Output Stabilization in EMU: IS there a Case for EFTS?

Macroeconomic performance in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) will be impaired if macroeconomic shocks are largely asymmetric, fiscal policy flexibility is limited, goods markets adjust sluggishly, labour mobility is low and automatic stabilization from federal taxes and government spending is low like in the EU currently.This paper addresses the question whether a system of fiscal transfers to stabilize differences in national business cycles can improve the overall macroeconomic performance in the monetary union.business cycles;output;EMS;monetary policy;fiscal policy

Testing over-representation of observations in subsets of a DEA technology

This paper proposes a test for whether data are over-represented in a given production zone, i.e. a subset of a production possibility set which has been estimated using the non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. A binomial test is used that relates the number of observations inside such a zone to a discrete probability weighted relative volume of that zone. A Monte Carlo simulation illustrates the performance of the proposed test statistic and suggests good estimation of both facet probabilities and the assumed common inefficiency distribution in a three dimensional input space.Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA); Over-representation; Data density; Binomial test; Convex hull

Output Stabilization in EMU:IS there a Case for EFTS?

Macroeconomic performance in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) will be impaired if macroeconomic shocks are largely asymmetric, fiscal policy flexibility is limited, goods markets adjust sluggishly, labour mobility is low and automatic stabilization from federal taxes and government spending is low like in the EU currently.This paper addresses the question whether a system of fiscal transfers to stabilize differences in national business cycles can improve the overall macroeconomic performance in the monetary union.

Elevated fetal steroidogenic activity in autism

Autism affects males more than females, giving rise to the idea that the influence of steroid hormones on early fetal brain development may be one important early biological risk factor. Utilizing the Danish Historic Birth Cohort and Danish Psychiatric Central Register, we identified all amniotic fluid samples of males born between 1993 and 1999 who later received ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision) diagnoses of autism, Asperger syndrome or PDD-NOS (pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified) (n=128) compared with matched typically developing controls. Concentration levels of Δ4 sex steroids (progesterone, 17α-hydroxy-progesterone, androstenedione and testosterone) and cortisol were measured with liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry. All hormones were positively associated with each other and principal component analysis confirmed that one generalized latent steroidogenic factor was driving much of the variation in the data. The autism group showed elevations across all hormones on this latent generalized steroidogenic factor (Cohen's d=0.37, P=0.0009) and this elevation was uniform across ICD-10 diagnostic label. These results provide the first direct evidence of elevated fetal steroidogenic activity in autism. Such elevations may be important as epigenetic fetal programming mechanisms and may interact with other important pathophysiological factors in autism

Absences and Epistemologies of Ignorance: A Critical Multi-Sited Study on the Teaching of the Danish Colonial and Slave Trading Past

The present study is a critical investigation of the production of subjectivities through the teaching of the history of the Danish slave trade within the current neoliberal multicultural (Melamed, 2006) landscape of education. By conducting a study of teaching on this subject in the context of a Danish high school, the aim is to understand how the teaching-learning of the Danish slave trading history shapes the ground for Danish high school students to develop their own positionings with regards to the past as it ties into present day issues of nationalism and xenophobia in Denmark. Drawing on the concept of history-in-person (Holland & Lave, 2001, 2009) and premised on Marxist notions of history as the continuous and contradictory flows of social practices to which our contributions matter (Marx, 1975; Vygotsky, 1966; Stetsenko & Vianna, 2006), the aim is to explore how the teaching of the past of the Danish slave trade, as a particularly fertile ground for a critical pedagogical intervention, facilitates students’ interrogation of both the past and the present, as well as their future orientations (Stetsenko, 2013; Taylor, 1991). The design employed is a critical multi-site case study that draws on the insights of counter-topography (Katz, 2004) and multi-sited ethnography (Weis, Fine & Dimitriadis, 2009) of tapping into the local-global nexus by moving across sites. The high school’s participation in the UNESCO project Breaking the Silence, an international collaboration aimed at developing best practices in the teaching of the history of slavery and with corresponding goals of promoting global citizenship, provides the second site for interrogation. By first following a Danish high school classroom during the implementation of the curriculum on the Danish slave trading past in Denmark, and then later following two of those same Danish high school students in their educational visit to the U.S. Virgin Islands, the analytical focus is to explore how engaging with the same history across the two different geo-political sites affords students’ positionings vis-à-vis the two different curricula. In exploring the local and global dynamics in education, including colonial tensions in the global citizenship paradigm, the study examines how global citizenship as an educational discourse intersects with, contradicts, or compliments the positionings of national identity and “Nordic Exceptionalism” (Jensen & Loftsdóttir, 2012) in the context of the teaching of the history of slavery. The analysis is conducted by drawing on insights from critical race theory Solórzano & Villalpando, 1998; Nasir & Hand, 2006; Leonardo, 2002; Leonardo & Manning, 2017), including by exploring how collective colonial forgetting in Demark is tied into epistemologies of ignorance (Mills, 1997, 2007; Tuana, 2006)

3-round Feistel is Not Superpseudorandom Over Any Group

Luby and Rackoff used a Feistel cipher over bit strings to construct a pseudorandom permutation from pseudorandom functions in 1988 and in 2002, Patel, Ramzan, and Sundaram generalized the construction to arbitrary abelian groups. They showed that the 3-round Feistel cipher is not superpseudorandom over abelian groups but left as an open problem a proof for non-abelian groups. We give this proof. Keywords: Feistel, non-abelian group, pseudorandom