How are rescaled range analyses affected by different memory and distributional properties? A Monte Carlo study

In this paper, we present the results of Monte Carlo simulations for two popular techniques of long-range correlations detection - classical and modified rescaled range analyses. A focus is put on an effect of different distributional properties on an ability of the methods to efficiently distinguish between short and long-term memory. To do so, we analyze the behavior of the estimators for independent, short-range dependent, and long-range dependent processes with innovations from 8 different distributions. We find that apart from a combination of very high levels of kurtosis and skewness, both estimators are quite robust to distributional properties. Importantly, we show that R/S is biased upwards (yet not strongly) for short-range dependent processes, while M-R/S is strongly biased downwards for long-range dependent processes regardless of the distribution of innovations.Comment: 15 pages, 6 table

Resolving climate impacts on fish stocks

Evidence is accumulating that the increase in CO2 is affecting the global climate, with far‐reaching implications for biological processes and ecosystem services. Recent studies suggest that there is evidence for a northward shift in the distributional range of fish species, but the mechanisms underlying these changes remain uncertain. Hence, it is largely unknown whether the observed distributional shifts are caused by a relocation of the spawning and feeding grounds, a change in the local survival of fish, or immigration into new habitats

Poverty Impacts of Government Expenditure from Natural Resource Revenues

This study analyzes the effects on poverty incidence and other economic variables resulting from government expenditures associated with natural resource revenues, using the Nam Theun II hydroelectric power project in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) as a case study. The analysis uses a multi-sector/multi-household general equilibrium model of the economy of Lao PDR. The conceptual framework distinguishes between official and marginal expenditures financed by project revenues, recognizing that some of the former still might have been undertaken without the new revenues generated by the project. A range of assumptions is considered regarding the direct distributional impact of the marginal expenditures. The analysis also incorporates the project’s indirect distributional effects, operating through the "Dutch disease" mechanism. We find that poverty incidence declines under the entire range of distributional assumptions considered. Nevertheless, the most important determinant of poverty impact is the degree of rural bias. Even the most regressive of the pro-rural distributions reduces poverty incidence by seven times as much as the most progressive of the pro-urban distributions.Poverty incidence; general equilibrium; natural resource revenues; Dutch disease; Lao PDR

Redefining part-of-speech classes with distributional semantic models

This paper studies how word embeddings trained on the British National Corpus interact with part of speech boundaries. Our work targets the Universal PoS tag set, which is currently actively being used for annotation of a range of languages. We experiment with training classifiers for predicting PoS tags for words based on their embeddings. The results show that the information about PoS affiliation contained in the distributional vectors allows us to discover groups of words with distributional patterns that differ from other words of the same part of speech. This data often reveals hidden inconsistencies of the annotation process or guidelines. At the same time, it supports the notion of `soft' or `graded' part of speech affiliations. Finally, we show that information about PoS is distributed among dozens of vector components, not limited to only one or two features

An overview of the question-response system in American English conversation

This article, part of a 10 language comparative project on question–response sequences, discusses these sequences in American English conversation. The data are video-taped spontaneous naturally occurring conversations involving two to five adults. Relying on these data I document the basic distributional patterns of types of questions asked (polar, Q-word or alternative as well as sub-types), types of social actions implemented by these questions (e.g., repair initiations, requests for confirmation, offers or requests for information), and types of responses (e.g., repetitional answers or yes/no tokens). I show that declarative questions are used more commonly in conversation than would be suspected by traditional grammars of English and questions are used for a wider range of functions than grammars would suggest. Finally, this article offers distributional support for the idea that responses that are better “fitted” with the question are preferred

Monitoring the Socio-Economic Conditions in Uruguay

This document is the first of a series of reports on the socio-economic situation in Uruguay. It is mainly based on a wide range of distributional, labor and social statistics computed from microdata collected by the Encuesta Continua de Hogares (ECH) from 1989 to 2003. Data has also been drawn from other sources and the existing literature. In contrast to the significant advances in poverty reduction recorded since the mid-eighties, in the last years Uruguay witnessed a deterioration of distributional, labor and social conditions. However, the country’s social performance is still one of the best in the region.poverty, inequality, education, labor, wages, employment, Uruguay

The Burden of Federal Tax Increases Under the Conservatives

An important economic trend in Canada in recent years is the increasing share of personal income going to both direct and indirect taxes. This article provides a analysis of the distributional impact of federal tax and transfer policies over the period that the Conservatives were in power between 1984 and 1992. It finds that the policy changes (primarily increased commodity taxes and income surtaxes) have raised the tax burden on the household sector by $22 billion between 1984 and 1992. Net taxes paid by the average Canadian family have increased by almost$1,900. The tax changes have been very progressive on average for families earning less than $35,000 per year, roughly prooortional in the$35,000 to $75,000 range, modestly regressive in the$75,000 to $150,000 range, and very regressive above$150,000.Tax increases in Canada, distributional analysis

Forward-backward SDEs with distributional coefficients

Forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) have attracted significant attention since they were introduced almost 30 years ago, due to their wide range of applications, from solving non-linear PDEs to pricing American-type options. Here, we consider two new classes of multidimensional FBSDEs with distributional coefficients (elements of a Sobolev space with negative order). We introduce a suitable notion of a solution, show existence and uniqueness of a strong solution of the first FBSDE, and weak existence for the second. We establish a link with PDE theory via a nonlinear Feynman-Kac representation formula. The associated semi-linear second order parabolic PDE is the same for both FBSDEs, also involves distributional coefficients and has not previously been investigated; our analysis uses mild solutions, Sobolev spaces and semigroup theory.Comment: 40 pages, no figures - new improved version with shorter proof of Thm 18, extended results in Thm 25 and Thm 27. Other minor clarifications adde