Auctions - A Survey

The importance of auction theory has gained increased recognition in the scientific community, the latest recognition being the award of the Nobel price to Vickrey and Mirrlees. Auction theory has been used in quite different fields, both theoretically and empirically. This paper connects recent developments in theoretical and empirical works, providing a survey about theoretical, empirical, and experimental results.Auction Theory, Information and Uncertainty, Asymmetric and Private Information

Temporary Help Services Employment in Portugal, 1995-2000

Whereas there is widespread belief that workers in temporary help services (THS) are subject to poorer working conditions, in particular pay, than comparable workers in the rest of the economy, there is little evidence on whether that is driven by the sector per se or by the workers' characteristics. The first aim of this analysis is to quantify the wage penalty, if any, for workers in THS firms. Secondly, we analyze the wage profile of workers right before and after spells of THS. Linked employer-employee data for Portugal enable us to account for observable as well as unobservable worker quality. Our results show that workers in THS firms earn lower wages than their peers and that this difference is mostly due to the workers' characteristics. We estimate that workers in THS firms earn on average 9% less than comparable workers in the rest of the economy if we control for the workers' observable attributes only. This difference is reduced to about 1% when we control for unobservable characteristics as well. However, interesting differences emerge across groups. Younger workers, both men and women, earn higher wages in TAW than their peers in other firms, while the opposite holds for prime-age and older workers. Moreover, for young workers THS firms is not associated with a stigma effect that slows their wage progression after they work for THS, as opposed to prime-age and older workers, in particular males. Also before entering THS the wage trends are different. Prime-age and older workers, both male and female, see their wages deteriorate relative to their peers before entering THS, suggesting that adverse labor market conditions may motivate them to search for a THS job. On the contrary, for young workers we do not detect any pre-THS wage trend.

Human activity recognition using limb component extraction

in the field of human activity recognition has existed for quite sometime, but has gained popularity in recent years for use in many areas of application. In the security industry, suspicious activities could be detected in high-profile areas. In the medical industry, systems could be trained to detect patterns of motion indicating distress or to detect a lack of motion if a person had fallen and was unable to move. However, algorithms with reliable accuracy are difficult to implement in a real-time environment due to computational complexity. This thesis developed a new way of extracting and using data from a human figure in a video frame to determine what type of activity the subject is performing. Following background subtraction, a thinning algorithm operating on the silhouette offered a more robust limb extraction method, while a six-segment representation of the human figure offered more accuracy in deriving limb parameters, or components, such as distance from torso, and angle of displacement from the vertical axis. Neural networks or nearest neighbor classifiers used the limb components to identify a number of activities, such as walking, running, waving and jumping. This entire human activity recognition system was tested with both a MATLAB implementation (non real-time) and a C++ implementation in OpenCV (real-time). The algorithm achieved 96% classification accuracy in video feeds, which is only slightly lower than that of intensive, non real-time systems

WRITING NEXT TO THE WEST: A SPATIAL CONSIDERATION OF WOMEN IN THE AMERICAN WEST

Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt are contemporary women writers of the American West. Both women grew up on ranches in Montana but left in adulthood. Despite leaving, each woman maintains significant intellectual and emotional connections to the land and culture of her youth in her writing. Blew\u27s memoir All But the Waltz and Blunt’s memoir Breaking Clean reveal a friction between dependency on the land and necessary distancing from it that presents the opportunity to employ geographical analysis to the ways in which place figures into the production of identity and of these texts. In this paper, I seek to understand the tension between attachment to place and rejection of it. Humanist geography provides a framework for understanding this tension in Blew’s and Blunt’s memoirs. Specifically, landscape theories and feminist critical perspectives serve as methodologies to understand the construction of hegemonic places, and can elucidate women’s use of space to assert themselves in cultures where they had previously been prevented from doing so. This project brings to the fore ways women can make themselves visible from within a history that has sought to hide them, that of the American West. Through writing Blew and Blunt validate the feminine subject as a creator of knowledge; they also contribute their unique voices to the history of the American West, thus enriching and deepening its purview. Additionally, the interdisciplinary nature of this project demonstrates the use value of literature to the understanding of space and place in a humanist geography context

The distribution of the gender pay gap in Austria: Evidence from matched employer-employee data and tax-records

We examine the gender wage gap in Austria using new matched employer-employee data from 2007. We investigate the gap at the conditional wage distribution of men and women, and decompose it into the parts which are attributed to different characteristics and different returns to these characteristics. We find that women earn on average about 14% less than men for given characteristics, and that about 50% of the gender wage gap cannot be attributed to observable characteristics. The extent of different returns for women and men increase over the wage distribution where wage bargaining is predominantly on an individual basis (in contrast to low wage jobs, where collective bargaining contracts are binding)

Thinking Inside the Box

In early 2007, SLAC was faced with a shortage of both electrical power and cooling in the main computer building, at the same time that the BaBar collaboration needed a new cluster of 250 batch machines installed. A number of different options were explored for the expansion. Provision of additional electrical power to the building was estimated to take one to two years, and cost several million dollars; additional cooling was even worse. Space in a Silicon Valley co-location facilities was reasonable on a one-year timescale, but broke even in costs by the end of three years, and were more expensive after that. There were also unresolved questions about the affects of additional latency from an offsite compute cluster to the onsite disk servers. The option of converting existing experimental hall space into computer space was estimated at one year, with uncertain availability. An option to aggressively replace several existing clusters with more power-efficient equipment was studied closely, but was disruptive to continued operations, expensive, and didn't provide any additional headroom. Finally, the installation of a Sun Project Blackbox (PBB) unit was selected as providing the capacity on a timescale of six months for a reasonable cost with minimal disruption to service. SLAC obtained and installed a beta unit and have been running it in production since September 2007. The experiences described are with the Early Access version of the PBB. The production version of the box has engineering changes based in part on our experiences

Consumption Based Capital Asset Pricing and the Austrian Stock Exchange

Using data from the Vienna Stock Exchange we investigate three different types of consumption based capital asset pricing models: the well known two state model of Mehra and Prescott, the model of Rietz, which includes also a crash state, and an own four state model. The aim of this Vienna Stock Exchange during the 1980s into account. For all the models we calculate the risk premium in order to see whether the models could explain the empirically observed risk premium. For the calculation of risk premia we use estimators generated by the General Method of Moments.Consumption based Capital Pricing Models, GMM, Equity Premium Puzzle

The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Self-employment amongst migrant groups: New evidence for England and Wales

Self-employment constitutes a vital part of the economy since entrepreneurs can provide employment not only for themselves but also for others. The link between self-employment and immigration is, however, complex, especially given the changing nature of self-employment. We investigate the evolving relationship between self-employment and immigration using recently released microdata from the 2011 Census for England and Wales. Our findings indicate large variations, with high self-employment rates observed for some groups with a long established history of migration to the UK (especially men born in Pakistan) and also for some groups who have arrived more recently (such as from the EU’s new member states). We further explore the differences, analyse variations by gender and identify key determining factors. In addition to certain socio-economic characteristics, it is found that migration-related influences, such as English language proficiency and period of arrival in the UK, play an important role for some groups