3,430 research outputs found
101 Proposals to reform the Stability and Growth Pact. Why so many? A Survey
The failure of key EU Member States to respect the requirements of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) a few years after its inception triggered a heated debate on how to reform the framework of fiscal policy coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper systematically analyzes 101 reform proposals presented by professional academic and non-academic economists prior to March 2005, when the Council of the European Union adopted a revised version of the SGP. Each proposal is characterized by a set of variables reflecting features such as the degree of modification of the SGP, the background of its author(s), the main aim attached to fiscal policy coordination in the EMU, the timing of the proposal and the type of proposal made. Using multivariate statistical analysis, roughly four different schools of thought concerning the reform of the SGP are identified. In line with the main findings of the political economy literature, all four schools of thought share the view that in the absence of specific rules fiscal policy would lead to excessive deficits and hence affect the conduct of the common monetary policy. However, beyond this common denominator, there is no consensus on how best to co-ordinate fiscal policy.Several explanations for the multitude of proposals are presented, the most important being the present lack of a consensus in the economics profession concerning the role of fiscal policy.Monetary union, euro, fiscal policy, Stability and Growth Pact, international policy coordination, EMU, European Union, Europe, Fischer, Jonung, Larch
101 proposals to reform the Stability and Growth Pact. Why so many? A survey.
The failure of key EU Member States to respect the provisions of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) a few years after its inception triggered a heated debate on how to reform the framework of fiscal policy coordination in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). This paper analyzes 101 reform proposals presented by professional academic and non-academic economists prior to March 2005, when the Council of the European Union adopted a revised version of the SGP. Roughly four different schools of thought concerning the reform of the SGP are identified. In line with the main findings of the political economy literature, all four schools of thought share the view that in the absence of specific rules fiscal policy would lead to excessive deficits and hence affect the conduct of the common monetary policy. However, beyond this common denominator, there is no consensus on how best to co-ordinate fiscal policy. We present several explanations for the multitude of proposals, the most important being the present lack of a consensus in the economics profession concerning the role of fiscal policy. Economists hold diverging views on the goals, instruments, efficiency and institutions for fiscal policy-making. This state of affairs is in sharp contrast to the case of monetary policy. Also, the euro area is the first case where monetary policy-making is centralized while fiscal policy-making is decentralized to national governments.Monetary union, euro, fiscal policy, Stability and Growth Pact, international policy coordination, EMU, European nion, Europe
Bidirectional Text Compression in External Memory
Bidirectional compression algorithms work by substituting repeated substrings by references that, unlike in the famous LZ77-scheme, can point to either direction. We present such an algorithm that is particularly suited for an external memory implementation. We evaluate it experimentally on large data sets of size up to 128 GiB (using only 16 GiB of RAM) and show that it is significantly faster than all known LZ77 compressors, while producing a roughly similar number of factors. We also introduce an external memory decompressor for texts compressed with any uni- or bidirectional compression scheme
Code for all: a case study in entrepreneurial finance - evaluation of a social impact start-up from a venture capital firm-s perspective
While the many examples of start-up funding journeys offer a large basis for analysis, the
scarcity of social impact ventures leaves many pending questions about funding these types of
ventures. We review the history of a Portuguese start-up named âCode For Allâ by creating a
case study. We draw conclusions on which typology of financing fits best with the social impact
start-up, analyze how a venture capital firm would assess and value Code For All, and lastly
determine a rationale of how such a venture could quantify their impact on society
More than the sum of its parts â pattern mining, neural networks, and how they complement each other
In this thesis we explore pattern mining and deep learning. Often seen as orthogonal, we show that these fields complement each other and propose to combine them to gain from each otherâs strengths. We, first, show how to efficiently discover succinct and non-redundant sets of patterns that provide insight into data beyond conjunctive statements. We leverage the interpretability of such patterns to unveil how and which information flows through neural networks, as well as what characterizes their decisions. Conversely, we show how to combine continuous optimization with pattern discovery, proposing a neural network that directly encodes discrete patterns, which allows us to apply pattern mining at a scale orders of magnitude larger than previously possible. Large neural networks are, however, exceedingly expensive to train for which âlottery ticketsâ â small, well-trainable sub-networks in randomly initialized neural networks â offer a remedy. We identify theoretical limitations of strong tickets and overcome them by equipping these tickets with the property of universal approximation. To analyze whether limitations in ticket sparsity are algorithmic or fundamental, we propose a framework to plant and hide lottery tickets. With novel ticket benchmarks we then conclude that the limitation is likely algorithmic, encouraging further developments for which our framework offers means to measure progress.In dieser Arbeit befassen wir uns mit Mustersuche und Deep Learning. Oft als gegensĂ€tzlich betrachtet, verbinden wir diese Felder, um von den StĂ€rken beider zu profitieren. Wir zeigen erst, wie man effizient prĂ€gnante Mengen von Mustern entdeckt, die Einsichten ĂŒber konjunktive Aussagen hinaus geben. Wir nutzen dann die Interpretierbarkeit solcher Muster, um zu verstehen wie und welche Information durch neuronale Netze flieĂen und was ihre Entscheidungen charakterisiert. Umgekehrt verbinden wir kontinuierliche Optimierung mit Mustererkennung durch ein neuronales Netz welches diskrete Muster direkt abbildet, was Mustersuche in einigen GröĂenordnungen höher erlaubt als bisher möglich. Das Training groĂer neuronaler Netze ist jedoch extrem teuer, fĂŒr das âLotterieticketsâ â kleine, gut trainierbare Subnetzwerke in zufĂ€llig initialisierten neuronalen Netzen â eine Lösung bieten. Wir zeigen theoretische EinschrĂ€nkungen von starken Tickets und wie man diese ĂŒberwindet, indem man die Tickets mit der Eigenschaft der universalen Approximierung ausstattet. Um zu beantworten, ob EinschrĂ€nkungen in TicketgröĂe algorithmischer oder fundamentaler Natur sind, entwickeln wir ein Rahmenwerk zum Einbetten und Verstecken von Tickets, die als ModellfĂ€lle dienen. Basierend auf unseren Ergebnissen schlieĂen wir, dass die EinschrĂ€nkungen algorithmische Ursachen haben, was weitere Entwicklungen begĂŒnstigt, fĂŒr die unser Rahmenwerk Fortschrittsevaluierungen ermöglicht
Macroscopic Floquet topological crystalline steel pump
The transport of a steel sphere on top of two dimensional periodic magnetic
patterns is studied experimentally. Transport of the sphere is achieved by
moving an external permanent magnet on a closed loop around the two dimensional
crystal. The transport is topological i.e. the steel sphere is transported by a
primitive unit vector of the lattice when the external magnet loop winds around
specific directions. We experimentally determine the set of directions the
loops must enclose for nontrivial transport of the steel sphere into various
directions
Linear Time Runs Over General Ordered Alphabets
A run in a string is a maximal periodic substring. For example, the string
contains the runs
and . There are less than runs in any
length- string, and computing all runs for a string over a linearly-sortable
alphabet takes time (Bannai et al., SODA 2015). Kosolobov
conjectured that there also exists a linear time runs algorithm for general
ordered alphabets (Inf. Process. Lett. 2016). The conjecture was almost proven
by Crochemore et al., who presented an time algorithm
(where is the extremely slowly growing inverse Ackermann function).
We show how to achieve time by exploiting combinatorial
properties of the Lyndon array, thus proving Kosolobov's conjecture.Comment: This work has been submitted to ICALP 202
Lyndon Words Accelerate Suffix Sorting
Suffix sorting is arguably the most fundamental building block in string algorithmics, like regular sorting in the broader field of algorithms. It is thus not surprising that the literature is full of algorithms for suffix sorting, in particular focusing on their practicality. However, the advances on practical suffix sorting stalled with the emergence of the DivSufSort algorithm more than 10 years ago, which, up to date, has remained the fastest suffix sorter. This article shows how properties of Lyndon words can be exploited algorithmically to accelerate suffix sorting again. Our new algorithm is 6-19% faster than DivSufSort on real-world texts, and up to three times as fast on artificial repetitive texts. It can also be parallelized, where similar speedups can be observed. Thus, we make the first advances in practical suffix sorting after more than a decade of standstill
The Effectiveness of Security Interventions on GitHub
In 2017, GitHub was the first online open source platform to show security
alerts to its users. It has since introduced further security interventions to
help developers improve the security of their open source software. In this
study, we investigate and compare the effects of these interventions. This
offers a valuable empirical perspective on security interventions in the
context of software development, enriching the predominantly qualitative and
survey-based literature landscape with substantial data-driven insights. We
conduct a time series analysis on security-altering commits covering the entire
history of a large-scale sample of over 50,000 GitHub repositories to infer the
causal effects of the security alert, security update, and code scanning
interventions. Our analysis shows that while all of GitHub's security
interventions have a significant positive effect on security, they differ
greatly in their effect size. By comparing the design of each intervention, we
identify the building blocks that worked well and those that did not. We also
provide recommendations on how practitioners can improve the design of their
interventions to enhance their effectiveness
- âŠ