ON THE USER COST AND HOMEOWNERSHIP

This paper studies the determinants of housing tenure choice and the differences in the cost of housing services across households in an overlapping generations model with household-specific uninsurable earnings risk and housing prices that vary over time. We model houses as illiquid assets that provide collateral for loans. To analyze the impact of preferential housing taxation on the tenure choice, we consider a tax system that mimics that of the U.S. economy in a stylized way. We find that a mixture of idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty, house price risk, down payments and transaction costs are needed for the model to deliver life cycle patterns of homeownership and portfolio composition similar to those found in the data. Through simulations, we also show that a rental equivalence approach (relative to a user cost approach) overestimates the mean unit cost of housing by approximately 3 percent.

Consumption and Aggregate Constraints: International Evidence

This paper documents that region-level consumption exhibits excess sensitivity to lagged income in Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and West Germany. However, region-specific idiosyncratic) consumption exhibits substantially less sensitivity to lagged region-specific income. Also, excess sensitivity is inversely related to standard measures of openness and credit market integration and for most countries, it has decreased over time. These findings are consistent with those reported in Ostergaard, Sorensen & Yosha (2002) for U.S. state-level and Canadian province-level data, and provide empirical support for the hypothesis that closed-economy constraints may partly be responsible for the excess sensitivity phenomenon in aggregate data.Permanent Income Hypothesis, Consumption, Regional Data, Openness

Orthogonal parallel MCMC methods for sampling and optimization

Monte Carlo (MC) methods are widely used for Bayesian inference and optimization in statistics, signal processing and machine learning. A well-known class of MC methods are Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms. In order to foster better exploration of the state space, specially in high-dimensional applications, several schemes employing multiple parallel MCMC chains have been recently introduced. In this work, we describe a novel parallel interacting MCMC scheme, called {\it orthogonal MCMC} (O-MCMC), where a set of "vertical" parallel MCMC chains share information using some "horizontal" MCMC techniques working on the entire population of current states. More specifically, the vertical chains are led by random-walk proposals, whereas the horizontal MCMC techniques employ independent proposals, thus allowing an efficient combination of global exploration and local approximation. The interaction is contained in these horizontal iterations. Within the analysis of different implementations of O-MCMC, novel schemes in order to reduce the overall computational cost of parallel multiple try Metropolis (MTM) chains are also presented. Furthermore, a modified version of O-MCMC for optimization is provided by considering parallel simulated annealing (SA) algorithms. Numerical results show the advantages of the proposed sampling scheme in terms of efficiency in the estimation, as well as robustness in terms of independence with respect to initial values and the choice of the parameters

Zastosowanie programu gwarancji dla zdrowia jamy ustnej w opiece nad kobietą w ciąży w rodzinnym centrum zdrowia w Concepción, Chile, w latach 2014–2015

Indexación: Scopus.Background. Oral health plays a crucial role in general health, quality of life and well-being of pregnant women and their newborns. In Chile, pregnant women have dental care guaranteed by law. However, due to the lack of previous epidemiological studies on the benefits of this guarantee, it is necessary to describe this situation and evaluate the need to change the methods of providing dental services. Objectives. The objective of this study was to describe the pattern of providing dental benefits resulting from the Explicit Health Guarantee – Integral Oral Health in Pregnant Women (GES-SOIE) program to pregnant women attending the Juan Soto Fernández Family Health Center, Concepción, Chile, in 2014–2015. Material and methods. A cross-sectional study of the electronic dental records of patients admitted to GES-SOIE was conducted. The variables studied were sociodemographic data, dental chair hours, non-attendance, treatment completion, and the type of referral to secondary healthcare (SHC). Results. Of 233 pregnant women, 65.2% were registered for non-attendance, 21.2% required referral to SHC and 76.4% completed their treatment. When performing logistic regression, it was found that for each non-attendance the chance of not completing the treatment increased 1.4 times. Conclusions. The level of non-attendance and opting out of the treatment in pregnant women is high, which hinders the proper functioning and effectiveness of GES-SOIE. © 2018 by Wroclaw Medical University and Polish Dental Society.http://www.dmp.umed.wroc.pl/en/article/2018/55/2/179

Durables, Nondurables, Down Payments and Consumption Excesses

We examine a model that generalizes the standard buffer-stock model of savings to accommodate durables, nondurables and a collateralized liquidity constraint, with and without adjustment costs in the durables market. Since there is no known analytical solution to the model, we solve it numerically. We find that nondurable consumption becomes more volatile as down payment requirements decrease at the individual and at the aggregate level. Moreover, for plausible parameter values the model can explain the excess smoothness and excess sensitivity observed in the U.S. economy. The results follow from a gradual adjustment of consumption to permanent income shocks in an attempt by agents to spread out the burden of down payments over time.Buffer Stock, Consumption, Durable Goods

Conception of a simulator for a TEL system in orthopaedic surgery.

Within a research project whose aim is to promote the learning of percutaneous operation in orthopedic surgery, we investigate some representation models of empirical, deductive, and perceptivo-gestural knowledge. From these models, we design an TEL system (Tecnological Enhaced Learning) This project belongs to a multidisciplinary field including computer, orthopedic surgery, medical imaging, didactic and cognitive sciences. The article presents the design principles of TEL with a particular interest in the development of a simulator. This simulator allows a virtual exercise interacting with the learner in visual, temporal and haptic dimension

Current-induced spin polarization in InGaAs and GaAs epilayers with varying doping densities

The current-induced spin polarization and momentum-dependent spin-orbit field were measured in In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As epilayers with varying indium concentrations and silicon doping densities. Samples with higher indium concentrations and carrier concentrations and lower mobilities were found to have larger electrical spin generation efficiencies. Furthermore, current-induced spin polarization was detected in GaAs epilayers despite the absence of measurable spin-orbit fields, indicating that the extrinsic contributions to the spin polarization mechanism must be considered. Theoretical calculations based on a model that includes extrinsic contributions to the spin dephasing and the spin Hall effect, in addition to the intrinsic Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling, are found to qualitatively agree with the experimental results.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure