A comparative study of five Dutch disease models: a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Social Sciences at Massey University

During the past decade, the sudden and sharp increases in oil prices, coupled with the discovery and extraction of oil in the North Sea, have contributed considerable interest in the macroeconomic problems of oil-exporting countries. It is well known that a domestic oil discovery can give rise to wealth effects that cause a squeeze in the traded goods sector of an open economy. The decline of the manufacturing sector following an oil discovery is termed the 'Dutch disease', and has been investigated in many recent studies which embody a general equilibrium model. This is detailed in Chapter One where the development of Dutch disease literature is discussed. Despite the development of a wide range of the Dutch disease models, There is still a lack of consensus regarding the analysis on the issue of Dutch disease. This thesis aims to study a number of different models of the Dutch disease by focussing on the following considerations: i) the underlying theoretical framework with reference to some main-stream economic theories, such as those based on Trade theory, Neoclassical and Keynesian traditions; ii) the assumptions made within each framework regarding monetary and supply-side conditions; iii) analysis of the various effects of exogenous disturbances on the economy; and iv) evaluation of the relationship between the underlying assumptions and the conclusions drawn from the model analysis. Chapter Two outlines the classification of the Dutch disease model into three broad categories. These categories distinguish between the types of macroeconomic effects which give rise to the Dutch disease phenomenon. Detailed algebraic specification of each model, using standard notations developed for this thesis, along with the assumptions made are described in Chapter Three. Chapter Four is devoted to a comparative study of the models. In each section, two models are compared to draw out the differences in their assumptions and approach, and to show how these differences can affect their final conclusions about the effect of various exogenous disturbances. A summary of the main results of the comparative study is given in Chapter Five. Some points for further research are also briefly discussed

Reducing Model Complexity for DNN Based Large-Scale Audio Classification

Audio classification is the task of identifying the sound categories that are associated with a given audio signal. This paper presents an investigation on large-scale audio classification based on the recently released AudioSet database. AudioSet comprises 2 millions of audio samples from YouTube, which are human-annotated with 527 sound category labels. Audio classification experiments with the balanced training set and the evaluation set of AudioSet are carried out by applying different types of neural network models. The classification performance and the model complexity of these models are compared and analyzed. While the CNN models show better performance than MLP and RNN, its model complexity is relatively high and undesirable for practical use. We propose two different strategies that aim at constructing low-dimensional embedding feature extractors and hence reducing the number of model parameters. It is shown that the simplified CNN model has only 1/22 model parameters of the original model, with only a slight degradation of performance.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201

A Corpus of Sentence-level Revisions in Academic Writing: A Step towards Understanding Statement Strength in Communication

The strength with which a statement is made can have a significant impact on the audience. For example, international relations can be strained by how the media in one country describes an event in another; and papers can be rejected because they overstate or understate their findings. It is thus important to understand the effects of statement strength. A first step is to be able to distinguish between strong and weak statements. However, even this problem is understudied, partly due to a lack of data. Since strength is inherently relative, revisions of texts that make claims are a natural source of data on strength differences. In this paper, we introduce a corpus of sentence-level revisions from academic writing. We also describe insights gained from our annotation efforts for this task.Comment: 6 pages, to appear in Proceedings of ACL 2014 (short paper

Experimental investigation on cold-formed steel beams under pure bending

This paper presents the flexural behaviour of cold-formed double lipped channels beams under pure bending action. Two channel sections are bolted back-to-back to form an I-shape structural beam member. A series of six experiment tests were carried out on beam specimens DC200 and DC250, each with 200 mm depth and 250 mm depth respectively. The thickness of beam section is 2 mm and the design yield strength is 350 N/mm2. All beams failed at local buckling at top-flange due to lateral instability of the cold-formed steel structural members. The moment resistance for DC200 is 17.87 kNm and DC250 is 31.53 kNm. The experimental results are compared to theoretical resistance prediction based on British Standard and Eurocode. The comparison showed that the experimental moment capacity is lower than the theoretical bending moment resistance but higher than theoretical buckling moment resistance from Eurocode. This showed that a better agreement is achieved between experimental data and Eurocode buckling moment resistance for cold-formed steel beam under pure bending

The Impacts of Fees and Taxes on Choices of Development Timing and Capital Intensity

This article compares the effects of various fiscal policies on choices of development timing and capital intensity when rents on housing follow geometric Brownian motion with those when rents follow arithmetic Brownian motion. These policy instruments include fees on capital, housing, and land, and taxes on urban income, and properties both before and after development. Regardless of the motion of rents, when one choice is fixed, the effects of these policy instruments on the other choice are qualitatively the same. When the two choices are determined endogenously, although these policy instruments exhibit the same qualitative effect on the choice of development timing, they may exhibit different effects on the choice of capital intensity if rents on housing follow different types of motions.Capital intensity, Development Timing, Fees, Taxation, Real Options, International Development, G13, H21, H23, R52,

Shrewd Selection Speeds Surfing: Use Smart EXP3!

In this paper, we explore the use of multi-armed bandit online learning techniques to solve distributed resource selection problems. As an example, we focus on the problem of network selection. Mobile devices often have several wireless networks at their disposal. While choosing the right network is vital for good performance, a decentralized solution remains a challenge. The impressive theoretical properties of multi-armed bandit algorithms, like EXP3, suggest that it should work well for this type of problem. Yet, its real-word performance lags far behind. The main reasons are the hidden cost of switching networks and its slow rate of convergence. We propose Smart EXP3, a novel bandit-style algorithm that (a) retains the good theoretical properties of EXP3, (b) bounds the number of switches, and (c) yields significantly better performance in practice. We evaluate Smart EXP3 using simulations, controlled experiments, and real-world experiments. Results show that it stabilizes at the optimal state, achieves fairness among devices and gracefully deals with transient behaviors. In real world experiments, it can achieve 18% faster download over alternate strategies. We conclude that multi-armed bandit algorithms can play an important role in distributed resource selection problems, when practical concerns, such as switching costs and convergence time, are addressed.Comment: Full pape

A variation of McShane's identity for 2-bridge links

We give a variation of McShane's identity, which describes the cusp shape of a hyperbolic 2-bridge link in terms of the complex translation lengths of simple loops on the bridge sphere. We also explicitly determine the set of end invariants of $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$-characters of the once-punctured torus corresponding to the holonomy representations of the complete hyperbolic structures of 2-bridge link complements.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figure

Exact Moderate Deviation Asymptotics in Streaming Data Transmission

In this paper, a streaming transmission setup is considered where an encoder observes a new message in the beginning of each block and a decoder sequentially decodes each message after a delay of $T$ blocks. In this streaming setup, the fundamental interplay between the coding rate, the error probability, and the blocklength in the moderate deviations regime is studied. For output symmetric channels, the moderate deviations constant is shown to improve over the block coding or non-streaming setup by exactly a factor of $T$ for a certain range of moderate deviations scalings. For the converse proof, a more powerful decoder to which some extra information is fedforward is assumed. The error probability is bounded first for an auxiliary channel and this result is translated back to the original channel by using a newly developed change-of-measure lemma, where the speed of decay of the remainder term in the exponent is carefully characterized. For the achievability proof, a known coding technique that involves a joint encoding and decoding of fresh and past messages is applied with some manipulations in the error analysis.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor