The Impact of Infrastructure on Mexican Manufacturing Growth

This paper analyses the impact of infrastructure on the growth rate of the Mexican manufacturing sector. For such purpose, two measures of infrastructure are used: highways and electricity. Further, we also estimate the degree of returns to scale and the markup. We pooled two digit industries to obtain the estimates of the whole manufacturing sector. For the entire manufacturing sector, our results do not show evidence of increasing returns but the existence of market power cannot be rejected. We find that both types of public infrastructure have a significant effect on manufacturing growth and its inclusion reduces the estimated values of returns to scale and market power. Once we use sectoral data, we obtain mixed results: public infrastructure affects significantly only some sectors.

Measuring the equilibrium real interest rate

The equilibrium real interest rate represents the real rate of return required to keep the economy’s output equal to potential output. This article discusses how to measure the equilibrium real interest rate, using an empirical structural model of the economy.Interest rates ; Monetary policy

Exchange Rate Pass-Through and Relative Prices: An Industry-Level Empirical Investigation

In this paper we explore the extent of exchange rate pass-through for the USA, UK and Japan using a post-Bretton Woods industry-level dataset. We investigate how different channels of exchange rate pass-through affect domestic and import prices. Our analysis is suggestive of two channels of transmission and we find considerable variation in the extent of pass-through across industries and countries.Exchange Rates, Pass-Through Effect, Expenditure-Switching

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.Comment: 49 page

Exploring manuscripts: sharing ancient wisdoms across the semantic web

Recent work in digital humanities has seen researchers in-creasingly producing online editions of texts and manuscripts, particularly in adoption of the TEI XML format for online publishing. The benefits of semantic web techniques are un-derexplored in such research, however, with a lack of sharing and communication of research information. The Sharing Ancient Wisdoms (SAWS) project applies linked data prac-tices to enhance and expand on what is possible with these digital text editions. Focussing on Greek and Arabic col-lections of ancient wise sayings, which are often related to each other, we use RDF to annotate and extract seman-tic information from the TEI documents as RDF triples. This allows researchers to explore the conceptual networks that arise from these interconnected sayings. The SAWS project advocates a semantic-web-based methodology, en-hancing rather than replacing current workflow processes, for digital humanities researchers to share their findings and collectively benefit from each other’s work

An Annotation Scheme for Reichenbach's Verbal Tense Structure

In this paper we present RTMML, a markup language for the tenses of verbs and temporal relations between verbs. There is a richness to tense in language that is not fully captured by existing temporal annotation schemata. Following Reichenbach we present an analysis of tense in terms of abstract time points, with the aim of supporting automated processing of tense and temporal relations in language. This allows for precise reasoning about tense in documents, and the deduction of temporal relations between the times and verbal events in a discourse. We define the syntax of RTMML, and demonstrate the markup in a range of situations

First-price vs second-price auctions under risk aversion and private affiliated values

Under a specific informational framework, we compare the seller's expected revenue from a first-price auction and a second-price auction when bidders are risk averse and have private affiliated values.auctions, risk aversion, private affiliated values

Smoothing the shocks of a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model

In some ways, the recession of 2001 and the recovery that followed it were unique: During the recession, the contraction in measured output was driven almost entirely by a retrenchment in business capital spending while consumer spending and residential investment remained positive. And the recovery was marked by moderate, uneven gross domestic product growth and job market weakness that were historically unusual. These events raise questions about the conventional wisdom on post–World War II business cycles. ; To help answer these questions, the authors use a general equilibrium model with sticky prices and sticky wages as a framework for exploring the effects of structural shocks to the U.S. economy. Using the Kalman filter, the authors estimate the parameters of the model and then back out the unobservable shocks that make the model’s observed variables match the observable data. ; The model shows that during the 1990–91 and 2001 recessions demand shocks turned sharply negative as output growth weakened. However, the model attributes the relatively small decline in output during the 2001 recession to a positive productivity shock. Both the 1990–91 and 2001 recessions exhibited a sudden loosening of monetary policy greater than would be predicted by a Taylor rule. The model does not capture inflation dynamics during these periods and attributes frequent changes in inflation to the markup shock.Business cycles ; Econometric models