Inequality, Transfers and Growth: New Evidence from the Economic Transition in Poland

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that inequality in Poland increased markedly during the economic transition that began in 1989-90. Using micro data from the Household Budget Surveys, we find that, after a brief spike in 1989, income and consumption inequality actually declined to below pre-transition levels during 1990-92 and then increased gradually, rising only moderately above pre-transition levels by 1997. In sharp contrast, inequality in labor earnings increased markedly and consistently throughout the 1990-97 period. We find that social transfer mechanisms, including pensions, played an important role in mitigating increases in both overall inequality and poverty. We argue that, from a political economy perspective, transfer mechanisms were well-designed to reduce political resistance to market-oriented reforms in the early years of transition, paving the way for rapid growth. Finally, we provide cross-country evidence from the transition economies that is consistent with our interpretation of the Polish experience and is also consistent with recent work in growth theory which suggests that redistribution that reduces inequality can enhance growth.

Does Openness to International Financial Flows Contribute to Productivity Growth?

Economic theory has identified a number of channels through which openness to international financial flows could raise productivity growth. However, while there is a vast empirical literature analyzing the impact of financial openness on output growth, far less attention has been paid to its effects on productivity growth. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between financial openness and total factor productivity (TFP) growth using an extensive dataset that includes various measures of productivity and financial openness for a large sample of countries. We find that de jure capital account openness has a robust positive effect on TFP growth. The effect of de facto financial integration on TFP growth is less clear, but this masks an important and novel result. We find strong evidence that FDI and portfolio equity liabilities boost TFP growth while external debt is actually negatively correlated with TFP growth. The negative relationship between external debt liabilities and TFP growth is attenuated in economies with higher levels of financial development and better institutions.foreign direct investment, external assets and liabilities, capital flows, capital account liberalization, financial openness, portfolio equity, debt, total factor productivity

Growth and Volatility in an Era of Globalization

We extend the analysis in Kose, Prasad, and Terrones (2005) to provide a comprehensive examination of the cross-sectional relationship between growth and macroeconomic volatility over the past four decades. We also document that while there has generally been a negative relationship between volatility and growth during this period, the nature of this relationship has been changing over time and across different country groups. In particular, we detect major shifts in this relationship after trade and financial liberalizations. In addition, our results show that volatility stemming from the main components of domestic demand is negatively associated with economic growth. Copyright 2005, International Monetary Fund

A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Weaning of Mechanical Ventilation in Intensive Care Units

The management of invasive mechanical ventilation, and the regulation of sedation and analgesia during ventilation, constitutes a major part of the care of patients admitted to intensive care units. Both prolonged dependence on mechanical ventilation and premature extubation are associated with increased risk of complications and higher hospital costs, but clinical opinion on the best protocol for weaning patients off of a ventilator varies. This work aims to develop a decision support tool that uses available patient information to predict time-to-extubation readiness and to recommend a personalized regime of sedation dosage and ventilator support. To this end, we use off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms to determine the best action at a given patient state from sub-optimal historical ICU data. We compare treatment policies from fitted Q-iteration with extremely randomized trees and with feedforward neural networks, and demonstrate that the policies learnt show promise in recommending weaning protocols with improved outcomes, in terms of minimizing rates of reintubation and regulating physiological stability

Amplitude death in coupled chaotic oscillators

Amplitude death can occur in chaotic dynamical systems with time-delay coupling, similar to the case of coupled limit cycles. The coupling leads to stabilization of fixed points of the subsystems. This phenomenon is quite general, and occurs for identical as well as nonidentical coupled chaotic systems. Using the Lorenz and R\"ossler chaotic oscillators to construct representative systems, various possible transitions from chaotic dynamics to fixed points are discussed.Comment: To be published in PR