Current Economic Conditions and Selected Forecasts

This report contains information regarding the Current Economic Conditions, Recent Macroeconomic Developments, Posture of Monetary and Fiscal Policy, Summary of Current Developments, Sources of GDP Growth, Economic Forecasts 2001, and Promotion of Economic Growth. The report also presents statistics regarding the Growth Rate of Real GDP v. Final Sales, Civilian Unemployment Rate, Rate of Change in the Consumer Price Index, Rate of Change in the GDP Deflators, Rate of Change in Labor Costs, U.S. Foreign Trade Deficit, Alternative Measures of Fiscal Policy, The Growth Rates of the Monetary Aggregates, etc

The competing claims of crime versus heritage in A Memento for Istanbul, Ahmed Umit

This article notes the competing narrative drives, in A Memento for Istanbul byAhmed Ümit, of a crime police procedural and of a celebration of the history of Istanbul. It examines the tensions in play with these competing trajectories and questions whether they compete for attention in an expansive layering of the readerly experience, or pull in opposite and damaging directions? Noting that readers are always plural, and some will look for the whodunit while others will enjoy the historical information, the paper traces the different ways in which history is used in the novel, beginning with the obvious placing of the murder victims at the various cultural sites which trace the emerging history of the city, starting with Byzantium and ending in the present. This mix of taut crime narrative and travel guide, the article concludes, could perhaps be most usefully considered as a hybrid text, a ‘cross-over’ novel incorporating two separate generic expectations where neither is secondary to the other

Jeanette Winterson: interrogating masculinity with violence

Jeanette Winterson is known for the way she questions gender categories and confounds expectations of the feminine, from Villanelle’s active swashbuckling to the Dog Woman’s casual violence, from the unknown narrator of Written on the Body who rejects gendered identity to the fluid interplay of the narrator of The PowerBook shuffling between masculine and feminine via the engorged tulip, Winterson is someone we look to for texts that can unpack gender stereotypes. Her self-reflexive post modern texts deconstruct the divisions between masculinity and femininity

Preparation for implementing the proposed EC Water Framework Directive in Finland

Finland reorganised its environmental administration in 1995 when thirteen Regional Environmental Centres (RECs) and one national agency called the Finnish Environment Institute (FEI) were created. The REC's and the FEI have been entrusted with functions related to water resources management. RECs and FEI together with the Ministry of Agriculture and Foresty have appointed a steering group which will supervise the implementation of the EC Water Framework Directive in Finlan

A Regression Discontinuity Design for Ordinal Running Variables: Evaluating Central Bank Purchases of Corporate Bonds

Regression discontinuity (RD) is a widely used quasi-experimental design for causal inference. In the standard RD, the assignment to treatment is determined by a continuous pretreatment variable (i.e., running variable) falling above or below a pre-fixed threshold. In the case of the corporate sector purchase programme (CSPP) of the European Central Bank, which involves large-scale purchases of securities issued by corporations in the euro area, such a threshold can be defined in terms of an ordinal running variable. This feature poses challenges to RD estimation due to the lack of a meaningful measure of distance. To evaluate such program, this paper proposes an RD approach for ordinal running variables under the local randomization framework. The proposal first estimates an ordered probit model for the ordinal running variable. The estimated probability of being assigned to treatment is then adopted as a latent continuous running variable and used to identify a covariate-balanced subsample around the threshold. Assuming local unconfoundedness of the treatment in the subsample, an estimate of the effect of the program is obtained by employing a weighted estimator of the average treatment effect. Two weighting estimators---overlap weights and ATT weights---as well as their augmented versions are considered. We apply the method to evaluate the causal effect of the CSPP and find a statistically significant and negative effect on corporate bond spreads at issuance.Comment: Also available as Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) 1213, Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Are

Method of measuring the thickness of radioactive thin films

Thickness monitor consists of proportional X-ray counter coupled to pulse counting system, copper filter over face of counter, rotatable collimator containing radioactive source, and rotatable shutter. Monitor can be used as integral part of neutron generator. It has been used to measure titanium tritide film thicknesses from 0.1 to 30 micrometers

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An Examination of Clery Crime Statistics at Four Year Public Institutions of Higher Education Served by or Without Dedicated University Police Departments

This paper was written to examine the impact of dedicated university police departments relative to reporting Clery statistics, fundamental information that prospective students and their parents can use in selecting an institution of higher education. The prospect of gaining knowledge and bettering one’s life occurs best when taking place in a safe and transparent environment. While college and university campuses are not immune to crime, similar to society as a whole, they are statistically safer places by which learning can occur. The college years are instrumental in shaping the lives and mindset of America’s youth by exposing them to a variety of cultural experiences and divergent beliefs. The higher education marketplace has become an exceedingly competitive environment wherein students, parents and society have an expectation of a safe environment. Campus administrators can best evaluate, control and mitigate issues if they are reported and data is analyzed to prevent similar instances in the future. Reporting and data acquisition is best accomplished by dedicated, trained and honorable administrators who desire to truly understand criminal activities occurring at their establishments. An in-depth examination of literature concerning Clery statistics reveals the significant impact reported crime has on campuses of institutions of higher education (IHE’s). This data can be utilized to influence and affect change in preventing crime on college and university campuses. This paper specifically focuses on the difference in reported data from IHE’s with dedicated university police departments versus IHE’s without dedicated university police departments. This study revealed that the most prevalent reported crimes were disciplinary actions followed by arrests and criminal offenses. Paired samples t tests were conducted and determined that there was a statistical difference in the amount of crimes reported by IHE’s with a dedicated university police department versus IHE’s without a dedicated university police department for the crime categories of criminal offenses, VAWA offenses, arrests, disciplinary actions and fires. Hate crimes was the singular crime category analyzed that did not reveal a difference in the crime reporting for IHE’s with or without a dedicated university police department