6,052 research outputs found
Efficient Wage Subsidies in Private Firms and Deadweight Spending
This paper links the old literature on employment subsidies with the current theories of contract and regulation. One important source of inefficiency of employment subsidies is deadweight spending. This refers to the cases in which private firms receive a subsidy for employment creation that would have been reached without this financial support. We identify the asymmetry of information between the regulator and the private firm as the source of this deadweight spending. The private firm knows its hiring capability while the government does not. We then derive the optimal incentive contracts for the government. In these contracts deadweight spending is reduced to the information rent to private firms. We derive conditions for which this deadweight spending is zero.Contract-Theory; Principal-Agent; Economic-Policy; Employment-Subsidy; Cost-Benefit-Analysis
Decomposition of Triebel-Lizorkin and Besov spaces in the context of Laguerre expansions
A pair of dual frames with almost exponentially localized elements (needlets)
are constructed on \RR_+^d based on Laguerre functions. It is shown that the
Triebel-Lizorkin and Besov spaces induced by Laguerre expansions can be
characterized in terms of respective sequence spaces that involve the needlet
coefficients.Comment: 42 page
Subsampling needlet coefficients on the sphere
In a recent paper, we analyzed the properties of a new kind of spherical
wavelets (called needlets) for statistical inference procedures on spherical
random fields; the investigation was mainly motivated by applications to
cosmological data. In the present work, we exploit the asymptotic uncorrelation
of random needlet coefficients at fixed angular distances to construct
subsampling statistics evaluated on Voronoi cells on the sphere. We illustrate
how such statistics can be used for isotropy tests and for bootstrap estimation
of nuisance parameters, even when a single realization of the spherical random
field is observed. The asymptotic theory is developed in detail in the high
resolution sense.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/08-BEJ164 the Bernoulli
(http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical
Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm
Asymptotics for spherical needlets
We investigate invariant random fields on the sphere using a new type of
spherical wavelets, called needlets. These are compactly supported in frequency
and enjoy excellent localization properties in real space, with
quasi-exponentially decaying tails. We show that, for random fields on the
sphere, the needlet coefficients are asymptotically uncorrelated for any fixed
angular distance. This property is used to derive CLT and functional CLT
convergence results for polynomial functionals of the needlet coefficients:
here the asymptotic theory is considered in the high-frequency sense. Our
proposals emerge from strong empirical motivations, especially in connection
with the analysis of cosmological data sets.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS601 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Optimal detection of changepoints with a linear computational cost
We consider the problem of detecting multiple changepoints in large data
sets. Our focus is on applications where the number of changepoints will
increase as we collect more data: for example in genetics as we analyse larger
regions of the genome, or in finance as we observe time-series over longer
periods. We consider the common approach of detecting changepoints through
minimising a cost function over possible numbers and locations of changepoints.
This includes several established procedures for detecting changing points,
such as penalised likelihood and minimum description length. We introduce a new
method for finding the minimum of such cost functions and hence the optimal
number and location of changepoints that has a computational cost which, under
mild conditions, is linear in the number of observations. This compares
favourably with existing methods for the same problem whose computational cost
can be quadratic or even cubic. In simulation studies we show that our new
method can be orders of magnitude faster than these alternative exact methods.
We also compare with the Binary Segmentation algorithm for identifying
changepoints, showing that the exactness of our approach can lead to
substantial improvements in the accuracy of the inferred segmentation of the
data.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, To appear in Journal of the American Statistical
Associatio
Characterization of a dense aperture array for radio astronomy
EMBRACE@Nancay is a prototype instrument consisting of an array of 4608
densely packed antenna elements creating a fully sampled, unblocked aperture.
This technology is proposed for the Square Kilometre Array and has the
potential of providing an extremely large field of view making it the ideal
survey instrument. We describe the system,calibration procedures, and results
from the prototype.Comment: 17 pages, accepted for publication in A&
Preventing pain on injection of propofol: A comparison between lignocaine pre-treatment and lignocaine added to propofol
Publisher's copy made available with the permission of the publisherA randomized double-blind study compared two methods of preventing the pain from injection of propofol, lignocaine pre-treatment followed by propofol and lignocaine added to propofol. One hundred patients received a 4 ml solution intravenously with a venous tourniquet for 1 minute, followed by propofol mixed with 2 ml of solution. Patients were divided into two treatment groups of 50 patients each: 4 ml 1% lignocaine pre-treatment followed by propofol and 2 ml saline, or 4 ml saline followed by propofol and 2 ml 2% lignocaine. Pain was assessed with a 100 mm visual analogue scale after induction and in recovery. The incidence of injection pain was 8% in the propofol mixed with lignocaine group, and 28% in the lignocaine pre-treatment group. This difference is statistically significant (P=0.017). For those patients who had pain, the mean pain score was 26.5 on induction for the propofol with lignocaine group (n=4), while the mean score was 44.4 for the pre-treatment group (n=13). The difference was not statistically significant (P=0.25). None of the propofol mixed with lignocaine group recalled pain, while 13 of the pre-treatment group did so. Lignocaine pre-treatment does not improve the immediate or the recalled comfort of patients during propofol induction when compared to lignocaine added to propofol. It is recommended that lignocaine should be added to propofol for induction rather than given before induction.P. Lee, W. J. Russellhttp://www.aaic.net.au/Article.asp?D=200339
Données préliminaires sur la transpiration du riz pluvial, variété IRAT 13, soumis à une carence hydrique
Constitutive association of BRCA1 and c-Abl and its ATM-dependent disruption after irradiation
BRCA1 plays an important role in mechanisms of response to double-strand breaks, participating in genome surveillance, DNA repair, and cell cycle checkpoint arrests. Here, we identify a constitutive BRCA1-c-Abl complex and provide evidence for a direct interaction between the PXXP motif in the C terminus of BRCA1 and the SH3 domain of c-Abl. Following exposure to ionizing radiation (IR), the BRCA1-c-Abl complex is disrupted in an ATM-dependent manner, which correlates temporally with ATM-dependent phosphorylation of BRCA1 and ATM-dependent enhancement of the tyrosine kinase activity of c-Abl. The BRCA1-c-Abl interaction is affected by radiation-induced modification to both BRCA1 and c-Abl. We show that the C terminus of BRCA1 is phosphorylated by c-Abl in vitro. In vivo, BRCA1 is phosphorylated at tyrosine residues in an ATM-dependent, radiation-dependent manner. Tyrosine phosphorylation of BRCA1, however, is not required for the disruption of the BRCA1-c-Abl complex. BRCA1-mutated cells exhibit constitutively high c-Abl kinase activity that is not further increased on exposure to IR. We suggest a model in which BRCA1 acts in concert with ATM to regulate c-Abl tyrosine kinase activity
Water Vapour Effects in Mass Measurement
Water vapour inside the mass comparator enclosure is a critical parameter. In
fact, fluctuations of this parameter during mass weighing can lead to errors in
the determination of an unknown mass. To control that, a proposal method is
given and tested. Preliminary results of our observation of water vapour
sorption and desorption processes from walls and mass standard are reported
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