"On Hochberg et al.'s, the tragedy of the reviewers commons"

We discuss each of the recommendations made by Hochberg et al. (2009) to prevent the “tragedy of the reviewer commons”. Having scientific journals share a common database of reviewers would be to recreate a bureaucratic organization, where extra-scientific considerations prevailed. Pre-reviewing of papers by colleagues is a widespread practice but raises problems of coordination. Revising manuscripts in line with all reviewers’ recommendations presupposes that recommendations converge, which is acrobatic. Signing an undertaking that authors have taken into accounts all reviewers’ comments is both authoritarian and sterilizing. Sending previous comments with subsequent submissions to other journals amounts to creating a cartel and a single all-encompassing journal, which again is sterilizing. Using young scientists as reviewers is highly risky: they might prove very severe; and if they have not yet published themselves, the recommendation violates the principle of peer review. Asking reviewers to be more severe would only create a crisis in the publishing houses and actually increase reviewers’ workloads. The criticisms of the behavior of authors looking to publish in the best journals are unfair: it is natural for scholars to try to publish in the best journals and not to resign themselves to being second rate. Punishing lazy reviewers would only lower the quality of reports: instead, we favor the idea of paying reviewers “in kind” with, say, complimentary books or papers.Reviewer;Referee;Editor;Publisher;Publishing;Tragedy of the Commons;Hochberg

Biproportional Techniques in Input-Output Analysis: Table Updating and Structural Analysis

This paper is dedicated to the contributions of Sir Richard Stone, Michael Bacharach, and Philip Israilevich. It starts out with a brief history of biproportional techniques and related matrix balancing algorithms. We then discuss the RAS algorithm developed by Sir Richard Stone and others. We follow that by evaluating the interpretability of the product of the adjustment parameters, generally known as R and S. We then move on to discuss the various formal formulations of other biproportional approaches and discuss what defines an algorithm as “biproportionalâ€. After mentioning a number of competing optimization algorithms that cannot fall under the rubric of being biproportional, we reflect upon how some of their features have been included into the biproportional setting (the ability to fix the value of interior cells of the matrix being adjusted and of incorporating data reliability into the algorithm). We wind up the paper by pointing out some areas that could use further investigation.Input-Output Economics; RAS; data raking; iterative proportional fitting; estimating missing data

Asymmetry of Information within Family Networks

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of mis-perception of living standards among households within the same network. We contrast altruism, pressure, exchange and risk sharing as motives to transfer in simple models with asymmetric information. Testing the model predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by recipients of transfers. Our findings suggest that recipients set the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure on donors or because they hold substantial bargaining power in their exchange relationships

Some conceptual difficulties regarding "net" multipliers

Multipliers are routinely used for impact evaluation of private projects and public policies at the national and subnational levels. Oosterhaven and Stelder (2002) correctly pointed out the misuse of standard 'gross' multipliers and proposed the concept of 'net' multiplier as a solution to this bad practice. We prove their proposal is not well founded. We do so by showing that supporting theorems are faulty in enunciation and demonstration. The proofs are flawed due to an analytical error but the theorems themselves cannot be salvaged as generic, non-curiosum counterexamples demonstrate. We also provide a general analytical framework for multipliers and, using it, we show that standard 'gross' multipliers are all that is needed within the interindustry model since they follow the causal logic of the economic model, are well defined and independent of exogenous shocks, and are interpretable as predictors for change

Asymmetry of Information within Family Networks

This paper studies asymmetry of information and transfers within a unique data set of 712 extended family networks from Tanzania. Using cross-reports on asset holdings, we construct measures of misperception of income among all pairs of households belonging to the same network. We show that there is significant asymmetry of information and no evidence of major systematic over-evaluation or under-evaluation of income in our data, although there is a slight over-evaluation on the part of migrants regarding non-migrants. We develop a static model of asymmetric information that contrasts altruism, pressure and exchange as motives to transfer. The model makes predictions about the correlations between misperceptions and transfers under these competing explanations. Testing these predictions in the data uncovers the active role played by the recipient. Our findings suggest that the recipient sets the terms of the transfers, either by exerting pressure to give on the donor or by holding the bargaining power during the exchange of services with the donor

An SMT-Based Concolic Testing Tool for Logic Programs

[EN] Concolic testing combines symbolic and concrete execution to generate test cases that achieve a good program coverage. Its benefits have been demonstrated for more than 15 years in the case of imperative programs. In this work, we present a concolic-based test generation tool for logic programs which exploits SMT-solving for constraint resolutionThird author is a research associate at FNRS that also supports this work (O05518FRG03). The last author is partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish MCI/AEI under grants TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R/PID2019-104735RB-C41 and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2019/098 (DeepTrust)Fortz, S.; Mesnard, F.; Payet, E.; Perrouin, G.; Vanhoof, W.; Vidal, G. (2020). An SMT-Based Concolic Testing Tool for Logic Programs. Springer Nature. 215-219. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59025-3_13S215219de Moura, L., Bjørner, N.: Z3: an efficient SMT solver. In: Ramakrishnan, C.R., Rehof, J. (eds.) TACAS 2008. LNCS, vol. 4963, pp. 337–340. Springer, Heidelberg (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78800-3_24Giantsios, A., Papaspyrou, N., Sagonas, K.: Concolic testing for functional languages. Sci. Comput. Program. 147, 109–134 (2017)Godefroid, P., Klarlund, N., Sen, K.: DART: directed automated random testing. In: Proceedings of PLDI 2005, pp. 213–223. ACM (2005)Mesnard, F., Payet, É., Vidal, G.: Concolic testing in logic programming. TPLP 15(4–5), 711–725 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1471068415000332Mesnard, F., Payet, É., Vidal, G.: On the completeness of selective unification in concolic testing of logic programs. In: Hermenegildo, M.V., Lopez-Garcia, P. (eds.) LOPSTR 2016. LNCS, vol. 10184, pp. 205–221. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63139-4_12Mesnard, F., Payet, É., Vidal, G.: Selective unification in constraint logic programming. In: Vanhoof, W., Pientka, B. (eds.) PPDP, pp. 115–126. ACM (2017)Mesnard, F., Payet, É., Vidal, G.: Concolic Testing in CLP. CoRR abs/2008.00421 (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00421Sen, K., Marinov, D., Agha, G.: CUTE: a concolic unit testing engine for C. In: ESEC/ FSE, pp. 263–272. ACM (2005)Ströder, T., Emmes, F., Schneider-Kamp, P., Giesl, J., Fuhs, C.: A linear operational semantics for termination and complexity analysis of ISO Prolog. In: Vidal, G. (ed.) LOPSTR 2011. LNCS, vol. 7225, pp. 237–252. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32211-2_16Tikovsky, J.R.: Concolic testing of functional logic programs. In: Seipel, D., Hanus, M., Abreu, S. (eds.) WFLP/WLP/INAP -2017. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 10997, pp. 169–186. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00801-7_11Vidal, G.: Concolic execution and test case generation in prolog. In: Proietti, M., Seki, H. (eds.) LOPSTR 2014. LNCS, vol. 8981, pp. 167–181. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17822-6_10Wielemaker, J., Schrijvers, T., Triska, M., Lager, T.: SWI-prolog. TPLP 12(1–2), 67–96 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1017/S147106841100049

Size-Change Termination, Monotonicity Constraints and Ranking Functions

Size-Change Termination (SCT) is a method of proving program termination based on the impossibility of infinite descent. To this end we may use a program abstraction in which transitions are described by monotonicity constraints over (abstract) variables. When only constraints of the form x>y' and x>=y' are allowed, we have size-change graphs. Both theory and practice are now more evolved in this restricted framework then in the general framework of monotonicity constraints. This paper shows that it is possible to extend and adapt some theory from the domain of size-change graphs to the general case, thus complementing previous work on monotonicity constraints. In particular, we present precise decision procedures for termination; and we provide a procedure to construct explicit global ranking functions from monotonicity constraints in singly-exponential time, which is better than what has been published so far even for size-change graphs.Comment: revised version of September 2

Can Conditional Cash Transfers compensate for a father’s absence?

This paper investigates how the departure of the father from the household, that results in his permanent absence, affects children’s school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia. The results show that departure of the father decreases children’s school enrollment by around 5 percentage points and increases child labor by 3 percentage points. The paper exploits the roll-out of a conditional cash transfer program during the period of study and shows that it counteracts these adverse effects. This, and other pieces of evidence provided, strongly suggests that the channel through which the father’s departure affects children is through reducing the income of very poor households, which is tightening their liquidity constraints. It also highlights the important safety net role played by such welfare programs, in particular for disadvantaged households, which are unlikely to find formal or informal ways of insuring themselves against such vagaries