Investment and income effects of land regularization : the case of Nicaragua

The authors use data from Nicaragua to examine the impact of the award of registered and nonregistered title on land values and on investments attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases the propensity to invest, bringing investment closer to the optimum. Consistent with descriptive statistics indicating great demand for regularization of land rights, especially from the poor, this finding suggests that titling can have a positive distributional effect. Of overriding importance, however, are the legal validity and official recognition of the titles issued.Municipal Housing and Land,Banks&Banking Reform,Real Estate Development,Environmental Economics&Policies,Land Use and Policies,Environmental Economics&Policies,Municipal Housing and Land,Banks&Banking Reform,Rural Land Policies for Poverty Reduction,Land Use and Policies

Understanding and Comparing Deep Neural Networks for Age and Gender Classification

Recently, deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performances in recognizing the age and gender on human face images. However, these models were applied in a black-box manner with no information provided about which facial features are actually used for prediction and how these features depend on image preprocessing, model initialization and architecture choice. We present a study investigating these different effects. In detail, our work compares four popular neural network architectures, studies the effect of pretraining, evaluates the robustness of the considered alignment preprocessings via cross-method test set swapping and intuitively visualizes the model's prediction strategies in given preprocessing conditions using the recent Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) algorithm. Our evaluations on the challenging Adience benchmark show that suitable parameter initialization leads to a holistic perception of the input, compensating artefactual data representations. With a combination of simple preprocessing steps, we reach state of the art performance in gender recognition.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 5 tables. Presented at ICCV 2017 Workshop: 7th IEEE International Workshop on Analysis and Modeling of Faces and Gesture

Target Capital Structure Determinants and Speed of Adjustment Analysis to Address the Keynes-Hayek Debate

According to F. A. Hayek, Keynes' General Theory neglects an analysis of the production structure. As a contribution to this research gap, we look at companies' decisions to finance investments and at their agility to adjust their capital structure. We thus study the relationship between capital structure to finance corporate production and shifts in aggregate demand. Target capital structure determinants and speeds of adjustment to these target capital structures will be analyzed for a geographically comprehensive sample of 2,706 companies listed in Asia, Europe and the U.S.A. in the period 1995 – 2009. Aggregate demand turns out to be the coordinating force which determines managers' choices of target capital structures. The speed of adjustments towards target capital structures indicate that firms are agile in adapting to their targets. Our results provide evidence on Keynes' General Theory from a firm level perspective: Firms respond quickly to shifts in aggregate demand by adjusting capital and production structure correspondingly

Extending the Prym map to toroidal compactifications of the moduli space of abelian varieties

The main purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual approach to understanding the extension of the Prym map from the space of admissible double covers of stable curves to different toroidal compactifications of the moduli space of principally polarized abelian varieties. By separating the combinatorial problems from the geometric aspects we can reduce this to the computation of certain monodromy cones. In this way we not only shed new light on the extension results of Alexeev, Birkenhake, Hulek, and Vologodsky for the second Voronoi toroidal compactification, but we also apply this to other toroidal compactifications, in particular the perfect cone compactification, for which we obtain a combinatorial characterization of the indeterminacy locus, as well as a geometric description up to codimension six, and an explicit toroidal resolution of the Prym map up to codimension four.Comment: 53 pages, AMS LaTeX, Appendix by Mathieu Dutour Sikiric, minor revisions, to appear in JEM

First-order perturbative calculation of the frequency-shifts caused by static cylindrically-symmetric electric and magnetic imperfections of a Penning trap

The ideal Penning trap consists of a uniform magnetic field and an electrostatic quadrupole potential. Cylindrically-symmetric deviations thereof are parametrized by the coefficients Bn and Cn, respectively. Relativistic mass-increase aside, the three characteristic eigenfrequencies of a charged particle stored in an ideal Penning trap are independent of the three motional amplitudes. This three-fold harmonicity is a highly-coveted virtue for precision experiments that rely on the measurement of at least one eigenfrequency in order to determine fundamental properties of the stored particle, such as its mass. However, higher-order contributions to the ideal fields result in amplitude-dependent frequency-shifts. In turn, these frequency-shifts need to be understood for estimating systematic experimental errors, and eventually for correcting them by means of calibrating the imperfections. The problem of calculating the frequency-shifts caused by small imperfections of a near-ideal trap yields nicely to perturbation theory, producing analytic formulas that are easy to evaluate for the relevant parameters of an experiment. In particular, the frequency-shifts can be understood on physical rather than purely mathematical grounds by considering which terms actually drive them. Based on identifying these terms, we derive general formulas for the first-order frequency-shifts caused by any perturbation parameter Bn or Cn.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure, 0 tables. Accepted manuscript subsequently published. Streamlined the introduction. Optimized choice of summation variable