Examples of quasi-hyperbolic dynamical systems with slow decay of correlations

We give examples of quasi-hyperbolic dynamical systems with the following properties : polynomial decay of correlations, convergence in law toward a non gaussian law of the ergodic sums (divided by $n^{3/4}$) associated to non degenerated regular functions

Candidate Entry, Screening, and the Political Budget Cycle

We investigate whether relevant private information about citizens’ competence in political office can be credibly revealed by their entry and campaign expenditure decisions, as opposed to choice of policy once in office. We find that this depends on whether voters and candidates have common or conflicting interests ; only in the former case can entry be revealing in equilibrium. We apply these results to Rogoff’s (1990) model of the political budget cycle, allowing for candidate entry, as well as elections : as interests are common, low-ability candidates are screened out at the entry stage, and so there is no signaling via fiscal policy (i.e. no “political budget cycle”). In a variant of the Rogoff model where citizens differ in honesty, rather than ability, interests are conflicting, and so the political budget cycle can persist in equilibrium.Asymmetric Information ; Citizen-Candidate ; Representative Democracy ; Signaling Games ; Political Budget Cycles

Ridgelet-based signature for natural image classification

This paper presents an approach to grouping natural scenes into (semantically) meaningful categories. The proposed approach exploits the statistics of natural scenes to define relevant image categories. A ridgelet-based signature is used to represent images. This signature is used by a support vector classifier that is well designed to support high dimensional features, resulting in an effective recognition system. As an illustration of the potential of the approach several experiments of binary classifications (e.g. city/landscape or indoor/outdoor) are conducted on databases of natural scenes

Do Elections Always Motivate Incumbents?.

This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between office-holders and the electorate, where the office-holder is initially uninformed about herability (following Holmström, 1999). If office-holder effort and ability interact in the "production function" that determines performance in office, then an office-holder has an incentive to experiment, i.e. raise effort so that performance becomes a more accurate signal of her ability.ELECTIONS ; BUSINESS CYCLES ; PRODUCTION

GEOS RR Lyr survey: FM Del is indeed a cepheid

Though FM Del has been considered as a RR Lyr star by Preston et al. in 1959 (following discovery by Huth, 1957), Huth (1960) eventually changed his mind by showing that it is in fact a cepheid of W Vir type of period of 3.95452 days. Various authors since then have considered it as a cepheid indeed, with the exception of Wils et al. (2006) who list this star in their RR Lyr catalog with a period of 0.79688 days. On this basis, FM Del was added to Tarot RR Lyr program. We present here these observations which confirm the cepheid type.Comment: Published in the GEOS circulars (Groupe Europeen d'Observations Stellaires, http://geos.upv.es/