Understanding international prices: customers as capital

This paper develops a theory of pricing-to-market driven by marketing and bargaining frictions. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. In our model, producers search and form long-lasting relations with their customers, and marketing helps overcome the search frictions involved in forming such matches. In the context of international business cycle patterns, the model accounts for observations that are puzzles for a large class of theories: (i) pricing-to-market, (ii) positive correlation of aggregate real export and import prices, (iii) excess volatility of the real exchange rate over the terms of trade, and (iv) low short-run and high long-run price elasticity of international trade flows. The behavior of quantities is shown to be on par with standard international business cycle theories that, in contrast to our model, assume low intrinsic elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods.Business cycles ; Prices ; International business enterprises

Pricing to Market in Business Cycle Models

This paper evaluates the performance of leading micro-founded pricing-to-market frictions vis-a-vis a set of robust stylized facts about international prices. In order to make that evaluation meaningful, we embed each friction into a unified IRBC framework and parameterize the models in a uniform way. Our goal is to evaluate the broad-based applicability of these frictions for policy-oriented DSGE modeling by documenting their strengths and weaknesses. We make three points: (i) the mechanisms generating pricing to market are not always neutral to business cycle dynamics of quantities, (ii) some mechanisms require producer markups at least 50% to account for the full range of estimates of the empirical exchange rate pass-through to export prices of 35%-50%, (iii) some frictions crucially depend on a particular driver of uncertainty in the underlying model.pricing to market, law of one price, incomplete pass-through, international correlations, international business cycle, sticky prices, pass-through coefficient

\u27Improvement the Order of the Age\u27: Historic Advertising, Consumer Choice, and Identity in 19th Century Roxbury, Massachusetts

During the mid-to-late 19th century, Roxbury, Massachusetts experienced a dramatic change from a rural farming area to a vibrant, working-class, and predominantly-immigrant urban community. This new demographic bloomed during America’s industrial age, a time in which hundreds of new mass-produced goods flooded consumer markets. This thesis explores the relationship between working-class consumption patterns and historic advertising in 19th-century Roxbury, Massachusetts. It assesses the significance of advertising within households and the community by comparing advertisements from the Roxbury Gazette and South End Advertiser with archaeological material from the Tremont Street and Elmwood Court Housing sites, excavated in the late 1970s, to determine the degree of correlation between the two sources. Separately, the archaeological and advertising materials highlight different facets of daily life for the residents of this neighborhood. When combined, however, these two distinct data sets provide a more holistic snapshot of household life and consumer choice. Specifically, I examine the relationship between advertisers and consumers and how tangible goods served as a medium of communication for values, social expectations, and individual and group identities. Ultimately, this study found that there is little direct overlap between the material record from the Southwest Corridor excavations and the historic Roxbury Gazette advertisements. The most prevalent types of advertisements from an 1861-1898 Roxbury Gazette sample largely did not overlap with the highest artifact type concentrations from the Southwest Corridor excavations. This disconnect may be the result of internal factors, including lack of purchases or extended use lives for certain objects. External factors for disconnect include archaeological deposition patterns, as well as the ways in which the archaeological and advertising data is categorized for analysis. Most importantly, this study emphasizes that the lives of Tremont Street and Elmwood Court’s residents cannot be neatly summed up by the materials they discarded. Only through the consideration of material culture, documentary resources, and other historic information can we begin to understand the experiences these individuals endured

Higher order moments dynamics for some multimode quantum master equations

We derive Heisenberg equations for arbitrary high order moments of creation and annihilation operators in the case of the quantum master equation with a multimode generator which is quadratic in creation and annihilation operators and obtain their solutions. Based on them we also derive similar equations for the case of the quantum master equation, which occur after averaging the dynamics with a quadratic generator with respect to the classical Poisson process. This allows us to show that dynamics of arbitrary finite-order moments of creation and annihilation operators is fully defined by finite number of linear differential equations in this case

Olfaction Contributes to Pelagic Navigation in a Coastal Shark.

How animals navigate the constantly moving and visually uniform pelagic realm, often along straight paths between distant sites, is an enduring mystery. The mechanisms enabling pelagic navigation in cartilaginous fishes are particularly understudied. We used shoreward navigation by leopard sharks (Triakis semifasciata) as a model system to test whether olfaction contributes to pelagic navigation. Leopard sharks were captured alongshore, transported 9 km offshore, released, and acoustically tracked for approximately 4 h each until the transmitter released. Eleven sharks were rendered anosmic (nares occluded with cotton wool soaked in petroleum jelly); fifteen were sham controls. Mean swimming depth was 28.7 m. On average, tracks of control sharks ended 62.6% closer to shore, following relatively straight paths that were significantly directed over spatial scales exceeding 1600 m. In contrast, tracks of anosmic sharks ended 37.2% closer to shore, following significantly more tortuous paths that approximated correlated random walks. These results held after swimming paths were adjusted for current drift. This is the first study to demonstrate experimentally that olfaction contributes to pelagic navigation in sharks, likely mediated by chemical gradients as has been hypothesized for birds. Given the similarities between the fluid three-dimensional chemical atmosphere and ocean, further research comparing swimming and flying animals may lead to a unifying paradigm explaining their extraordinary navigational abilities

Pricing to Market in Business Cycle Models

This paper evaluates the performance of leading micro-founded pricing-to-market frictions vis-a-vis a set of robust stylized facts about international prices. In order to make that evaluation meaningful, we embed each friction into a unified IRBC framework and parameterize the models in a uniform way. Our goal is to evaluate the broad-based applicability of these frictions for policy-oriented DSGE modeling by documenting their strengths and weaknesses. We make three points: (i) the mechanisms generating pricing to market are not always neutral to business cycle dynamics of quantities, (ii) some mechanisms require producer markups at least 50% to account for the full range of estimates of the empirical exchange rate pass-through to export prices of 35%-50%, (iii) some frictions crucially depend on a particular driver of uncertainty in the underlying model

Silbido profundo : an open source package for the use of deep learning to detect odontocete whistles

The authors wish to thank Dr. Michael Weise of the Office of Naval Research (N00014-17-1-2867, N00014-17-1-2567) for supporting this project. We also thank Anu Kumar and Mandy Shoemaker of U.S. Navy Living Marine Resources for supporting development of the data management tools used in this work (N3943020C2202).This work presents an open-source matlab software package for exploiting recent advances in extracting tonal signals from large acoustic data sets. A whistle extraction algorithm published by Li, Liu, Palmer, Fleishman, Gillespie, Nosal, Shiu, Klinck, Cholewiak, Helble, and Roch [(2020). Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, July 19–24, Glasgow, Scotland, p. 10] is incorporated into silbido, an established software package for extraction of cetacean tonal calls. The precision and recall of the new system were over 96% and nearly 80%, respectively, when applied to a whistle extraction task on a challenging two-species subset of a conference-benchmark data set. A second data set was examined to assess whether the algorithm generalized to data that were collected across different recording devices and locations. These data included 487 h of weakly labeled, towed array data collected in the Pacific Ocean on two National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cruises. Labels for these data consisted of regions of toothed whale presence for at least 15 species that were based on visual and acoustic observations and not limited to whistles. Although the lack of per whistle-level annotations prevented measurement of precision and recall, there was strong concurrence of automatic detections and the NOAA annotations, suggesting that the algorithm generalizes well to new data.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe