11,604 research outputs found

    Who Benefits from Quality Labelling? Segregation Costs, International Trade and Producer Outcomes

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    This paper analyses the impact of quality based labelling on product prices, factor allocation and the resulting effects on producers within the context of an international trading system. A general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1998 data, describes United States and European Union labelling regimes for genetically modified agricultural products. The results indicate that the labelling choice of trade partners have large distributive impacts within national economies, as well as across countries and highlight the importance of using general equilibrium framework to understand the system wide impacts of segregation and quality labelling.Labelling, price premium, international trade, political economy, biotechnology.

    The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act: Part B Regulations

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    [Excerpt] The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) provides federal funding for the education of children with disabilities and requires, as a condition for the receipt of such funds, the provision of a free appropriate public education (FAPE). The statute also contains detailed due process provisions to ensure the provision of FAPE. On December 1, 2008, the Department of Education (ED) issued a final regulation to “clarify and strengthen current regulations” promulgated under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The areas covered by the regulation include (1) parental revocation of consent after consenting to the initial provision of services; (2) a state’s or local educational agency’s (LEA’s) obligation to make positive efforts to employ qualified individuals with disabilities; (3) representation of parents by non-attorneys in due process hearings; (4) state monitoring, technical assistance, and enforcement of the Part B program; and (5) the allocation of funds, under Sections 611 and 619 of the act, to LEAs that are not serving any children with disabilities. The regulations take effect on December 31, 2008. This report will briefly discuss the issues raised by these changes

    Nuclear Spirals as Signatures of Supermassive Black Holes

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    Recent high resolution images of spiral galaxies show wide varieties of features including nuclear spirals in the central parts. Some of the galaxies show grand-design nuclear spirals. The morphology of grand-design spirals can be further divided by the openness of the arms: tightly wound ones with winding angle of around 3π\pi radian and open spirals with winding angle of around π\pi radian. Based on hydrodynamical simulations, we have investigated the mechanism responsible for the openness of nuclear spirals. Since the gas flow in the nuclear region is mainly governed by the central mass concentration near the nuclei and the sound speed of the gas, we have examined various models with different mass concentration represented by the mass of the central black hole and different sound speeds. We found that the tightly wound spirals can be formed when the mass of the black hole is large enough to remove the inner-inner Lindblad resonances and sound speeds lie between 15 - 20 km/sec. Thus, the presence of the tightly wound nuclear spiral could imply the presence of relatively massive black hole in the center.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

    GM food technology abroad and its implications for Australia and New Zealand

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    The potential economic benefits from agricultural biotechnology adoption by ANZ need to be weighed against any likely loss of market access abroad for crops that may contain genetically modified (GM) organisms. This paper uses the global GTAP model to estimate effects of other countries' GM policies without and with ANZ farmers adopting GM varieties of various grains and oilseeds. The benefits to ANZ from adopting GM crops under a variety of scenarios are positive even in the presence of the ban on imports from GM-adopting countries by the EU (but not if East Asia also applied such a ban).Biotechnology, GMOs, regulation, trade policy, computable general equilibrium, Crop Production/Industries, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, C68, D58, F13, O3, Q17, Q18,

    Global and Local Two-Sample Tests via Regression

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    Two-sample testing is a fundamental problem in statistics. Despite its long history, there has been renewed interest in this problem with the advent of high-dimensional and complex data. Specifically, in the machine learning literature, there have been recent methodological developments such as classification accuracy tests. The goal of this work is to present a regression approach to comparing multivariate distributions of complex data. Depending on the chosen regression model, our framework can efficiently handle different types of variables and various structures in the data, with competitive power under many practical scenarios. Whereas previous work has been largely limited to global tests which conceal much of the local information, our approach naturally leads to a local two-sample testing framework in which we identify local differences between multivariate distributions with statistical confidence. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach both theoretically and empirically, under some well-known parametric and nonparametric regression methods. Our proposed methods are applied to simulated data as well as a challenging astronomy data set to assess their practical usefulness
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