News-driven business cycles in small open economies

The focus of this paper is on news-driven business cycles in small open economies. We make two significant contributions. First, we develop a small open economy model where the presence of financial frictions permits the replication of business cycle co-movements in response to news shocks. Second, we use VAR analysis to identify news shocks using data on four advanced small open economies. We find that expected shocks about the future Total Factor Productivity generate business cycle co-movements in output, hours, consumption and investment. We also find that news shocks are associated with countercyclical current account dynamics. Our findings are robust across a number of alternative identification schemes

‘‘Appearance of Corruption’’: Linking Public Opinion and Campaign Finance Reform

At present, campaign finance regulations may only be justified if their primary purpose is to prevent quid pro quo corruption or the appearance of corruption. References to the ‘‘appearance of corruption’’ are ubiquitous in campaign finance decisions, yet courts have provided very little guidance about what the phrase means. In this article, we report findings from a broadly representative national survey in which we (1) directly ask respondents to identify behaviors that appear politically corrupt, and (2) indirectly measure perceptions of corruption using a novel paired-choice conjoint experiment asking respondents to choose which of two randomly generated candidates are more likely to do something corrupt while in office. Our findings both support and challenge current campaign finance jurisprudence. Our direct item shows that bribery is considered to be the most politically corrupt behavior, while wealthy self-funded candidates are not perceived as corrupting the political system. These findings support the reliance of courts on bribery as the primary justification for campaign finance rules, and the courts’ dismissal of regulations targeting wealthy candidates. However, most of our respondents perceived many common behaviors besides bribery to be ‘‘very corrupt,’’ challenging courts’ reliance on bribery as the sole justification for campaign finance rules. Our conjoint experiment, designed to force trade-offs between various behaviors, similarly reveals little differentiation across candidate campaign finance profiles, suggesting voters may not distinguish common behaviors in terms of their corrupting role. A normatively positive result in our conjoint analysis is that partisans do not appear to define corruptibility on the basis of in-/out-party signals

A TOOL FOR COLLECTING, QUERYING AND MINING MACROSEISMIC DATA

SEISMO-SURFER is a tool for collecting, querying and mining seismic data being developed in Java programming language using Oracle database system. The objective is to combine recent research trends and results in the fields of spatial and spatio-temporal databases, data warehouses and data mining, as well as well established visualization techniques for geographical information. The database of the tool is automatically updated from remote sources while existing possibilities allow the querying on different earthquakes parameters, the analysis of the data for extraction of useful information and the graphical representation of the results via maps, charts etc. In the present work, we extend SEISMO-SURFER to include macroseismic data collected by the Geodynamic Institute and filled in a relative database. More specifically, the seismic parameters of the strong earthquakes, stored into the SEISMO-SURFER database, are linked to the macroseismic intensities observed at different sites. Administrative information for each site, local surface geology, tectonic lines, damage photographs and detailed descriptions from newspapers are also included. University of Piraeus and Geodynamic Institute are working together to continuously update and develop SEISMO-SURFER, concerning the data included, the variety of parameters stored and the mining algorithms supported for exploiting knowledge

CAC-TCP cross-layer interaction in a HAPS-satellite integrated scenario

The integration of a satellite system with a HAPS segment appears very suitable to provide communication services, including Internet access, for a large set of applications. In fact, the-satellite capability to provide wide coverage and broadband access can be enhanced by the use of cost-effective, mobile/portable and low-power consuming user terminals, when HAPS acts as an intermediate repeater. Moreover, also TCP-based applications, which suffer from long latency introduced by the satellite link and in general by errors, can get benefits in terms of end-to-end performance. In this frame, this paper deals with the introduction, on board the HAPS, of an efficient CAC scheme in order to guarantee an optimal utilization of the precious radio resources. In particular, we propose an innovative TCP driven CAC algorithm, which shall take into account not only the QoS requirements, but also TCP statistics obtained through a proxy installed on the HAPS. Results show that the overall system performance in terms of both average throughput and blocking probability is significantly improved

A TCP Driven CAC scheme: efficient resource utilization in a leaky HAP-satellite integrated scenario

An integrated high altitude platform (HAP)-satellite communication system appears to be very suitable for a large set of scenarios including emergency situations, exceptional events, etc. In fact, the satellite capability to provide a broadband and ubiquitous access can be enhanced by the deployment of HAP that allows the use of low-power consuming, cost-efficient, and portable terminals. To obtain an optimum utilization of radio resource, without renouncing to QoS satisfaction, a suitable call admission control scheme must be implemented. Nevertheless, transmission control protocol (TCP) behavior, mainly affected by the high latency and shadowing events, can impact call admission control (CAC) performance. Therefore, it would be desirable that the CAC scheme takes into account also the TCP congestion window real evolution. We present an innovative CAC scheme that uses TCP statistics as one of its inputs and is able to manage different classes of users. Results show that CAC performance is significantly improved by introducing TCP statistics about network congestion as an input parameter

Improving market outcomes: A qualitative assessment of the Greek dairy supply chain

ΔΕΝ ΔΙΑΤΙΘΕΤΑΙ ΠΕΡΙΛΗΨΗThis study provides a qualitatative assessment of the overall outcomes of the dairy supply chain in Greece. Based on the framework of the Taskforce for Agricultural Markets, a questionnaire survey with in-depth interviews was conducted to farmers, industries and supermarkets in Greece in order to gain knowledge about trading practices, market transparency, risk management, contracts, access to finance and the role of Producer Organizations. The analysis did not reveal significant unfair trading practices and showed positive prospects for the overall supply chain

Time-aware Sub-Trajectory Clustering in Hermes@PostgreSQL

In this paper, we present an efficient in-DBMS framework for progressive time-aware sub-trajectory cluster analysis. In particular, we address two variants of the problem: (a) spatiotemporal sub-trajectory clustering and (b) index-based time-aware clustering at querying environment. Our approach for (a) relies on a two-phase process: a voting-and-segmentation phase followed by a sampling-and-clustering phase. Regarding (b), we organize data into partitions that correspond to groups of sub-trajectories, which are incrementally maintained in a hierarchical structure. Both approaches have been implemented in Hermes@PostgreSQL, a real Moving Object Database engine built on top of PostgreSQL, enabling users to perform progressive cluster analysis via simple SQL. The framework is also extended with a Visual Analytics (VA) tool to facilitate real world analysis

Bidding at Sequential First-Price Auctions with(out) Supply Uncertainty: A Laboratory Analysis

We report on a series of experiments that test the effects of an uncertain supply on the formation of bids and prices in sequential first-price auctions with private-independent values and unit-demands. Supply is assumed uncertain when buyers do not know the exact number of units to be sold (i.e., the length of the sequence). Although we observe a non-monotone behavior when supply is certain and an important overbidding, the data qualitatively support our price trend predictions and the risk neutral Nash equilibrium model of bidding for the last stage of a sequence, whether supply is certain or not. Our study shows that behavior in these markets changes significantly with the presence of an uncertain supply, and that it can be explained by assuming that bidders formulate pessimistic beliefs about the occurrence of another stage.Financial support from the University of Valencia (project GV98_08/2960) and from a EU-TMR ENDEAR Network Grant (FMRX-CT98-0238) is gratefully acknowledged