Political and institutional factors in regime change in the ERM: An application of duration analysis

This paper analyses the functioning of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). To that end, we apply duration models to estimate an augmented target-zone model, explicitly incorporating political and institutional factors into the explanation of European exchange rate policies. The estimations are based on quarterly data of eight currencies participating in the ERM, covering the complete history of the European Monetary System. Our results suggest that both economic and political factors are important determinants of the ERM currency policies. Concerning economic factors, the money supply, the real exchange rate, the interest in Germany and the central parity deviation would have negatively affected the duration of a given central parity, while credibility and the price level in Germany would have positively influenced such duration. Regarding political variables, elections, central bank independence and left-wing administrations would have increased the probability of maintaining the current regime, while unstable governments would have been associated with more frequent regime changes. Moreover, we show how the political augmented model outperforms, both in terms of explanatory power and goodness of fit, the model which just incorporates pure economic determinants.Duration analysis, political variables, exchange rates, European Monetary System

Chapter 5 Writing for the Stage

Baroque Lorca: An Arcaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba)

A Personal History of the «American Hour» of Comparative Literature: Claudio Guillén in Conversation with Harry Levin

In this essay I examine the unpublished correspondence between Harry Levin and Claudio Guillén from 1956 to 1992. I also review Guillén’s proposal for the Ph. D. Degree in Comparative Literature at UC San Diego, a 21-page document he submitted in 1968, three years after the first ACLA report, also known as the Levin report. In the first section of this essay I argue that their letters evidence the existence of diverging views, as early as the mid-1960s, on the nature of a discipline that had been recently institutionalized in the United States. I then look at how Guillén’s relationship to Levin changed significantly after Guillén abandoned Harvard to work in the Spanish public university system in the mid-1980s. In the third and final section I examine Guillén’s prologue to the second edition of Entre lo uno y lo diverso (2005), in which he described his Spanish experience as a failed attempt to spread comp lit in his country. This prologue was published only two years before Guillén passed away in 2007.En el presente ensayo analizo la correspondencia inédita entre Harry Levin y Claudio Guillén entre 1956 y 1992. También estudio el programa doctoral en Literatura Comparada que Guillén diseñó para UC San Diego, un documento de 21 páginas entregado a la universidad en 1968, tres años después del primer informe de la ACLA, también conocido como el informe Levin. La primera sección del ensayo muestra cómo sus cartas se hacen eco, ya a mitad de la década de los sesenta, de la existencia de ideas muy diferentes sobre qué debería ser la literatura comparada, disciplina que acababa de ser institucionalizada en los Estados Unidos. A continuación examino la manera en la que la relación entre Guillén y Levin cambió después de que Guillén abandonara su puesto en Harvard para trabajar en la universidad pública española en los ochenta. En la tercera y última sección analizo el prólogo de Guillén a la segunda edición de Entre lo uno y lo diverso (2005), en el que describe su experiencia en España como un fallido intento para popularizar la literatura comparada en su país. Este prólogo apareció sólo dos años antes de que Guillén falleciera en 2007

Improving redundant multithreading performance for soft-error detection in HPC applications

Tesis de Graduación (Maestría en Computación) Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica, Escuela de Computación, 2018As HPC systems move towards extreme scale, soft errors leading to silent data corruptions become a major concern. In this thesis, we propose a set of three optimizations to the classical Redundant Multithreading (RMT) approach to allow faster soft error detection. First, we leverage the use of Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) to collocate sibling replicated threads on the same physical core to efficiently exchange data to expose errors. Some HPC applications cannot fully exploit SMT for performance improvement and instead, we propose to use these additional resources for fault tolerance. Second, we present variable aggregation to group several values together and use this merged value to speed up detection of soft errors. Third, we introduce selective checking to decrease the number of checked values to a minimum. The last two techniques reduce the overall performance overhead by relaxing the soft error detection scope. Our experimental evaluation, executed on recent multicore processors with representative HPC benchmarks, proves that the use of SMT for fault tolerance can enhance RMT performance. It also shows that, at constant computing power budget, with optimizations applied, the overhead of the technique can be significantly lower than the classical RMT replicated execution. Furthermore, these results show that RMT can be a viable solution for soft-error detection at extreme scale

An empirical examination of exchange-rate credibility determinants in the EMS

This paper provides empirical evidence on the determinants of exchange rate credibility under the European Monetary System (EMS). To that end, we have considered both economic variables and political factors using data of eight currencies participating in the Exchange Rate Mechanism, covering the complete EMS history (1979-1998). Our results suggest that the level of international reserves, the real interest rate and right-wing governments would have positively affected the credibility of a given central parity, while the unemployment rate and the inflation rate would have negative influenced such credibility.Credibility, Political variables, Exchange rates, European Monetary System

Chapter 5 Writing for the Stage

Baroque Lorca: An Arcaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, Mariana Pineda); his interest in puppetry (The Billy-Club Puppets and In the Frame of Don Cristóbal) and the two ‘human’ farces The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (The Public); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (The Dream of Life); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ (Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba)