Chinese Penetration and Importer Country Wages: Microevidence From Chile

The increasing importance of China in the world trade raises important questions on its impact on importing countries. This paper studies how import competition from China has affected wages in the Chilean Manufacturing Industry. Using plant-level data for the period 1996-2005, we find that increasing imports from China have tended to depress real wages in manufacturing plants. This negative effect on manufacturing workers is heterogeneous. We find that firms in labor-intensive industries and smaller firms have been quantitatively more affected by Chinese competition. These results hold to correction for sample selection and alternative measures of import competition from low-wages countries.

Hitchin-Kobayashi correspondence, quivers, and vortices

A twisted quiver bundle is a set of holomorphic vector bundles over a complex manifold, labelled by the vertices of a quiver, linked by a set of morphisms twisted by a fixed collection of holomorphic vector bundles, labelled by the arrows. When the manifold is Kaelher, quiver bundles admit natural gauge-theoretic equations, which unify many known equations for bundles with extra structure. In this paper we prove a Hitchin--Kobayashi correspondence for twisted quiver bundles over a compact Kaehler manifold, relating the existence of solutions to the gauge equations to a stability criterion, and consider its application to a number of situations related to Higgs bundles and dimensional reductions of the Hermitian--Einstein equations.Comment: 28 pages; larger introduction, added references for the introduction, added a short comment in Section 1, typos corrected, accepted in Comm. Math. Phy

The price setting behaviour of Spanish firms: evidence from survey data

This paper reports the results of a survey carried out by the Banco de España on a sample of around 2000 spanish firms to deepen the understanding of firms’ price setting behaviour. The main findings may be summarised as follows. Most Spanish firms are price setters that use predominantly state-dependent rules or a combination of time- and statedependent rules when reviewing their prices. Changes in costs are the main factor underlying price increases, whereas changes in market conditions (demand and competitors’ prices) are the main driving forces of price decreases. The degree of price flexibility is directly related to the share of energy inputs over total costs and to the intensity of competition, whereas it is inversely linked to the labour share. The three theories of price stickiness that receive the highest empirical support are implicit contracts, coordination failure and explicit contracts. JEL Classification: D40, E31price setting, Price stickiness, survey data

Price setting behaviour in Spain: stylised facts using consumer price micro data

This paper identifies the basic features of the price setting mechanism in the Spanish economy, using a large dataset that contains over 1.1 million price records and covers around 70% of the expenditure on the CPI basket. In particular, the paper identifies differences in the frequency and size of price adjustments across types of products and explores how these general features are affected by certain specific factors: seasonality, the level of inflation, changes in indirect taxation and the practice of using psychological and round prices. We find that prices do not change often but do so by a large amount, although there is a marked heterogeneity across products. Moreover, the high frequency of price reductions suggests that there is no strong downward rigidity. Our evidence also supports the use of time and state-dependent pricing strategies. JEL Classification: E31, D40, C25consumer prices, frequency of price changes, price setting

Fine structure in the large n limit of the non-hermitian Penner matrix model

In this paper we apply results on the asymptotic zero distribution of the Laguerre polynomials to discuss generalizations of the standard large $n$ limit in the non-hermitian Penner matrix model. In these generalizations $g_n n\to t$, but the product $g_n n$ is not necessarily fixed to the value of the 't Hooft coupling $t$. If $t>1$ and the limit $l = \lim_{n\rightarrow \infty} |\sin(\pi/g_n)|^{1/n}$ exists, then the large $n$ limit is well-defined but depends both on $t$ and on $l$. This result implies that for $t>1$ the standard large $n$ limit with $g_n n=t$ fixed is not well-defined. The parameter $l$ determines a fine structure of the asymptotic eigenvalue support: for $l\neq 0$ the support consists of an interval on the real axis with charge fraction $Q=1-1/t$ and an $l$-dependent oval around the origin with charge fraction $1/t$. For $l=1$ these two components meet, and for $l=0$ the oval collapses to the origin. We also calculate the total electrostatic energy $\mathcal{E}$, which turns out to be independent of $l$, and the free energy $\mathcal{F}=\mathcal{E}-Q\ln l$, which does depend of the fine structure parameter $l$. The existence of large $n$ asymptotic expansions of $\mathcal{F}$ beyond the planar limit as well as the double-scaling limit are also discussed

Scalable software architecture for on-line multi-camera video processing

In this paper we present a scalable software architecture for on-line multi-camera video processing, that guarantees a good trade off between computational power, scalability and flexibility. The software system is modular and its main blocks are the Processing Units (PUs), and the Central Unit. The Central Unit works as a supervisor of the running PUs and each PU manages the acquisition phase and the processing phase. Furthermore, an approach to easily parallelize the desired processing application has been presented. In this paper, as case study, we apply the proposed software architecture to a multi-camera system in order to efficiently manage multiple 2D object detection modules in a real-time scenario. System performance has been evaluated under different load conditions such as number of cameras and image sizes. The results show that the software architecture scales well with the number of camera and can easily works with different image formats respecting the real time constraints. Moreover, the parallelization approach can be used in order to speed up the processing tasks with a low level of overhea