61,324 research outputs found
A comparative study of five Dutch disease models: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences at Massey University
During the past decade, the sudden and sharp increases in oil prices, coupled with the discovery and extraction of oil in the North Sea, have contributed considerable interest in the macroeconomic problems of oil-exporting countries. It is well known that a domestic oil discovery can give rise to wealth effects that cause a squeeze in the traded goods sector of an open economy. The decline of the manufacturing sector following an oil discovery is termed the 'Dutch disease', and has been investigated in many recent studies which embody a general equilibrium model. This is detailed in Chapter One where the development of Dutch disease literature is discussed.
Despite the development of a wide range of the Dutch disease models, There is still a lack of consensus regarding the analysis on the issue of Dutch disease. This thesis aims to study a number of different models of the Dutch disease by focussing on the following considerations:
i) the underlying theoretical framework with reference to some main-stream economic theories, such as those based on Trade theory, Neoclassical and Keynesian traditions;
ii) the assumptions made within each framework regarding monetary and supply-side conditions;
iii) analysis of the various effects of exogenous disturbances on the economy; and
iv) evaluation of the relationship between the underlying assumptions and the conclusions drawn from the model analysis.
Chapter Two outlines the classification of the Dutch disease model into three broad categories. These categories distinguish between the types of macroeconomic effects which give rise to the Dutch disease phenomenon. Detailed algebraic specification of each model, using standard notations developed for this thesis, along with the assumptions made are described in Chapter Three. Chapter Four is devoted to a comparative study of the models. In each section, two models are compared to draw out the differences in their assumptions and approach, and to show how these differences can affect their final conclusions about the effect of various exogenous disturbances. A summary of the main results of the comparative study is given in
Chapter Five. Some points for further research are also briefly discussed
Reducing Model Complexity for DNN Based Large-Scale Audio Classification
Audio classification is the task of identifying the sound categories that are
associated with a given audio signal. This paper presents an investigation on
large-scale audio classification based on the recently released AudioSet
database. AudioSet comprises 2 millions of audio samples from YouTube, which
are human-annotated with 527 sound category labels. Audio classification
experiments with the balanced training set and the evaluation set of AudioSet
are carried out by applying different types of neural network models. The
classification performance and the model complexity of these models are
compared and analyzed. While the CNN models show better performance than MLP
and RNN, its model complexity is relatively high and undesirable for practical
use. We propose two different strategies that aim at constructing
low-dimensional embedding feature extractors and hence reducing the number of
model parameters. It is shown that the simplified CNN model has only 1/22 model
parameters of the original model, with only a slight degradation of
performance.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201
A Corpus of Sentence-level Revisions in Academic Writing: A Step towards Understanding Statement Strength in Communication
The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on
the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the
media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected
because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to
understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to
distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is
understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently
relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on
strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level
revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our
annotation efforts for this task.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 2014 (short paper
Experimental investigation on cold-formed steel beams under pure bending
This paper presents the flexural behaviour of cold-formed double lipped channels beams under pure bending action. Two channel sections are bolted back-to-back to form an I-shape structural beam member. A series of six experiment tests were carried out on beam specimens DC200 and DC250, each with 200 mm depth and 250 mm depth respectively. The thickness of beam section is 2 mm and the design yield strength is 350 N/mm2. All beams failed at local buckling at top-flange due to lateral instability of the cold-formed steel structural members. The moment resistance for DC200 is 17.87 kNm and DC250 is 31.53 kNm. The experimental results are compared to theoretical resistance prediction based on British Standard and Eurocode. The comparison showed that the experimental moment capacity is lower than the theoretical bending moment resistance but higher than theoretical buckling moment resistance from Eurocode. This showed that a better agreement is achieved between experimental data and Eurocode buckling moment resistance for cold-formed steel beam under pure bending
The Impacts of Fees and Taxes on Choices of Development Timing and Capital Intensity
This article compares the effects of various fiscal policies on choices of development timing and capital intensity when rents on housing follow geometric Brownian motion with those when rents follow arithmetic Brownian motion. These policy instruments include fees on capital, housing, and land, and taxes on urban income, and properties both before and after development. Regardless of the motion of rents, when one choice is fixed, the effects of these policy instruments on the other choice are qualitatively the same. When the two choices are determined endogenously, although these policy instruments exhibit the same qualitative effect on the choice of development timing, they may exhibit different effects on the choice of capital intensity if rents on housing follow different types of motions.Capital intensity, Development Timing, Fees, Taxation, Real Options, International Development, G13, H21, H23, R52,
Shrewd Selection Speeds Surfing: Use Smart EXP3!
In this paper, we explore the use of multi-armed bandit online learning
techniques to solve distributed resource selection problems. As an example, we
focus on the problem of network selection. Mobile devices often have several
wireless networks at their disposal. While choosing the right network is vital
for good performance, a decentralized solution remains a challenge. The
impressive theoretical properties of multi-armed bandit algorithms, like EXP3,
suggest that it should work well for this type of problem. Yet, its real-word
performance lags far behind. The main reasons are the hidden cost of switching
networks and its slow rate of convergence. We propose Smart EXP3, a novel
bandit-style algorithm that (a) retains the good theoretical properties of
EXP3, (b) bounds the number of switches, and (c) yields significantly better
performance in practice. We evaluate Smart EXP3 using simulations, controlled
experiments, and real-world experiments. Results show that it stabilizes at the
optimal state, achieves fairness among devices and gracefully deals with
transient behaviors. In real world experiments, it can achieve 18% faster
download over alternate strategies. We conclude that multi-armed bandit
algorithms can play an important role in distributed resource selection
problems, when practical concerns, such as switching costs and convergence
time, are addressed.Comment: Full pape
Exact Moderate Deviation Asymptotics in Streaming Data Transmission
In this paper, a streaming transmission setup is considered where an encoder
observes a new message in the beginning of each block and a decoder
sequentially decodes each message after a delay of blocks. In this
streaming setup, the fundamental interplay between the coding rate, the error
probability, and the blocklength in the moderate deviations regime is studied.
For output symmetric channels, the moderate deviations constant is shown to
improve over the block coding or non-streaming setup by exactly a factor of
for a certain range of moderate deviations scalings. For the converse proof, a
more powerful decoder to which some extra information is fedforward is assumed.
The error probability is bounded first for an auxiliary channel and this result
is translated back to the original channel by using a newly developed
change-of-measure lemma, where the speed of decay of the remainder term in the
exponent is carefully characterized. For the achievability proof, a known
coding technique that involves a joint encoding and decoding of fresh and past
messages is applied with some manipulations in the error analysis.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on
Information Theor
A variation of McShane's identity for 2-bridge links
We give a variation of McShane's identity, which describes the cusp shape of
a hyperbolic 2-bridge link in terms of the complex translation lengths of
simple loops on the bridge sphere. We also explicitly determine the set of end
invariants of -characters of the once-punctured torus
corresponding to the holonomy representations of the complete hyperbolic
structures of 2-bridge link complements.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figure
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