3,579 research outputs found
Expected Benefits of Voting and Voter Turnout
This empirical study seeks to identify key aggregate-level economic and non-economic determinants of the expected benefits from voting and hence aggregate voter turnout. A unique dimension of this study is the hypothesis that PAC (political action committee) election campaign contributions, e.g., to U.S. Senate races, may reduce the expected benefits of voting and hence voter turnout because the greater the growth of real PAC contributions, the greater the extent to which eligible voters may become concerned that these contributions lead to PAC political influence over elected officials. Indeed, this study finds for the period 1960-2000 that the voter participation rate has been negatively impacted by the growth in real PAC contributions to Senate election campaigns. Another interesting finding is that voter turnout is directly/positively related to strong public approval or strong public disapproval of the incumbent President. This study also finds that the voter participation rate has been positively impacted by the opportunity to vote in Presidential elections, the Vietnam War, a “too slowly” growing real GDP, and inflation rates when they exceed five percent per annum. Furthermore, this study also finds the voter participation rate to have been negatively impacted by the public’s general dissatisfaction with government.
The cyclicality of worker flows: new evidence from the SIPP
Drawing on CPS data, the authors show that total monthly job loss and hiring among U.S. workers, as well as job loss hazard rates, are strongly countercyclical, while job finding hazard rates are strongly procyclical. They also find that total job loss and job loss hazard rates lead the business cycle, while total hiring and job finding rates trail the cycle. In the current paper the authors use information from the Survey on Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to reevaluate these findings. SIPP data are used to construct new longitudinally consistent gross flow series for U.S. workers, covering 1983-2003. The results strongly validate the authors' findings, with two important exceptions: (1) total hiring leads the cycle in the SIPP data, and (2) the job loss rate is substantially more volatile than the job finding rate at business cycle frequencies.
Computational Difficulty of Global Variations in the Density Matrix Renormalization Group
The density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) approach is arguably the most
successful method to numerically find ground states of quantum spin chains. It
amounts to iteratively locally optimizing matrix-product states, aiming at
better and better approximating the true ground state. To date, both a proof of
convergence to the globally best approximation and an assessment of its
complexity are lacking. Here we establish a result on the computational
complexity of an approximation with matrix-product states: The surprising
result is that when one globally optimizes over several sites of local
Hamiltonians, avoiding local optima, one encounters in the worst case a
computationally difficult NP-hard problem (hard even in approximation). The
proof exploits a novel way of relating it to binary quadratic programming. We
discuss intriguing ramifications on the difficulty of describing quantum
many-body systems.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, RevTeX, final versio
Turbulence and unemployment in a job matching model
According to Ljungqvist and Sargent (1998), high European unemployment since the 1980s can be explained by a rise in economic turbulence, leading to greater numbers of unemployed workers with obsolete skills. These workers refuse new jobs due to high unemployment benefits. In this paper we reassess the turbulence-unemployment relationship using a matching model with endogenous job destruction. In our model, higher turbulence reduces the incentives of employed workers to leave their jobs. If turbulence has only a tiny effect on the skills of workers experiencing endogenous separation, then the results of Lungqvist and Sargent (1998, 2004) are reversed, and higher turbulence leads to a reduction in unemployment. Thus, changes in turbulence cannot provide an explanation for European unemployment that reconciles the incentives of both unemployed and employed workers.Skill loss, European unemployment puzzle
Contract-Theoretic Approaches to Wages and Displacement
This paper develops a theoretical framework for analyzing contracting imperfections in long-term employment relationships. We focus chiefly on limited enforceability and limited worker liquidity. Inefficient severance of employment relationships, payment of efficiency wages, the relative responses of wages and employment to business cycle shocks, and the propagation of these shocks are linked to the nature of contracting imperfections.
Finding Multiple New Optimal Locations in a Road Network
We study the problem of optimal location querying for location based services
in road networks, which aims to find locations for new servers or facilities.
The existing optimal solutions on this problem consider only the cases with one
new server. When two or more new servers are to be set up, the problem with
minmax cost criteria, MinMax, becomes NP-hard. In this work we identify some
useful properties about the potential locations for the new servers, from which
we derive a novel algorithm for MinMax, and show that it is efficient when the
number of new servers is small. When the number of new servers is large, we
propose an efficient 3-approximate algorithm. We verify with experiments on
real road networks that our solutions are effective and attains significantly
better result quality compared to the existing greedy algorithms
NP-hardness of the cluster minimization problem revisited
The computational complexity of the "cluster minimization problem" is
revisited [L. T. Wille and J. Vennik, J. Phys. A 18, L419 (1985)]. It is argued
that the original NP-hardness proof does not apply to pairwise potentials of
physical interest, such as those that depend on the geometric distance between
the particles. A geometric analog of the original problem is formulated, and a
new proof for such potentials is provided by polynomial time transformation
from the independent set problem for unit disk graphs. Limitations of this
formulation are pointed out, and new subproblems that bear more direct
consequences to the numerical study of clusters are suggested.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, accepted to J. Phys. A: Math. and Ge
On the complexity of the multiple stack TSP, kSTSP
The multiple Stack Travelling Salesman Problem, STSP, deals with the collect
and the deliverance of n commodities in two distinct cities. The two cities are
represented by means of two edge-valued graphs (G1,d2) and (G2,d2). During the
pick-up tour, the commodities are stored into a container whose rows are
subject to LIFO constraints. As a generalisation of standard TSP, the problem
obviously is NP-hard; nevertheless, one could wonder about what combinatorial
structure of STSP does the most impact its complexity: the arrangement of the
commodities into the container, or the tours themselves? The answer is not
clear. First, given a pair (T1,T2) of pick-up and delivery tours, it is
polynomial to decide whether these tours are or not compatible. Second, for a
given arrangement of the commodities into the k rows of the container, the
optimum pick-up and delivery tours w.r.t. this arrangement can be computed
within a time that is polynomial in n, but exponential in k. Finally, we
provide instances on which a tour that is optimum for one of three distances
d1, d2 or d1+d2 lead to solutions of STSP that are arbitrarily far to the
optimum STSP
Logarithmic corrections in the free energy of monomer-dimer model on plane lattices with free boundaries
Using exact computations we study the classical hard-core monomer-dimer
models on m x n plane lattice strips with free boundaries. For an arbitrary
number v of monomers (or vacancies), we found a logarithmic correction term in
the finite-size correction of the free energy. The coefficient of the
logarithmic correction term depends on the number of monomers present (v) and
the parity of the width n of the lattice strip: the coefficient equals to v
when n is odd, and v/2 when n is even. The results are generalizations of the
previous results for a single monomer in an otherwise fully packed lattice of
dimers.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
- …