R&D Intensity, Technology Transfer and Absorptive Capacity

In the line of Schumpeterian fully endogenous growth theory, this study attempts to investigate whether differences in research intensity as well as absorptive capacity help to explain cross-country differences in productivity growth in a panel of 55 sample countries including 23 OECD and 32 developing economies over the period 1970 to 2004. Using several indicators of innovative activity and product variety empirical results from system GMM estimator confirm that research intensity has significant positive effect on productivity growth in both the OECD and developing countries. TFP growth is also found to be enhanced by the distance to technology frontier in both the group of countries. R&D based absorptive capacity seems to have significant positive impact on productivity growth in both the groups though strong in OECD countries. Human capital based technology transfer is found significant and robust in both the OECD and developing countries. Absorptive capacity appears to be sensitive to the model specification and measurement of innovative activity as well as product variety.Schumpeterian growth theory, R&D intensity, TFP growth, technology transfer, human capital, absorptive capacity, system GMM, OECD, developing countries

Quality-adjusted Human Capital and Productivity Growth

Both the quality and quantity of human capital are important for growth. Although the quality aspects of human capital may have greater potential in explaining growth, given that the quantity effects of human capital have been found to be ambiguous, they have long been ignored in empirical growth literature. This paper empirically tests the joint effects of both the quantity and quality of human capital in stimulating productivity growth for a panel of 89 countries over the period 1970-2007. Based on different measures of human capital quantity and quality, the results show that the growth effects of educational attainment can be significantly enhanced when the quality of schooling is improved. The joint effect of human capital quality and quantity is found to be stronger in developing countries.quantity, quality, human capital, growth, world

Human Capital Composition, Proximity to Technology Frontier and Productivity Growth

The role of human capital composition has been given importance in the most recent endogenous growth models. Assuming that primary as well as secondary education is more suitable for imitation and higher education is more appropriate for innovation, this paper empirically investigates whether the contribution of human capital to productivity growth depends on the composition of human capital and the proximity to technology frontier in a panel of 87 sample countries over the period of 1970 to 2004. The sample is further divided into 28 high, 37 medium, and 22 low income countries to gain some insights into the importance of composition effects of human capital on growth in developing countries relative to their developed counterparts. Using different levels of human capital data from four alternative sources empirical results from system GMM estimator demonstrate that growth enhancing effect of skilled human capital increases with the proximity to the technology frontier only for high and medium income countries. Unskilled human capital is contributing more for low income countries as they move closer to the technology frontier. Matured workers with tertiary education are more growth enhancing for high and medium income countries, whereas younger workers with secondary education are more growth improving for low income countries. Estimated results are consistent across male and female workers.Human capital composition, proximity, technology frontier, growth, GMM, world

Improvement of Text Dependent Speaker Identification System Using Neuro-Genetic Hybrid Algorithm in Office Environmental Conditions

In this paper, an improved strategy for automated text dependent speaker identification system has been proposed in noisy environment. The identification process incorporates the Neuro-Genetic hybrid algorithm with cepstral based features. To remove the background noise from the source utterance, wiener filter has been used. Different speech pre-processing techniques such as start-end point detection algorithm, pre-emphasis filtering, frame blocking and windowing have been used to process the speech utterances. RCC, MFCC, ?MFCC, ??MFCC, LPC and LPCC have been used to extract the features. After feature extraction of the speech, Neuro-Genetic hybrid algorithm has been used in the learning and identification purposes. Features are extracted by using different techniques to optimize the performance of the identification. According to the VALID speech database, the highest speaker identification rate of 100.000% for studio environment and 82.33% for office environmental conditions have been achieved in the close set text dependent speaker identification system

Efficient algorithms for the optical multi-trees (OMULT) architecture.

In this thesis, we have reported our investigations on efficiently implementing algorithms on the recently proposed Optical Multi-Trees (OMULT) multi-processors interconnection architecture that uses both electronic and optical links among processors. We have investigated algorithms for matrix multiplication of two matrices of size n2 x n2 and two matrices of arbitrary size, the prefix-sum of a series and some fundamental computational geometry problems. We show that some common algorithms for computational geometry---finding the convex hull, the smallest enclosing box, the empirical cumulative distribution function and the all-nearest neighbor problems of n data points can be computed on the OMULT network in O(log n) time, compared to O(√n) algorithms on the Optical Transpose Interconnection System (OTIS) mesh for each of these problems. Finally we have implemented our algorithm for matrix multiplication using the SimJava simulation tool and feel that this is a convenient environment for testing such parallel algorithms.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .I85. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, page: 1751. Adviser: Subir Bandyopadhyay. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND FINANCING CONSTRAINTS IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY - THE CASE OF BANGLADESH

This paper examines the sensitivity of investment to available cash-stock, a measure for internal funds, for 192 listed non-financial firms of Bangladesh from 1992 to 2002. The empirical results show that smaller firms have greater financing constraints to investment than larger firms due to financial market imperfection and unequal access to external finance. We also find that financing constraints of investment by small firms are eased along with financial development. It is likely that financial development encourages efficiency of the financial market in Bangladesh, and hence decreases cash stock sensitivity of investment of small firms. Our finding demonstrates the importance of financial development for economic growth even in a developing country like Bangladesh.financing constraints, financial development, investment, Bangladesh

Mining Bad Credit Card Accounts from OLAP and OLTP

Credit card companies classify accounts as a good or bad based on historical data where a bad account may default on payments in the near future. If an account is classified as a bad account, then further action can be taken to investigate the actual nature of the account and take preventive actions. In addition, marking an account as "good" when it is actually bad, could lead to loss of revenue - and marking an account as "bad" when it is actually good, could lead to loss of business. However, detecting bad credit card accounts in real time from Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) data is challenging due to the volume of data needed to be processed to compute the risk factor. We propose an approach which precomputes and maintains the risk probability of an account based on historical transactions data from offline data or data from a data warehouse. Furthermore, using the most recent OLTP transactional data, risk probability is calculated for the latest transaction and combined with the previously computed risk probability from the data warehouse. If accumulated risk probability crosses a predefined threshold, then the account is treated as a bad account and is flagged for manual verification.Comment: Conference proceedings of ICCDA, 201

Catching Up to the Technology Frontier: The Dichotomy between Innovation and Imitation

Using data for 55 developing and developed countries, this research examines the roles of technology transfer, research intensity, educational attainment and the ability to absorb foreign technology in explaining cross-country differences in productivity growth. The results show that innovation is an important factor for growth in OECD countries whereas growth in developing countries is driven by imitation. Furthermore the interaction between educational attainment and the distance to the frontier is a significant determinant of growth in the overall sample.R&D; endogenous growth theory; absorptive capacity