15,047 research outputs found
Is a Growing Middle Class Good for the Poor? Social Policy in a Time of Globalization
We examine the effect of the rise and evolution of the middle class on extreme poverty, using the World Bank's international poverty line of 11 and $110 per person per day in 2011 PPP terms—referred to as a "global," as opposed to national, definition of the middle class (Kharas, 2017). We argue that middle-class expansion initially is pro-poor given the incentives of the emerging middle class and the working poor to cooperate on matters of social policy. As citizens join the ranks of the middle class, they lobby for programs that provide them income stability and protections against shocks (social insurance). By allying with the working poor who seek social assistance (income transfers), middle-class constituents increase their bargaining power relative to elites who seek labor flexibility and lower taxes in a competitive global economy. Over time, however, as the middle class prospers and acquires greater political influence, the balance of programs shifts increasingly toward social insurance and away from social assistance. In this way, the middle class begins to capture an increasing proportion of the benefits of social spending, leaving less for welfare services targeted exclusively at the poorest. One implication of this is that the emerging middle class has never been truly progressive, because progressivity ultimately comes at its own expense
On the Noisy Feedback Capacity of Gaussian Broadcast Channels
It is well known that, in general, feedback may enlarge the capacity region
of Gaussian broadcast channels. This has been demonstrated even when the
feedback is noisy (or partial-but-perfect) and only from one of the receivers.
The only case known where feedback has been shown not to enlarge the capacity
region is when the channel is physically degraded (El Gamal 1978, 1981). In
this paper, we show that for a class of two-user Gaussian broadcast channels
(not necessarily physically degraded), passively feeding back the stronger
user's signal over a link corrupted by Gaussian noise does not enlarge the
capacity region if the variance of feedback noise is above a certain threshold.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to appear in IEEE Information Theory Workshop
2015, Jerusale
An Evasion Attack against ML-based Phishing URL Detectors
Background: Over the year, Machine Learning Phishing URL classification
(MLPU) systems have gained tremendous popularity to detect phishing URLs
proactively. Despite this vogue, the security vulnerabilities of MLPUs remain
mostly unknown. Aim: To address this concern, we conduct a study to understand
the test time security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art MLPU systems,
aiming at providing guidelines for the future development of these systems.
Method: In this paper, we propose an evasion attack framework against MLPU
systems. To achieve this, we first develop an algorithm to generate adversarial
phishing URLs. We then reproduce 41 MLPU systems and record their baseline
performance. Finally, we simulate an evasion attack to evaluate these MLPU
systems against our generated adversarial URLs. Results: In comparison to
previous works, our attack is: (i) effective as it evades all the models with
an average success rate of 66% and 85% for famous (such as Netflix, Google) and
less popular phishing targets (e.g., Wish, JBHIFI, Officeworks) respectively;
(ii) realistic as it requires only 23ms to produce a new adversarial URL
variant that is available for registration with a median cost of only
$11.99/year. We also found that popular online services such as Google
SafeBrowsing and VirusTotal are unable to detect these URLs. (iii) We find that
Adversarial training (successful defence against evasion attack) does not
significantly improve the robustness of these systems as it decreases the
success rate of our attack by only 6% on average for all the models. (iv)
Further, we identify the security vulnerabilities of the considered MLPU
systems. Our findings lead to promising directions for future research.
Conclusion: Our study not only illustrate vulnerabilities in MLPU systems but
also highlights implications for future study towards assessing and improving
these systems.Comment: Draft for ACM TOP
The dynamic impact of uncertainty in causing and forecasting the distribution of oil returns and risk
The aim of this study is to analyze the relevance of recently developed news-based measures of economic policy and equity market uncertainty in causing and predicting the conditional quantiles of crude oil returns and risk. For this purpose, we studied both the causality relationships in quantiles through a non-parametric testing method and, building on a collection of quantiles forecasts, we estimated the conditional density of oil returns and volatility, the out-of-sample performance of which was evaluated by using suitable tests. A dynamic analysis shows that the uncertainty indexes are not always relevant in causing and forecasting oil movements. Nevertheless, the informative content of the uncertainty indexes turns out to be relevant during periods of market distress, when the role of oil risk is the predominant interest, with heterogeneous effects over the different quantiles levels.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/physa2019-10-01hj2018Economic
The vicious circles of control - regional governments and insiders in privatized Russian enterprises
How can one account for the puzzling behavior of insider-managers who, in stripping assets from the veryfirms they own, appear to be stealing from one pocket to fill the other? The authors suggest that such asset-stripping and failure to restructure are the consequences of interactions between insiders (manager-owners) and regional governments in a particular property rights regime. In this regime, the ability to realize value is limited by uncertainty and illiquidity, so managers have little incentive to increase value. As the central institutions that rule Russia have ceded their powers to the regions, regional governments have imposed various distortions on enterprises to protect local employment. Prospective outsider-investors doubt they can acquire the control rights they need for restructuring firms and doubt they can avoid the distortions regional governments impose on the firms in which they might invest. The result: little restructuring and little new investment. And regional governments, knowing the firms'taxable cash flows will have been reduced through cash flow diversion, have responded by collecting revenues in kind. To disentangle these vicious circles of control, the authors propose a pilot for transforming ownership in insider-dominated firms through a system of simultaneous tax-debt-for-equity conversion and resale through competitive auctions. The objective: to show regional governments, for example, that a more sustainable way to protect employment is to give managers incentives to increase enterprises'value by transferring effective control to investors. The proposed mechanism would provide cash benefits to insiders who agree to sell control to outside investors. The increased cash revenue (rather than in-kind or money surrogates) would enable regional governments to finance safety nets for the unemployed and to promote other regional initiatives.International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Municipal Financial Management,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Municipal Financial Management,Economic Theory&Research,National Governance,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform
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