5,644 research outputs found
When is capital enough to get female microenterprises growing? Evidence from a randomized experiment in Ghana
Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firms should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not effect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female-owned microenterprises in urban Ghana. Our findings cast doubt on the ability of capital alone to stimulate the growth of female microenterprises. First, while the average treatment effects of the in-kind grants are large and positive for both males and females, the gain in profits is almost zero for women with initial profits below the median, suggesting that capital alone is not enough to grow subsistence enterprises owned by women. Second, for women we strongly reject equality of the cash and in-kind grants;
only in-kind grants lead to growth in business profits. The results for men also suggest a lower impact of cash, but differences between cash and in-kind grants are less robust. The difference in the effects of cash and in-kind grants is associated more with a lack of self-control than with external pressure. As a result, the manner in which funding is provided affects microenterprise growth
The Dutch Energy Markets in 2009: Target Scenario β Obstacles β Measures
Competition on the wholesale gas market is still in its early stages. Measures have already been put in place to eliminate some shortcomings, these are the new market model and the market-based balancing system. Both of these are the result of the Gas Letter from the Minister and the underlying TTF advice from the NMa. These measures facilitate a development towards more competition. But for a better functioning market the commitment of all market participants is required. Gasterra, the exclusive marketer of Groningen gas, has a key responsibility here. Energy suppliers should be able to obtain gas on the TTF in the required periods and quantities. Otherwise the development of the wholesale gas market will just be stalled further.Monitoring, electricity, gas, competition, infrastructure
The One-Loop Matter Bispectrum in the Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structures
Given the importance of future large scale structure surveys for delivering
new cosmological information, it is crucial to reliably predict their
observables. The Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structures (EFTofLSS)
provides a manifestly convergent perturbative scheme to compute the clustering
of dark matter in the weakly nonlinear regime in an expansion in , where is the wavenumber of interest and is the
wavenumber associated to the nonlinear scale. It has been recently shown that
the EFTofLSS matches to level the dark matter power spectrum at redshift
zero up to Mpc and Mpc at one
and two loops respectively, using only one counterterm that is fit to data.
Similar results have been obtained for the momentum power spectrum at one loop.
This is a remarkable improvement with respect to former analytical techniques.
Here we study the prediction for the equal-time dark matter bispectrum at one
loop. We find that at this order it is sufficient to consider the same
counterterm that was measured in the power spectrum. Without any remaining free
parameter, and in a cosmology for which is smaller than in the
previously considered cases (), we find that the prediction from
the EFTofLSS agrees very well with -body simulations up to Mpc, given the accuracy of the measurements, which is of order a few
percent at the highest 's of interest. While the fit is very good on average
up to Mpc, the fit performs slightly worse on
equilateral configurations, in agreement with expectations that for a given
maximum , equilateral triangles are the most nonlinear.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures; v2: JCAP published version, improved numerical
data, added explanation and clarification
When is capital enough to get female microenterprises growing? Evidence from a randomized experiment in Ghana
Standard models of investment predict that credit-constrained firmd should grow rapidly when given additional capital, and that how this capital is provided should not affect decisions to invest in the business or consume the capital. We randomly gave cash and in-kind grants to male- and female- owned microenterprises in urban Ghana. Our findings cast doubt on the ability of caoital alone to stimulate the growth of female microenterprises. First, while the average treatment effects of the in-kind grants are large and positive for both males and females, the gain in profits is almost zerp fpr women with itital profits below the median, suggesting that capital alone is not enough to grow subsistence enterprises owned by women. Second, for women we strongly reject equality of the case and in-kind grants; only in-kind grants lead to growth in business profits. The results for men also suggest a lower impact of cash, but differences between cash and in-kind grants is assoicated more with a lack of self-control than with external pressure. As a result, the manner in which funding is provided affects microenterprise growth.microenterprises; ghana; Conditionality; Asset intergration
The effects of halo alignment and shape on the clustering of galaxies
We investigate the effects of halo shape and its alignment with larger scale
structure on the galaxy correlation function. We base our analysis on the
galaxy formation models of Guo et al., run on the Millennium Simulations. We
quantify the importance of these effects by randomizing the angular positions
of satellite galaxies within haloes, either coherently or individually, while
keeping the distance to their respective central galaxies fixed. We find that
the effect of disrupting the alignment with larger scale structure is a ~2 per
cent decrease in the galaxy correlation function around r=1.8 Mpc/h. We find
that sphericalizing the ellipsoidal distributions of galaxies within haloes
decreases the correlation function by up to 20 per cent for r<1 Mpc/h and
increases it slightly at somewhat larger radii. Similar results apply to power
spectra and redshift-space correlation functions. Models based on the Halo
Occupation Distribution, which place galaxies spherically within haloes
according to a mean radial profile, will therefore significantly underestimate
the clustering on sub-Mpc scales. In addition, we find that halo assembly bias,
in particular the dependence of clustering on halo shape, propagates to the
clustering of galaxies. We predict that this aspect of assembly bias should be
observable through the use of extensive group catalogues.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS. Minor changes
relative to v1. Note: this is an revised and considerably extended
resubmission of http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.4888; please refer to the current
version rather than the old on
Convolutional Patch Networks with Spatial Prior for Road Detection and Urban Scene Understanding
Classifying single image patches is important in many different applications,
such as road detection or scene understanding. In this paper, we present
convolutional patch networks, which are convolutional networks learned to
distinguish different image patches and which can be used for pixel-wise
labeling. We also show how to incorporate spatial information of the patch as
an input to the network, which allows for learning spatial priors for certain
categories jointly with an appearance model. In particular, we focus on road
detection and urban scene understanding, two application areas where we are
able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the KITTI as well as on the
LabelMeFacade dataset.
Furthermore, our paper offers a guideline for people working in the area and
desperately wandering through all the painstaking details that render training
CNs on image patches extremely difficult.Comment: VISAPP 2015 pape
- β¦