690 research outputs found
Price dispersion: the case of pasta
Scopo della ricerca è indagare la possibilità di utilizzare scanner data sugli acquisti di pasta per costruire indici dei prezzi spaziali bilaterali e multilaterali utilizzando un approccio binario nella loro costruzione.The aim of our research is to explore the possibility of utilizing scanner data on
pasta purchases to build bilateral and multilateral spatial price indexes, taking a
binary approach in the latter.1
Pasta plays a major role in the Italian diet. Historically, pasta consumption was
mainly concentrated in the Southern regions of the country but today pasta is perhaps
the product most representative of the eating habits of the Italians. The range
of pasta producers runs from firms of longstanding tradition (some of them mainly
directed towards local markets, such as Mastromauro in Puglia) to well known
international brands (such as Barilla and De Cecco).
The marked increase in pasta prices over the last two years has aroused great
interest, but with little focus on spatial price diversity.
This study stems from the availability of an extremely detailed panel dataset
(Nielsen data) on values and quantities of pasta purchased. This data was produced
by the use of bar-code scanning at retail outlets and thus includes information which
provides weights at an elementary level. The use of scanner data to construct price
indexes is not new in literature and there is a widespread consensus on the advantages
of this approach in achieving more representative indexes. Average prices (unit
values) show a marked spatial price variability: even when only considering the five
bestselling products, regional prices vary greatly.
The paper is set out as follows: Sect. 2 provides a description of the pasta scanner
dataset and briefly looks for price variability; in Sect. 3 the requirements of comparability
and representativity in the case of pasta are discussed; Sect. 4 deals with
the methods and formulas chosen to obtain indexes for the regional comparisons of prices; Sect. 5 shows empirical results; in Sect. 6 a brief conclusion and suggestions
for future work are given
Massive MIMO radar for target detection
Since the seminal paper by Marzetta from 2010, the Massive MIMO paradigm in communication systems has changed from being a theoretical scaled-up version of MIMO, with an infinite number of antennas, to a practical technology. Its key concepts have been adopted in the 5G new radio standard and base stations, where 64 fully-digital transceivers have been commercially deployed. Motivated by these recent developments, this paper considers a co-located MIMO radar with MT transmitting and MR receiving antennas and explores the potential benefits of having a large number of virtual spatial antenna channels N=MTMR. Particularly, we focus on the target detection problem and develop a robust Wald-type test that guarantees certain detection performance, regardless of the unknown statistical characterization of the disturbance. Closed-form expressions for the probabilities of false alarm and detection are derived for the asymptotic regime N→∞. Numerical results are used to validate the asymptotic analysis in the finite system regime with different disturbance models. Our results imply that there always exists a sufficient number of antennas for which the performance requirements are satisfied, without any a-priori knowledge of the disturbance statistics. This is referred to as the Massive MIMO regime of the radar system
Analysis and design in providing a robotised cleaning and validation system for hospital environment
Evidence for the Gompertz Curve in the Income Distribution of Brazil 1978-2005
This work presents an empirical study of the evolution of the personal income
distribution in Brazil. Yearly samples available from 1978 to 2005 were studied
and evidence was found that the complementary cumulative distribution of
personal income for 99% of the economically less favorable population is well
represented by a Gompertz curve of the form , where
is the normalized individual income. The complementary cumulative
distribution of the remaining 1% richest part of the population is well
represented by a Pareto power law distribution . This
result means that similarly to other countries, Brazil's income distribution is
characterized by a well defined two class system. The parameters , ,
, were determined by a mixture of boundary conditions,
normalization and fitting methods for every year in the time span of this
study. Since the Gompertz curve is characteristic of growth models, its
presence here suggests that these patterns in income distribution could be a
consequence of the growth dynamics of the underlying economic system. In
addition, we found out that the percentage share of both the Gompertzian and
Paretian components relative to the total income shows an approximate cycling
pattern with periods of about 4 years and whose maximum and minimum peaks in
each component alternate at about every 2 years. This finding suggests that the
growth dynamics of Brazil's economic system might possibly follow a
Goodwin-type class model dynamics based on the application of the
Lotka-Volterra equation to economic growth and cycle.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures, 4 tables. LaTeX. Accepted for publication in
"The European Physical Journal B
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What next for children's services? Can policy at a local or national level have any significant impact on the outcomes for children and their families?
In England at both strategic and operational levels, policy-makers in the public sector have undertaken considerable work on implementing the findings of the Every Child Matters report and subsequently through the Children's Act 2004. Legislation has resulted in many local authorities seeking to implement more holistic approaches to the delivery of children's services. At a strategic level this is demonstrated by the creation of integrated directorate structures providing for a range of services, from education to children's social care. Such services were generally under the management of the Director of Children's Services, holding statutory responsibilities for the delivery of services formally divided into the three sectors of education, health and social services. At a national level, more fundamental policy developments have sought to establish a framework through which policy-makers can address the underlying causes of deprivation, vulnerability and inequality. The Child Poverty Act, 2010, which gained Royal Assent in 2010, provides for a clear intention to reduce the number of children in poverty, acknowledging that ‘the best way to eradicate child poverty is to address the causes of poverty, rather than only treat the symptoms’. However, whilst the policy objectives of both pieces of legislation hold positive aspirations for children and young people, a change of policy direction through a change of government in May 2010 seems to be in direct contrast to the intended focus of these aims. This paper explores the impact of new government policy on the future direction of children's services both at the national and local levels. At the national level, we question the ability of the government to deliver the aspirations of the Child Poverty Act, 2010, given the broad range of influences and factors that can determine the circumstances in which a child may experience poverty. We argue that poverty is not simply an issue of the pressure of financial deprivation, but that economic recession and cuts in government spending will further increase the number of children living in poverty
Individual scatterers as microscopic origin of equilibration between spin- polarized edge channels in the quantum Hall regime
The equilibration length between spin-polarized edge states in the Quantum
Hall regime is measured as a function of a gate voltage applied to an electrode
on top of the edge channels. Reproducible fluctuations in the coupling are
observed and interpreted as a mesoscopic fingerprint of single spin-flip
scatterers which are turned on and off. A model to analyze macroscopic edge
state coupling in terms of individual scatterers is developed, and
characteristic values for these scatterers in our samples are extracted. For
all samples investigated, the distance between spin-flip scatterers lies
between the Drude and the quantum scattering length.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Kinetic Exchange Models for Income and Wealth Distributions
Increasingly, a huge amount of statistics have been gathered which clearly
indicates that income and wealth distributions in various countries or
societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in
an ideal gas in equilibrium. However, it also deviates in the low income and
more significantly for the high income ranges. Application of physics models
provides illuminating ideas and understanding, complementing the observations.Comment: 15 pages, 20 eps figures, EPJ class; To be published as "Colloquium"
in Eur Phys J
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