The Real Exchange Rate and Fiscal Policy During the Gold Standard PeriodEvidence from the United States and Great Britain

We study the determinants of the dollar/pound real exchange rate from 1879 to 1914 focusing on the role of fiscal policy. We present a simple dynamic model of the real exchange rate to frame our analysis. The econometric results are based upon the decomposition of the sources of the innovation of the real exchange rate drawn from a structural vector autoregression model. We find little evidence that changes in tariffs and government spending affected the real exchange rate. There is some stronger empirical evidence that shocks to deficits were associated with the fluctuations in the real exchange rate.

Estimating the Price Elasticity of Demand for Water with Quasi Experimental Methods

There is a growing recognition in both the professional and popular literatures that water scarcity is a key policy issue that is especially important in arid, urban settings with the prospects for shortfalls in water availability due to the effects of climate change. Those evaluating these types of water problems usually conclude prices must be reformed so that incentives facing water users change to reflect this scarcity. Demand functions provide the basic economic relationships required to understand how water use will respond to such changes. This paper proposes a new method for estimating the price elasticity of demand that meets policy needs and can accommodate the presence of increasing block pricing structures.Water Demand Elasticity, Quasi Experiment, Climate Change, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The Social and Emotional Impact of Videogames in the Classroom: A Meta-Synthesis

As videogames become more and more prevalent in today’s culture, the effects of gameplay on child development has grown as a concern for parents, educators, and researchers. The aim of this paper is to explore the possible social and emotional impacts of including videogames in the classroom. This paper specifically investigated the impact of videogame play on student self-esteem, social skills, and emotional well-being. This was done through a meta-synthesis of the existing literature on the social and emotional aspects of videogame play. Results indicate that there are likely both positive and negative impacts from gameplay but there is a need for more studies to be done. Research findings were often contradictory and based on data collection instruments that are vulnerable to participant interpretation and therefore less reliable than other methods of collecting data

User authentication and remote execution across administrative domains

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-77).(cont.) selectively delegates authority to processes running on remote machines that need to access other resources. The delegation mechanism lets users incrementally construct trust policies for remote machines. Measurements of the system demonstrate that the modularity of REX's architecture does not come at the cost of performance.A challenge in today's Internet is providing easy collaboration across administrative boundaries. Using and sharing resources between individuals in different administrative domains should be just as easy and secure as sharing them within a single domain. This thesis presents a new authentication service and a new remote login and execution utility that address this challenge. The authentication service contributes a new design point in the space of user authentication systems. The system provides the flexibility to create cross-domain groups in the context of a global, network file system using a familiar, intuitive interface for sharing files that is similar to local access control mechanisms. The system trades off freshness for availability by pre-fetching and caching remote users and groups defined in other administrative domains, so the file server can make authorization decisions at file-access time using only local information. The system offers limited privacy for group lists and has all-or-nothing delegation to other administrative domains via nested groups. Experiments demonstrate that the authentication server scales to groups with tens of thousands of members. REX contributes a new architecture for remote execution that offers extensibility and security. To achieve extensibility, REX bases much of its functionality on a single new abstraction-emulated file descriptor passing across machines. This abstraction is powerful enough for users to extend REX's functionality in many ways without changing the core software or protocol. REX addresses security in two ways. First, the implementation internally leverages file descriptor passing to split the server into several smaller programs, reducing both privileged and remotely exploitable code. Second, REXby Michael Kaminsky.Ph.D

Array-Based Statistical Analysis of the MK-3 Authenticated Encryption Scheme

Authenticated encryption (AE) schemes are symmetric key cryptographic methods that support confidentiality, integrity and source authentication. There are many AE algorithms in existence today, in part thanks to the CAESAR competition for authenticated encryption, which is in its final stage. In our previous work we introduced a novel AE algorithm MK-3 (not part of the CAESAR competition), which is based on the duplex sponge construction and it is using novel large 16×16 AES-like S-boxes. Unlike most AE schemes, MK-3 scheme provides additional customization features for users who desire unique solutions. This makes it well suited for government and military applications. In this paper, we develop a new array- based statistical analysis approach to evaluate randomness of cryptographic primitives and show its effectiveness in the analysis of MK-3. One of the strengths of this method is that it focuses on the randomness of cryptographic primitive function rather than only on the randomness of the outpu