Legislative bargaining and the dynamics of public investment

We present a legislative bargaining model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizion. In each period, there is a societal endowment which can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the optimal public policy, defined by the time path of investment and consumption. In each period, a legislature with presentatives of each of n districts bargain over the current period's endowment for investment in the public good and transfers to each district. We analyze the Markov perfect equilibrium under different voting q-rules where q is the number of yes votes required for passage. We show that the efficiency of the public policy is increasing in q because higher q leads to higher investment in the public good and less pork. We examine the theoretical equilibrium predictions by conducting a laboratory experiment with fiveperson committees that compares three alternative voting rules: unanimity (q=5); majority (q=3); and dictatorship (q=1). --dynamic political economy,voting,public goods,bargaining,experiments

Circulating fibrocytes as a marker of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C

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Political Institutions and the Dynamics of Public Investment

We present a theoretical model of the provision of a durable public good over an infinite horizon. In each period, there is a societal endowment of which each of n districts owns a share. This endowment can either be invested in the public good or consumed. We characterize the planner's optimal solution and time path of investment and consumption. We then consider alternative political mechanisms for deciding on the time path, and analyze the Markov perfect equilibrium of these mechanisms. One class of these mechanisms involves a legislature where representatives of each district bargain with each other to decide how to divide the current period's societal endowment between investment in the public good and transfers to each district. The second class of mechanisms involves the districts making independent decisions for how to divide their own share of the endowment between consumption and investment. We conduct an experiment to assess the performance of these mechanisms, and compare the observed allocations to the Markov perfect equilibrium.Dynamic political economy; voting; public goods; bargaining; experiments

Dynamic legislative bargaining with veto power: theory and experiments

In many domains, committees bargain over a sequence of policies and a policy remains in effect until a new agreement is reached. In this paper, I argue that, in order to assess the consequences of veto power, it is important to take into account this dynamic aspect. I analyze an infinitely repeated divide-the-dollar game with an endogenous status quo policy. I show that full appropriation by the veto player is the only stable policy when legislators are sufficiently impatient; and that, irrespective of legislators' patience and the initial division of resources, there is always an equilibrium where policy eventually gets arbitrarily close to full appropriation by the veto player. In this equilibrium, increasing legislators' patience or decreasing the veto player's proposal power makes convergence to this outcome slower and the veto player supports reforms that decrease his allocation. The main predictions of the theory find support in controlled laboratory experiments

Clustering activity at Mt Etna based on volcanic tremor: A case study

AbstractThis paper deals with the classification of volcanic activity into three classes, referred to as Quite, Strombolian and Paroxysm. The main purpose is to give a measure of the reliability with which such a classification, typically carried out by experts, can be performed by Machine Learning algorithms, by using the volcanic tremor as a feature. Both supervised and unsupervised methods are considered. It is experimentally shown that at least the Paroxysm activity can be reliably classified. Performances are rigorously assessed, in comparison with the classification made by expert volcanologists, in terms of popular indices such as thef1-score and the Area under the ROC curve (AuC). The work is basically a case study carried out on a dataset recorded in the area of the Mt Etna volcano. However, as volcanic tremor is a geophysical signal widely available, considered methods and strategies can be easily applied to similar volcanic areas

Experimental investigation of a sheared thermally unstable boundary layer

In many natural and industrial systems, heat is transported by mixed convection, where an externally driven flow causes advection of the temperature field in addition to the fluid motion due to buoyancy of differentially heated areas. We investigate experimentally the heat flux across a thermally unstable boundary layer subject to a shear flow. In the experiment, we use a two meter long aluminium plate that is subject to a shear flow above its heated surface. For varying Richardson, Reynolds and Grashof numbers, we measure the heat flux from the plate, as well as the vertical velocity and temperature profiles above it by using hot-wire anemometry and thermistors arrays. The fluid is air at atmospheric pressure, resulting in a Prandtl number of Pr = 0.75. The goal of this research is not only to investigate the transition from fully forced to dominantly free convection, but we also hope to better understand the difference between a shear driven turbulent boundary layer and a laminar boundary layer which is perturbed by thermal plumes.2021-07-0

A Data Augmentation Approach for Sign-Language-To-Text Translation In-The-Wild

In this paper, we describe the current main approaches to sign language translation which use deep neural networks with videos as input and text as output. We highlight that, under our point of view, their main weakness is the lack of generalization in daily life contexts. Our goal is to build a state-of-the-art system for the automatic interpretation of sign language in unpredictable video framing conditions. Our main contribution is the shift from image features to landmark positions in order to diminish the size of the input data and facilitate the combination of data augmentation techniques for landmarks. We describe the set of hypotheses to build such a system and the list of experiments that will lead us to their verification