The Hungarian pension system in transition

After discussing the evolution of the policy dialogue in Hungary, this report broadly describes the reform of the pay-as-you-go public pension system and its partial privatization as legislated in July 1997. Through a combination of a debt and tax financed transition, the first partial pension privatization in Central Europe is shown to generate increased national savings while placing the pension systemon a more sustainable course. The potential positive impact on savings was diminished by politically-motivated compromises. Outstanding issues include problematic features of the"second pillar"and the reemergence of pay-as-you-go deficits in the long run. This suggests that further reforms, such as raising the retirement age beyond 62, will eventually be required.Pensions&Retirement Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Public Sector Economics,Economic Theory&Research

Rejecting Small Gambles Under Expected Utility

This paper contributes to an important recent debate around expected utility and risk aversion. Rejecting a gamble over a given range of wealth levels imposes a lower bound on risk aversion. Using this lower bound and empirical evidence on the range of the risk aversion coefficient, we calibrate the relationship between risk attitudes over small-stakes and large-stakes gambles. We find that rejecting small gambles is consistent with expected utility, contrary to a recent literature that concludes that expected utility is fundamentally unfit to explain decisions under uncertainty. Paradoxical behavior is only obtained when calibrations are made in a region of the parameter space that is not empirically relevant.Risk Aversion, Expected Utility

Empirical analysis of consumption in Mexico : determinants, beneficiaries and the effects of inequality

Mexico has lived through several episodes of economic and social unrest during the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s. Since then the country has embraced a free-trade agenda and has eventually established itself as a strong manufacturing centre. GDP per capita has kept growing almost steadily, and so has the level of consumption per capita. At the same time Mexico has experienced a modest reduction in income inequality.This piece of research was aimed at identifying the main determinants of consumption as well as to find out if the benefits of increased consumption have been distributed similarly among different groups of the Mexican society. Its main contribution is the decomposition of consumption by different cohorts of society—age cohorts, income deciles, regional trends, or consumption determinants—in order to evaluate how consumption has evolved in general and if significant sub-group differences exist.The empirical work presents the empirical analysis of time series data on consumption and different consumption determinants. The empirical evidence confirms the long-run equilibrium relationship between consumption, income, and wealth. The results indicate how income, the wealth components and the value-added output from the manufacturing sector have had a role in steering consumption over the past 57 years.The empirical analysis of pooled micro-level datasets found support to the consumption-puzzle postulate. Income distributional differences were found to exist in terms of the life cycle consumption profile. While the richer cohorts of the population have been able to reduce consumption before retirement age, the poorer deciles have not been able to afford to reduce consumption and increase savings until they have gone well into the later stages of the life cycle.The analysis of the pooled microeconomic dataset has found significant distributional differences associated with over time changes in income inequality. The cohorts of the population in the middle part of the distribution do benefit by increased consumption levels when inequality reduces. Given the way inequality has reduced in Mexico—reductions in returns from financial wealth for the richer cohorts—it came as a little surprise to find that inequality reductions have not benefitted households at both ends of the income distribution: the poorer most, nor the richer ones.Relevant for public policy is the fact that specific measures have to be put in place to help the poorer households as they reach retirement age when their consumption levels have been found to reduce drastically

Morir en Bilbao (siglos XV-XVI). Un estudio de las actitudes ante la muerte a través de las Ordenanzas

A lo largo de las páginas del presente trabajo se realizará una aproximación a la muerte a través de las ordenanzas municipales de la villa de Bilbao durante el período medieval. Se prestará un especial interés a todo el ritual funerario que seguía a la muerte, en concreto se tratarán temas como la comunicación de la muerte, el cortejo fúnebre hasta la iglesia, los plantos, el lugar de sepultura, así como las misas y ofrendas post-mortem.Azterlan honen orrietan heriotzarako hurbilketa bat egiten da Bilbo hiribilduaren Erdi Aroko udal ordenantzen bidez. Arreta berezia jarriko da hil ondoko ehortze erritu osoan, eta zehazki ondoko gaiak lantzen dira: heriotzaren komunikazioa, elizarainoko segizioa, lantuak, hilobi lekua, bai eta post-mortem egiten ziren mezak eta eskaintzak.Une approche de la mort à travers des ordonnances municipales de la ville de Bilbao durant la période médiévale se fera tout au long des pages de ce travail. On s'intéressera spécialement à tout le rituel funéraire qui suivait la mort. On traitera spécialement de thèmes comme la communication de la mort, le cortège funèbre jusqu'à l'église, «los plantos», le lieu de sépulture ainsi que les messes et les offrandes post-mortem.Throughout the pages of this work an approach is made to death-related matters by means of the municipal ordinances of the town of Bilbao during the medieval period. Special attention is paid to the whole of the funerary ritual that followed death, and concretely to matters such as how a death was announced, the funeral cortege to the church, the place of burial as well as masses and post-mortem offerings

Passive-Aggressive online learning with nonlinear embeddings

[EN] Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for machine learning techniques which can deal with problems where the instances are produced as a stream or in real time. In these scenarios, online learning is able to learn a model from data that comes continuously. The adaptability, efficiency and scalability of online learning techniques have been gaining interest last years with the increasing amount of data generated every day. In this paper, we propose a novel binary classification approach based on nonlinear mapping functions under an online learning framework. The non-convex optimization problem that arises is split into three different convex problems that are solved by means of Passive-Aggressive Online Learning. We evaluate both the adaptability and generalization of our model through several experiments comparing with the state of the art techniques. We improve significantly the results in several datasets widely used previously by the online learning community. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was developed in the framework of the PROM-ETEOII/2014/030 research project "Adaptive learning and multi modality in machine translation and text transcription", funded by the Generalitat Valenciana. The work of the first author is financed by Grant FPU14/03981, from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport.Jorge-Cano, J.; Paredes Palacios, R. (2018). Passive-Aggressive online learning with nonlinear embeddings. Pattern Recognition. 79:162-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2018.01.019S1621717

On improving robustness of LDA and SRDA by using tangent vectors

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition Letters. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition Letters, [Volume 34, Issue 9, 1 July 2013, Pages 1094–1100] DOI: 10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.001[EN] In the area of pattern recognition, it is common for few training samples to be available with respect to the dimensionality of the representation space; this is known as the curse of dimensionality. This problem can be alleviated by using a dimensionality reduction approach, which overcomes the curse relatively well. Moreover, supervised dimensionality reduction techniques generally provide better recognition performance; however, several of these tend to suffer from the curse when applied directly to high-dimensional spaces. We propose to overcome this problem by incorporating additional information to supervised subspace learning techniques using what is known as tangent vectors. This additional information accounts for the possible differences that the sample data can suffer. In fact, this can be seen as a way to model the unseen data and make better use of the scarce training samples. In this paper, methods for incorporating tangent vector information are described for one classical technique (LDA) and one state-of-the-art technique (SRDA). Experimental results confirm that this additional information improves performance and robustness to known transformations.Work partially supported through the EU 7th Framework Programme grant tranScriptorium (Ref: 600707), by the Spanish MEC under the STraDA research project (TIN2012-37475-C02-01) and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant Prometeo/2009/014.Villegas Santamaría, M.; Paredes Palacios, R. (2013). On improving robustness of LDA and SRDA by using tangent vectors. Pattern Recognition Letters. 34(9):1094-1100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.0011094110034

Study of Convolutional Neural Networks for Global Parametric Motion Estimation on Log-Polar Imagery

[EN] The problem of motion estimation from images has been widely studied in the past. Although many mature solutions exist, there are still open issues and challenges to be addressed. For instance, in spite of the well-known performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many computer vision problems, only very recent work has started to explore CNNs to learning to estimate motion, as an alternative to manually-designed algorithms. These few initial efforts, however, have focused on conventional Cartesian images, while other imaging models have not been studied. This work explores the yet unknown role of CNNs in estimating global parametric motion in log-polar images. Despite its favourable properties, estimating some motion components in this model has proven particularly challenging with past approaches. It is therefore highly important to understand how CNNs behave when their input are log-polar images, since they involve a complex mapping in the motion model, a polar image geometry, and space-variant resolution. To this end, a CNN is considered in this work for regressing the motion parameters. Experiments on existing image datasets using synthetic image deformations reveal that, interestingly, standard CNNs can successfully learn to estimate global parametric motion on log-polar images with accuracies comparable to or better than with Cartesian images.This work was supported in part by the Universitat Jaume I, Castellon, Spain, through the Pla de promocio de la investigacio, under Project UJI-B2018-44; and in part by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades through the Research Network under Grant RED2018-102511-T.Traver, VJ.; Paredes Palacios, R. (2020). Study of Convolutional Neural Networks for Global Parametric Motion Estimation on Log-Polar Imagery. IEEE Access. 8:149122-149132. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3016030S149122149132

Factores que permiten impulsar el uso de franquicias exitosas en Nuevo León

The growth of the franchise model has been significant, due, among other reasons, to the growing desire of individuals to achieve their labor and economic independence, which is why companies see it as an opportunity to expand to other markets (Mosquera, 2010). For what is intended to identify those factors that drive the use of successful franchises in Mexico, reflected in an increase in franchised units. For what is intended to identify those factors that drive the use of successful franchises in Mexico, reflected in an increase in franchised units. Once these factors are identified, they can be promoted with other companies, especially SMEs, with a desire to expand and that are not integrated into a franchise system, and thus obtain business growth that would impact the country's economic growth. The methodology used in the research was quantitative since it is intended to collect data from a sample and from there to be able to identify some variables, the data collection would be through a questionnaire that was developed from the revised theoretical framework, said instrument was applied to A representative sample of franchisors to find out the factors that have allowed them to be successful in their franchises and the results show that by combining the information of the franchisors, it is identified that they all agree that the “Renown of the Brand” has an important influence on success of the franchise, this reflected with an increase in units.El crecimiento que ha tenido el modelo de franquicia ha sido significativo, debido entre otras razones, al creciente deseo de los individuos por lograr su independencia laboral y económica, por lo que es visto por las empresas como una oportunidad de expansión a otros mercados (Mosquera, 2010). Por lo tanto , lo que se pretende identificar son aquellos factores que impulsan el uso de franquicias exitosas en México, específicamente en Nuevo León, lo cual se puede ver reflejado en un aumento en unidades franquiciadas. Una vez identificados esos factores se podrán promover con las demás empresas, en especial a las PYMES, con deseos de expandirse y que no están integradas a un sistema de franquicias, contribuyendo así a un crecimiento empresarial que impactaría al crecimiento económico del país. La metodología empleada en la investigación fue cuantitativa ya que se pretende  recoger datos de una muestra y de ahí poder  identificar algunas variables , la recopilación de datos seria a través de un cuestionario que se elaboro a partir del marco teórico revisad, dicho  instrumento fue aplicado a una muestra representativa de franquiciadores para conocer los factores que les han permitido tener éxito en sus franquicias y los resultados muestran que uniendo la información de los franquiciadores se identifica que todos coinciden en que el “Renombre de la Marca” influye de manera importante en el éxito de la franquicia , esto reflejado con un aumento en unidades

Validation of Rigid Wind Turbine Simulations Using NREL Phase VI Experiment

Realización de simulaciones de un aerogenerador indeformable y validación de los resultados obtenidos al compararlos con el experimento NREL PHASE VI. Redacción detallada de todos los pasos seguidos para crear las simulaciones y leer los resultados

La vulneración al principio de pluralidad de instancias en el proceso arbitral

El arbitraje debe convivir con la justicia ordinaria, pero para que esta convivencia sea armónica, habrá de establecerse una relación de cooperación entre ambos mecanismos a la vez los árbitros deben comprender las limitaciones que les impone su origen convivencial, la falta de imperium y el orden público, hacen necesario que los jueces compartan la idea del arbitraje como sistema que coopera en la solución de conflictos, prestando su auxilio cuando se deba recurrir a ellos para ejecutar el laudo. Si para lograr el pleno reconocimiento de las garantías procesales fundamentales resguardados en el ejercicio de la función jurisdiccional, habrá de considerarse jurisdicción, jurisdicción parcial o jurisdicción restringida en el que permita su acercamiento y reconocimiento que las garantías constitucionales en materia procesal no le es ajena y deberá ajustarse totalmente a ellas e impedir cualquiera forma de vulneración o inobservancia. Por otra parte que las partes en un proceso arbitral no configuren o acuerden, antes o durante el desarrollo del proceso arbitral, sobre la posibilidad de recurrir a una segunda instancia a través de una apelación contra el laudo, lo hacen en virtud de la aplicación del principio de determinación (fundado en el artículo 361 del Código Procesal Civil). El no acordar esto último no significa rechazar en el caso en concreto a este principio. Pero, al ser este un principio en el que se necesita de un acuerdo concurrente entre por lo menos dos de las partes, el no llegar a un acuerdo rechazaría de forma inmediata en el proceso arbitral su aplicación, sin existir medio o mecanismo alguno para lograr la posibilidad de que entre en juego o se active el principio de pluralidad de instancias. No habiendo acuerdo basado en el principio de determinación, entonces el principio es derrotado, o inaplicable, en virtud del artículo 62 del Decreto Legislativo 1071. Luego, el principio de pluralidad de instancias es derrotado también por el mismo artículo.No existe duda alguna que así tengamos en cuenta cualquier principio como elemento del debido proceso, y las partes no lleguen a un acuerdo en la configuración de las instancias, estos serán derrotados por la regla contenida en el artículo 62, y por los otros principios aplicables al proceso arbitral. Lo que hace concluir que existe un conflicto y vulneración «en concreto» del principio de pluralidad de instancias por el artículo 62 del Decreto Legislativo 1071The arbitration shall live with the regular courts, but for this coexistence is harmonious, cooperative relationship between the two mechanisms to be established once the referees must understand the limitations imposed by their convivial origin, lack of imperium and order, make it necessary for judges to share the idea of arbitration as a system that cooperates in resolving conflicts, with their aid when they need to use them to enforce the award. If achieving full recognition of the fundamental procedural guarantees sheltered in the exercise of the judicial function, will be considered jurisdiction, partial jurisdiction or restricted jurisdiction in permitting their approach and recognition that the constitutional guarantees of procedural matters is no stranger and shall conform fully to them and prevent any form of violation or non-compliance. Furthermore the parties to an arbitration agree not set or before or during the arbitral process, the possibility of using a second instance through an appeal against the award, they do under the application of determination principle. The latter does not agree does not mean rejecting the particular case of this principle. But as this is a principle which requires a concurrent agreement between at least two of the parties, unable to reach agreement immediately reject the arbitration process your application, with no means or mechanism to achieve the possibility that comes into play or the first of multiple instances are active. There being no agreement based on the principle of determination, then the principle is defeated, or unenforceable pursuant to Article 62 of Legislative Decree 1071. Then the principle of plurality of instances is defeated also by the Article. There is no doubt that so keep in mind any principle as an element of due process, and the parties do not reach agreement on the configuration of instances, they will be defeated by the rule contained in Article 62 and the other principles Arbitration process. What makes the conclusion that there is a conflict and violation ’in particular’ the principle of plurality of instances per article 62 of Legislative Decree 1071.Tesi