New Estimates of Government Net Capital Stocks for 22 OECD Countries, 1960-2001

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of attention recently, yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment-recognizing that investment may be a poor proxy for the corresponding capital stock. This paper attempts to overcome the data shortage by providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund

Learning to Rank from Samples of Variable Quality

Training deep neural networks requires many training samples, but in practice, training labels are expensive to obtain and may be of varying quality, as some may be from trusted expert labelers while others might be from heuristics or other sources of weak supervision such as crowd-sourcing. This creates a fundamental quality-versus quantity trade-off in the learning process. Do we learn from the small amount of high-quality data or the potentially large amount of weakly-labeled data? We argue that if the learner could somehow know and take the label-quality into account when learning the data representation, we could get the best of both worlds. To this end, we introduce "fidelity-weighted learning" (FWL), a semi-supervised student-teacher approach for training deep neural networks using weakly-labeled data. FWL modulates the parameter updates to a student network (trained on the task we care about) on a per-sample basis according to the posterior confidence of its label-quality estimated by a teacher (who has access to the high-quality labels). Both student and teacher are learned from the data. We evaluate FWL on document ranking where we outperform state-of-the-art alternative semi-supervised methods.Comment: Presented at The First International SIGIR2016 Workshop on Learning From Limited Or Noisy Data For Information Retrieval. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1711.0279

New Estimates of Government Net Capital Stocks for 22 OECD Countries 1960-2001

The issue of whether government capital is productive has received a great deal of recent attention. Yet empirical analyses of public capital productivity have generally been limited to the official capital stock estimates available in a small sample of countries. Alternatively, many researchers have investigated the output effects of public investment- recognizing that investment may be a poor proxy for the corresponding capital stock. This paper attempts to overcome the data shortage by providing internationally comparable capital stock estimates for 22 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.Capital stock, capital goods, public capital, perpetual inventory method, OECD countries, public investment, productivity

End of the upswing in Euroland: No reason to cut interest rates

Economic expansion in Euroland has decelerated considerably after mid-2000 as a consequence of the weakening of growth in the world economy, the tightening of monetary policy by the European Central Bank as well as the burden imposed by higher oil prices. While the upswing in the euro area has come to an end, there is no reason to dramatize the current situation. It has to be kept in mind that economy-wide capacity utilization has already risen to its normal level, and it is not likely that real GDP will fall below potential output. The government budget of euro-area countries showed a surplus in 2000 for the first time since the 1960s. This year and next year the euro-area budget will change into a deficit also because taxes had been cut in a number of countries. It has to be criticized that consolidation efforts have ceased; in particular Germany, France, and Italy are still far away from a balanced budget. There is a risk that these countries will not meet their targets; the stability and growth programs are somewhat unrealistic because governments expect that higher trend growth than in the past will solve the problem. Many observers have urged the ECB to follow the example of the Fed and cut interest rates in order to prevent a sharp drop in economic activity. But in our view the ECB neither should nor will alter its course. First of all the current stance of monetary policy is not restrictive; according to the Taylor rule, short-term interest rates are even too low. Moreover, the growth of M3 will not fall below the reference value. Finally, the projections presented by the ECB last December do not justify a cut in interest rates. In the medium run, the expansion of the money stock is the most important factor for inflation, while in the short run inflation is also influenced by other factors. These considerations underlie the P-star model in which the development of inflation depends on the liquidity overhang, defined as price gap, as well as on cost factors. This model can explain the past movements of inflation quite well. As regards the inflation forecast it is important to note that the price gap has closed due to a rise in the price level and the slower increase in M3 in the past months. Consequently, we expect that the increase in consumer prices will gradually slow in 2001 and 2002. Recently, the Irish government has been criticized by the Council of European finance ministers for its fiscal policy. This came as a surprise in view of the excellent situation of public finances in Ireland. The critique aimed at the loosening of fiscal policy which would aggravate the bottlenecks in the economy. But it is also questionable whether a fiscal contraction in Ireland would be the appropriate response. All in all, the only way to cool down the economy seems to be an acceleration of wage growth and inflation and the implied real appreciation of the Irish pound. --

Petrodollars and imports of oil exporting countries

This paper investigates the empirical determinants of import demand in oil exporting countries. Using a new dataset including a large cross section of oil exporting countries, we show with a panel cointegration analysis that import demand in these countries depends positively on domestic demand and exports, the real exchange rate and the price of oil. Fiscal surpluses, on the other hand, tend to reduce the demand for imports. More specifically, our import elasticities estimated for oil exporting countries are not far from estimates found in the literature on industrial countries. In particular, we conclude that the import elasticity with respect to domestic activity is larger than one – a finding which is in contrast to standard theoretical predictions but in line with most empirical findings for other countries. These results are robust over a wide set of alternative specifications. JEL Classification: F14, F01, Q43Import Equation, oil exporting countries, Panel Cointegration

What Do We Know About the Effects of Fiscal Policy Shocks? A Comparative Analysis

The empirical literature studying the effects of fiscal policy shocks using VAR models differs among two important dimensions: the identification scheme and the VAR specification. Not surprisingly the results obtained are often diverse. The aim of this paper is to test whether differences in the results can be explained by different VAR specifications and/or alternative identification strategies. To this end, we estimate a common reduced-form VAR model to which we apply the different identification approaches proposed in the literature. We find that, after controlling for specification issues, the recursive approach and the Blanchard-Perotti approach yield very similar results, while the fiscal dummy variable approach yields significantly different results.Fiscal Policy Shocks, VAR analysis

A homotopy double groupoid of a Hausdorff space II: a van Kampen theorem

This paper is the second in a series exploring the properties of a functor which assigns a homotopy double groupoid with connections to a Hausdorff space. We show that this functor satisfies a version of the van Kampen theorem, and so is a suitable tool for nonabelian, 2-dimensional, local-to-global problems. The methods are analogous to those developed by Brown and Higgins for similar theorems for other higher homotopy groupoids. An integral part of the proof is a detailed discussion of commutative cubes in a double category with connections, and a proof of the key result that any composition of commutative cubes is commutative. These results have recently been generalised to all dimensions by Philip Higgins.Comment: 19 pages, uses picte

LocLinkVis: A Geographic Information Retrieval-Based System for Large-Scale Exploratory Search

In this paper we present LocLinkVis (Locate-Link-Visualize); a system which supports exploratory information access to a document collection based on geo-referencing and visualization. It uses a gazetteer which contains representations of places ranging from countries to buildings, and that is used to recognize toponyms, disambiguate them into places, and to visualize the resulting spatial footprints.Comment: SEM'1