Topological restrictions in Lorentzian geometry: a survey

It is well know that globally hyperbolic solutions (M,g) of the Einstein field equations in general relativity may have initial data Cauchy hypersurfaces with any topology. However, some restrictions on the fundamental group of M can arise from the causal structure if either all inextendible causal geodesics in (M,g) are complete or if one assumes that M has a boundary with suitable properties. I shall review a number of such "topological censorship" results and discuss some open issues.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The productive role of public infrastructure: A critical review of recent literature

The publication of two empirical articles by Aschauer in 1989 brought a renewed interest in the study of the productive role of public infrastructure. Since then, many empirical studies as well as a few surveys have been published not only in regional science journals but also in main stream economics journals. The interest in the subject and the controversy are both high, which constitute two major ingredients for our critical review of recent literature. Our purpose in this paper is to evaluate the recent contributions identifying approaches followed, results obtained, major shortcomings of the empirical evidence produced, areas of strong controversy and promising methodologies for future research.

Are Voters Rationally Ignorant? An Empirical Study for Portuguese Local Elections

The application of the rational choice postulate to a political context invariably leads to the conclusion that most voters are ill informed when making the decision for whom to vote. In this paper, the authors do an empirical evaluation of the rational ignorance theory, based on the results of the 1997 Portuguese Local Elections. The results only partially sustain the hypothesis of rational ignorance, although it is also possible to identify several limitations that prevent the establishment of definite conclusions in this specific field.JEL Classification: H7 Key words: Voter’s Behaviour; Local Elections; Local Governments; Portugal.

An empirical analysis of Brazilian courts law documents using learning techniques

This paper describes a survey on investigating judicial data to find patterns and relations between crime attributes and corresponding decisions made by courts, aiming to find import directions that interpretation of the law might be taking. We have developed an initial methodology and experimentation to look for behaviour patterns to build judicial sentences in the scope of Brazilian criminal courts and achieved results related to important trends in decision making. Neural networks-based techniques were applied for classification and pattern recognition, based on Multi-Layer Perceptron and Radial-basis Functions, associated with data organisation techniques and behavioral modalities extractio