The Intergenerational Transmission of Family-Income Advantages in the United States

Estimates of economic persistence and mobility in the United States, as measured by the intergenerational elasticity (IGE), cover a very wide range. Nevertheless, careful analyses of the evidence suggested until recently that as much as half, and possibly more, of economic advantages are passed on from parents to children. This "dominant hypothesis" was seriously challenged by the first-ever study of family-income mobility based on tax data (Chetty et al. 2014), which provided estimates of family-income IGEs indicating that only one-third of economic advantages are transmitted across generations and claimed that previous highly influential IGE estimates were upward biased. Using a different tax-based data set, this article provides estimates of family-income IGEs that strongly support the dominant hypothesis. The article also carries out a one-to-one comparison between IGEs estimated with the two tax-based data sets and shows that Chetty et al.'s estimates were driven downward by a combination of attenuation, life-cycle, selection, and functional-form biases. Lastly, the article determines the exact relationship between parental income inequality, economic persistence, and inequality of opportunity for income. This leads to the conclusion that, in the United States, at least half of income inequality among parents is transformed into inequality of opportunity among their children

Supplemental Material, Mitnik_Cumberworth_Replication_package - Measuring Social Class with Changing Occupational Classifications: Reliability, Competing Measurement Strategies, and the 1970–1980 U.S. Classification Divide

<p>Supplemental Material, Mitnik_Cumberworth_Replication_package for Measuring Social Class with Changing Occupational Classifications: Reliability, Competing Measurement Strategies, and the 1970–1980 U.S. Classification Divide by Pablo A. Mitnik, and Erin Cumberworth in Sociological Methods & Research</p

Skin effect in neutron transport theory

We identify a neutron-flux "skin effect"in the context of neutron transport theory. The skin effect, which emerges as a boundary layer at material interfaces, plays a critical role in a correct description of transport phenomena. A correct accounting of the boundary-layer structure helps bypass computational difficulties reported in the literature over the last several decades, and should lead to efficient numerical methods for neutron transport in two and three dimensions.Fil: Gaggioli, Enzo Leopoldo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Mitnik, Dario Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; ArgentinaFil: Bruno, Oscar Pablo. California Institute of Technology; Estados Unido

Light transport with the equation of radiative transfer: The Fourier Continuation – Discrete Ordinates (FC–DOM) Method

We present a method for the treatment of the time dependent radiative transfer equation under the discrete ordinate approximation. The novelty of the proposed approach stems, in part, from the incorporation of a spectral method for the calculation of the spatial differential operators based on the Fourier Continuation procedure introduced recently by Bruno and co–authors. This is a spatially dispersionless and high order method, which can handle arbitrary geometries, including those encountered in the forward model of light transport in optical tomography. We validate our theoretical results by comparison with analytic and experimental outcomes of the fluence measurements on tissue-like phantoms. The method makes it possible to calculate the time of flight of photons in random media efficiently and with high accuracy.Fil: Gaggioli, Enzo Leopoldo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciónes Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; ArgentinaFil: Bruno, Oscar Pablo. California Institute Of Technology; Estados UnidosFil: Mitnik, Dario Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciónes Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio. - Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física; Argentin

Indoor Mobile Robotics at Grima, PUC

This paper describes the main activities and achievements of our research group on Machine Intelligence and Robotics (Grima) at the Computer Science Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC). Since 2002, we have been developing an active research in the area of indoor autonomous social robots. Our main focus has been the cognitive side of Robotics, where we have developed algorithms for autonomous navigation using wheeled robots, scene recognition using vision and 3D range sensors, and social behaviors using Markov Decision Processes, among others. As a distinguishing feature, in our research we have followed a probabilistic approach, deeply rooted in machine learning and Bayesian statistical techniques. Among our main achievements are an increasing list of publications in main Robotics conference and journals, and the consolidation of a research group with more than 25 people among full-time professors, visiting researchers, and graduate students