BALANCING THE BUDGET THROUGH REVENUE OR SPENDING ADJUSTMENTS? THE CASE OF GREECE

This paper examines the solvency of the Greek fiscal policy. Employing a cointegrated VAR as a benchmark, evidence of a long-run link between revenues and spending is presented, although intertemporal solvency is violated. Utilizing Granger-causality tests, a test for fiscal adjustment neutrality and Generalized Impulse Responses, this paper provides evidence in favor of the ¡®tax and spend¡¯ hypothesis for Greece. Additionally, the empirical evidence indicates that fiscal adjustment should take place through spending rather than revenue adjustment.Budget Balance, Government Revenue and Spending, Causality, Generalized Impulse Responses, Greece

Household food expenditures in the United States: A Bayesian MCMC approach to censored equation systems

We apply a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique, along with data augmentation to accommodate censoring in the dependent variables, to the estimation of a large expenditure system of food expenditures. Our finding of significant error covariance estimates justifies estimation of the system in improving statistical efficiency. Income, household composition, regions and other socio-demographic variables are found to play significant roles in determining household food expenditures.Bayesian MCMC, Censored equation system, Consumer Expenditure Survey, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, C11, C34, D12, C11, C34, D12,

Inferring offline hierarchical ties from online social networks

Social networks can represent many different types of relationships between actors, some explicit and some implicit. For example, email communications between users may be represented explicitly in a network, while managerial relationships may not. In this paper we focus on analyzing explicit interactions among actors in order to detect hierarchical social relationships that may be implicit. We start by employing three well-known ranking-based methods, PageRank, Degree Centrality, and Rooted-PageRank (RPR) to infer such implicit relationships from interactions between actors. Then we propose two novel approaches which take into account the time-dimension of interactions in the process of detecting hierarchical ties. We experiment on two datasets, the Enron email dataset to infer manager-subordinate relationships from email exchanges, and a scientific publication co-authorship dataset to detect PhD advisor-advisee relationships from paper co-authorships. Our experiments show that time-based methods perform considerably better than ranking-based methods. In the Enron dataset, they detect 48% of manager-subordinate ties versus 32% found by Rooted-PageRank. Similarly, in co-author dataset, they detect 62% of advisor-advisee ties compared to only 39% by Rooted-PageRank

A Binary-Ordered Probit Model of Cigarette Demand

This study analyzes the demand for cigarettes fitting observed zero outcomes with a trivariate model consisting of an equation for the starting smoking decision, an equation for the quitting decision, and an equation that models the level of cigarettes consumed. Five competing specifications are considered to explain level, with the ordered probit, which accommodates pile-ups of counts in the dependent variable, providing the best fit. Marginal effects of explanatory variables are calculated providing strong evidence of race and gender differences in consumption patterns. The estimated marginal effects are robust to alternative categorizations of the level of cigarettes.Demand and Price Analysis,

Influence of sodium chloride on wine yeast fermentation performance

This paper concerns research into the influence of salt (sodium chloride) on growth, viability and fermentation performance in a winemaking strain of the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Experimental fermentations were conducted in both laboratory-scale and industrial-scale experiments. Preculturing yeasts in elevated levels of sodium chloride, or salt “preconditioning” led to improved fermentation performance. This was manifest by preconditioned yeasts having an improved capability to ferment high-sugar containing media with increased cell viability and with elevated levels of produced ethanol. Salt-preconditioning most likely influenced the stress-tolerance of yeasts by inducing the synthesis of key metabolites such as trehalose and glycerol. These compounds may act to improve cells’ ability to withstand osmostress and ethanol toxicity during fermentations of grape must. Industrial-scale trials using salt-preconditioned yeasts verified the benefit of this novel physiological cell engineering approach to practical winemaking fermentations