also requires significantly less running time

The attempted merger between General Electric and Honeywell, a case study of transatlantic conflict

\cf1\f1 This paper analyzes how State aid affects and distorts competition and trade within and across jurisdictions. We identify the circumstances in which state aid is likely to involve the largest distortions. In the context of the paper distortion of competition" is interpreted as the effect on rivals\f2\rquote\f1 profits. We consider three types of state intervention, namely subsidies which affect marginal cost, entry and quality and analyse whether particular market characteristics are robust indicators of the magnitude of the distortions. We obtain the following results: (i) it appears that concentration is a fairly robust indicator; (ii) A high degree of substitution across differentiated products is not a robust indicator of the magnitude of the distortions. Its effect depends on the type of state intervention; (iii) The substitution among domestic products may have opposite effects respectively on domestic and foreign firms. In particular, when the market is not concentrated and state aid takes the form of a production subsidy, a stronger substitution among domestic products will reduce the distortions felt by the foreign firm (but increase that felt by domestic rivals); Finally, (iv) the paper demonstrates that the impact of selective State aid on market prices and competitors can depend on the particular characteristics of the market JEL Classification numbers: K21; L10; L40State aids; EU Antitrust; distortions of competition

An Unexpected Role of Local Selectivity in Social Promotion

A selection process and a hierarchical promotion system in a dynamic model are considered as in Harrington (1998) and Garcia-Martinez (2010), where agents are "climbing the pyramid" in a rank-order contest based on the "up or out" policy. The population at any level of the hierarchy is matched in groups of n agents, and each group faces a particular environment. Agents are ranked according to the quality of their performances in each particular environment. The top k performing agents from each group are promoted. The fraction (k/n) characterizes the local selectivity of the process. The role of the degree of local selectivity in the dynamic process where agents' types differ in their expected performances is studied. For low selectivity, the selection process is not strong enough to overcome the inertia of the initial population. If selectivity increases, only the best-performing type of agent will survive. If the selectivity is increased far enough, the worst-performing type also survives, and the proportion for which they account at equilibrium increases as selectivity increases. Therefore, surprisingly, no matter how low the expected success rate of a type is, if the selection process has a high enough level of selectivity, agents of that type survive in the long run: Too much selectivity is always harmful to the best-performing type.Social hierarchy; Selection; Selectivity; Promotion