Does inflation uncertainty affect output growth? Further evidence

Inflation (Finance)

Factor-adjustment costs at the industry level

An estimation of a dynamic cost function for the U.S. steel industry to investigate the cost of adjusting blue- and white-collar employment levels and to examine the importance of specification of the adjustment-cost function.Industries ; Steel industry and trade

Understanding nominal GNP targeting

Gross national product

Ludic Cyborgism

This article develops and critiques the concept of ludic cyborgism: the notion that playing videogames allows players a free, non-committal, yet strongly embodied pedagogical engagement with cyborg-being. The article argues that videogame play is a form of cyborgization—the act of becoming a metaphorical cyborg through participation in cybernetic feedback loops. Game Studies has so far neglected to deal with the historical and political implications of this cybernetic engagement, having chosen instead to focus on the supposedly educational and emancipatory aspects of the phenomenon. The history of videogames as simulations is intimately entangled with the development of training simulations in the military-entertainment complex of the late twentieth century United States (Crogan, 2011; Lenoir, 2000), and so what players are principally being taught through videogame play is how to operate military technologies like weapons targeting systems without critiquing the violent nature of those technologies. Moreover, the “cyborg-utopian” reading by game scholars of Donna Haraway’s (1985/1991) “Cyborg Manifesto,” which underlies most of the theoretical framework of ludic cyborgism, facilitates an uncritical understanding of cybernetic videogame play as an ideologically neutral phenomenon. If we wish to bring emancipatory movements into videogames, we should see the simulatory nature of videogames as an inherently conservative force with strong ties to military violence, imperialism, and economic injustice, meaning that these frameworks would require significant transformation in order to become neutral or progressive in any sense

Robustness Verification for Classifier Ensembles

We give a formal verification procedure that decides whether a classifier ensemble is robust against arbitrary randomized attacks. Such attacks consist of a set of deterministic attacks and a distribution over this set. The robustness-checking problem consists of assessing, given a set of classifiers and a labelled data set, whether there exists a randomized attack that induces a certain expected loss against all classifiers. We show the NP-hardness of the problem and provide an upper bound on the number of attacks that is sufficient to form an optimal randomized attack. These results provide an effective way to reason about the robustness of a classifier ensemble. We provide SMT and MILP encodings to compute optimal randomized attacks or prove that there is no attack inducing a certain expected loss. In the latter case, the classifier ensemble is provably robust. Our prototype implementation verifies multiple neural-network ensembles trained for image-classification tasks. The experimental results using the MILP encoding are promising both in terms of scalability and the general applicability of our verification procedure

A primer on cointegration with an application to money and income

Money theory ; Income ; Cointegration

Intertemporal substitution and the role of monetary policy: policy irrelevance once again

Recently Marini (1985) demonstrates that a policy rule with proportional feedback to the current money stock from disturbances dated t-2 or further in the past will be effective at stabilizing output in Barro's (1976) model. This paper questions the robustness and logical consistency of Marini's result. It demonstrates that Marini's claim is overturned when the length of private agents's horizons does not fall short of the length of the lags in the feedback rule, so that private agents correctly incorporate knowledge of the wealth they will receive from future transfers into their decision calculus. Marini assumes that private agents ignore a foreseeable source of change in future money balances. This questionable feature of his analysis is crucial to the policy effectiveness results he obtains.Monetary policy

The method of moments ratio estimator for the tail shape parameter

The so-called Hill estimator for the shape parameter of the tail distribution is known to be downwardly biased. The Hill estimator is a moment estimator, based on the first conditional moment of the highest logarithmically transformed data. We propose a new estimator for the tail index based on the ratio of the second to the first conditional moment. This estimator has a smaller bias than the Hill estimator. We provide simulation results that demonstrate a sizable reduction in bias when a is large, while the MSE is moderated as well. The new estimator is applied to stock return data in order to resolve a long standing issue in economics

On the frequency of large stock returns: putting booms and busts into perspective

Numerous articles have investigated the distribution of share prices, and find that the yields are leptokurtic. There is still controversy about the amount of leptokurtosis, and hence about the most appropriate distribution to use in modeling returns. This controversy has proven hard to resole, as the alternatives are non-nested. We propose to employ extreme value theory focusing exclusively on the larger observations, in order to assess the leptokurtosis within a unified framework. This enables one to generate robust probabilities on large changes, which put the recent stock market swings into historical perspective.Stock market ; Stock - Prices