86,036 research outputs found
Sticky Wages. Evidence from Quarterly Microeconomic Data.
This paper documents nominal wage stickiness using an original quarterly firm-level dataset. We use the ACEMO survey, which reports the base wage for up to 12 employee categories in French firms over the period 1998 to 2005, and obtain the following main results. First, the quarterly frequency of wage change is around 35 percent. Second, there is some downward rigidity in the base wage. Third, wage changes are mainly synchronized within firms but to a large extent staggered across .firms. Fourth, standard Calvo or Taylor schemes fail to match micro wage adjustment patterns, but fixed duration "Taylor-like" wage contracts are observed for a minority of firms. Based on a two-thresholds sample selection model, we perform an econometric analysis of wage changes. Our results suggest that the timing of wage adjustments is not state-dependent, and are consistent with existence of predetermined of wage changes. They also suggest that both backward- and forward-looking behavior is relevant in wage setting.Wage stickiness ; Wage predetermination.
Observing the sky at extremely high energies with the Cherenkov Telescope Array: Status of the GCT project
The Cherenkov Telescope Array is the main global project of ground-based
gamma-ray astronomy for the coming decades. Performance will be significantly
improved relative to present instruments, allowing a new insight into the
high-energy Universe [1]. The nominal CTA southern array will include a
sub-array of seventy 4 m telescopes spread over a few square kilometers to
study the sky at extremely high energies, with the opening of a new window in
the multi-TeV energy range. The Gamma-ray Cherenkov Telescope (GCT) is one of
the proposed telescope designs for that sub-array. The GCT prototype recorded
its first Cherenkov light on sky in 2015. After an assessment phase in 2016,
new observations have been performed successfully in 2017. The GCT
collaboration plans to install its first telescopes and cameras on the CTA site
in Chile in 2018-2019 and to contribute a number of telescopes to the
subsequent CTA production phase.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, ICRC201
A physical layer network coding based modify-and-forward with opportunistic secure cooperative transmission protocol
This paper investigates a new secure relaying scheme, namely physical layer network coding based modify-and-forward (PMF), in which a relay node linearly combines the decoded data sent by a source node with an encrypted key before conveying the mixed data to a destination node. We first derive the general expression for the generalized secrecy outage probability (GSOP) of the PMF scheme and then use it to analyse the GSOP performance of various relaying and direct transmission strategies. The GSOP performance comparison indicates that these transmission strategies offer different advantages depending on the channel conditions and target secrecy rates, and relaying is not always desirable in terms of secrecy. Subsequently, we develop an opportunistic secure transmission protocol for cooperative wireless relay networks and formulate an optimisation problem to determine secrecy rate thresholds (SRTs) to dynamically select the optimal transmission strategy for achieving the lowest GSOP. The conditions for the existence of the SRTs are derived for various channel scenarios
An experimental proposal to study collapse of the wave function in travelling-wave parametric amplifiers
The read-out of a microwave qubit state occurs using an amplification chain
that enlarges the quantum state to a signal detectable with a classical
measurement apparatus. However, at what point in this process did we really
`measure' the quantum state? In order to investigate whether the `measurement'
takes place in the amplification chain, we propose to construct a microwave
interferometer that has a parametric amplifier added to each of its arms.
Feeding the interferometer with single photons, the visibility depends on the
gain of the amplifiers and whether a measurement collapse has taken place
during the amplification process. We calculate the interference visibility as
given by standard quantum mechanics as a function of gain, insertion loss and
temperature and find a magnitude of in the limit of large gain without
taking into account losses. This number reduces to in case the insertion
loss of the amplifiers is dB at a temperature of mK. We show that if
the wave function collapses within the interferometer, we will measure a
reduced visibility compared to the prediction from standard quantum mechanics
once this collapse process sets in.Comment: 21 pages and 23 figures (including appendices and subfigures). v4:
Abstract and introduction rewritten and note on stochasticity of quantum
state collapse added to section 6. v5: no content changes w.r.t. v
A model for atomic and molecular interstellar gas: The Meudon PDR code
We present the revised ``Meudon'' model of Photon Dominated Region (PDR
code), presently available on the web under the Gnu Public Licence at:
http://aristote.obspm.fr/MIS. General organisation of the code is described
down to a level that should allow most observers to use it as an interpretation
tool with minimal help from our part. Two grids of models, one for low
excitation diffuse clouds and one for dense highly illuminated clouds, are
discussed, and some new results on PDR modelisation highlighted.Comment: accepted in ApJ sup
Initial POLAR MFE observation of substorm signatures in the polar magnetosphere
This paper studies substorm influences in the polar magnetosphere using data from the POLAR magnetic field experiment (MFE). The POLAR spacecraft remains in the high altitude polar magnetosphere for extended periods around apogee. There it can stay at nearly constant altitude through all phases of a substorm, which was not possible on previous missions. We report such an event on March 28, 1996. Ground magnetometers monitored substorm activity, while the POLAR spacecraft, directly over the pole at (−0.8, −0.6, 8.5) RE in GSM coordinates, observed a corresponding perturbation in the total magnetic field strength. The total magnetic field first increased, then recovered toward quiet levels, consistent with erosion of magnetic flux from the dayside magnetosphere, followed by transport of that flux to the magnetotail, and eventual onset of tail reconnection and the return of that magnetic flux to the dayside magnetosphere
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