Adjusting to the New Trade and Environmental Paradigm: The Case of the Philippines

The story of the Philippine environment during the past two decades is one of growing stress and resource degradation that has recently forced the Philippine polity and society to resolve the problem. This paper seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the issue of sustainable development by exploring the linkage between environment and trade both domestically and internationally from the Philippine perspective.natural resources and environment, trade sector, liberalization, environmental issues

Structural Change in Tail Behavior and the Asian Financial Crisis

This paper explores tests of the hypothesis that the tail thickness of a distribution is constant over time. Using Hill's conditional maximum likelihood estimator for the tail index of a distribution, tests of tail shape constancy are constructed that allow for an unknown breakpoint. The recursive test is shown to be inconsistent in one direction, and only a one-sided test is recommended. Specifically, the test can be used when the alternative hypothesis is that the tail index decreases over time. A rolling and sequential version of the test is consistent in both directions. The methods are illustrated on recent stock price data for Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. The period covers the recent Asian financial crisis and enables us to assess whether breakpoints in domestic asset return distributions are related to known changes in institutional arrangements in the foreign currency markets of these countries.Extreme value theory, Hill estimator, Structural change, Tail index estimation

Stopping Times Occurring Simultaneously

Stopping times are used in applications to model random arrivals. A standard assumption in many models is that they are conditionally independent, given an underlying filtration. This is a widely useful assumption, but there are circumstances where it seems to be unnecessarily strong. We use a modified Cox construction along with the bivariate exponential introduced by Marshall and Olkin (1967) to create a family of stopping times, which are not necessarily conditionally independent, allowing for a positive probability for them to be equal. We show that our initial construction only allows for positive dependence between stopping times, but we also propose a joint distribution that allows for negative dependence while preserving the property of non-zero probability of equality. We indicate applications to modeling COVID-19 contagion (and epidemics in general), civil engineering, and to credit ris

When practice does not make perfect: Differentiating between productive and unproductive persistence

Research has suggested that persistence in the face of challenges plays an important role in learning. However, recent work on wheel-spinning—a type of unproductive persistence where students spend too much time struggling without achieving mastery of skills—has shown that not all persistence is uniformly beneficial for learning. For this reason, Study 1 used educational data-mining techniques to determine key differences between the behaviors associated with productive persistence and wheel-spinning in ASSISTments, an online math learning platform. This study’s results indicated that three features differentiated between these two modes of persistence: the number of hints requested in any problem, the number of bottom-out hints in the last eight problems, and the variation in the delay between solving problems of the same skill. These findings suggested that focusing on number of hints can provide insight into which students are struggling, and encouraging students to engage in longer delays between problem solving is likely helpful to reduce their wheel-spinning. Using the same definition of productive persistence in Study 1, Study 2 attempted to investigate the relationship between productive persistence and grit using Duckworth and Quinn’s (2009) Short Grit Scale. Correlational results showed that the two constructs were not significantly correlated with each other, providing implications for synthesizing literature on student persistence across computer-based learning environments and traditional classrooms

MAXING CREDIT CARD BENEFITS USING LOCATION BASED DATA

A consumer establishes a digital wallet account with a payment processing system. The consumer configures settings of a digital wallet application on a consumer device to allow the payment processing system to log the consumer device’s location. The consumer, signed in to the digital wallet application on the consumer device, enters a physical location of a merchant, and the payment processing system logs location data of the consumer device. The consumer initiates a transaction at a point of sale device of the merchant. The consumer device forwards transaction data received from the point of sale device to the payment processing system, which determines the applicability of each of the consumer’s payment accounts to the transaction based on the location data and transaction data and determines which particular, applicable payment account provides the greatest rewards benefit to the consumer. The digital wallet application suggests the particular payment account to the consumer for use in the transaction with the merchant

Parental engagement as a 'boundary practice' in a classroom community of practice : implications for Latina/o students' mathematical learning

Este texto se presentó como comunicación al II Congreso Internacional de Etnografía y Educación: Migraciones y Ciudadanías. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, 5-8 Septiembre 2008.Urban education is in need of practices that break down the hierarchical and hegemonic relations that often characterize parental involvement in U.S. schools, particularly in minoritized communities. Within the framework of communities of practice, the concept of Boundary practices (Wegner, 1998) addresses the connection or disconnection, inclusion or exclusion, between members of two or more communities. In this case, our analysis describes how some practices afford the inclusion of family members and their funds of knowledge, while others exclude them from legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wegner, 1991). Embedded in this analysis are the historical inequities of opportunity and unequal power relations. We underscore the key role that legitimate and peripheral access in a community plays for students' mathematical learning and the inclusion of their families. This research uses case studies to bridge local particulars to the abstract social phenomenon of learning practices. We use ethnographic tools to collect the data and an analysis based on grounded theory to explore the emergent themes. The research takes place in a fifth-grade classroom in an urban elementary school in the southwest United States, in which ninety percent of the students are of Latino background and almost seventy percent receive free or reduced lunch. In this paper we present the boundary practices using one of the case studies developed, Yessenia and her mother, Lorena. Yessenia is a ten year old Mexican immigrant who arrived to the United States as an infant with her mother and her older sister.Our data suggest that the nature of the community of practice plays a critical role in the engagement of parents in their children's mathematics education. In this particular case, the inclusion of Spanish, a collaborative community, and the negotiation of mathematical meanings to read the world facilitate the inclusion of parents. This case study aids us to decenter the notion of parental engagement and focuses on the nature and history of the community, as well as the identities of the participants. The view of learning of mathematics as participation in particular communities brings to the forefront issues of power. There is an imminent need of mathematical practices that include learning as active participation and a view of mathematics as a cultural activity that draws on the resources of members of different communities. The transformation of current oppressing structures of power within the school system requires the inclusion of those who care most for students

Computing the Probability of a Financial Market Failure: A New Measure of Systemic Risk

This paper characterizes the probability of a market failure defined as the default of two or more globally systemically important banks (G-SIBs) in a small interval of time. The default probabilities of the G-SIBs are correlated through the possible existence of a market-wide stress event. The characterization employs a multivariate Cox process across the G-SIBs, which allows us to relate our work to the existing literature on intensity-based models. Various theorems related to market failure probabilities are derived, including the probability of a market failure due to two banks defaulting over the next infinitesimal interval, the probability of a catastrophic market failure, the impact of increasing the number of G-SIBs in an economy, and the impact of changing the initial conditions of the economy's state variables. We also show that if there are too many G-SIBs, a market failure is inevitable, i.e., the probability of a market failure tends to 1