Influence of Family Communication on Organ Donation

Organ donors are in high demand and although many individuals have a favorable attitude toward organ donation, very few are committed to donating. This study aims to examine the impact of mother-daughter relationships and the conversation that stems from this bond on decisions to donate. Some factors that exist within family communication such as attitudes, willingness to communicate, experience, and knowledge may not just impact the perspectives of adults but also the donation decisions of their college-aged children

Canadian Monetary Policy: Lessons from the Crisis

The following is a report from a panel of the same title held at the Rimini Conference in Economics and Finance, Rimini, Italy, 10-13 June 2010, and organized by the Rimini Conference for Economic Analysis (RCEA). Panel Chair: Angelo Melino (University of Toronto and RCEA). Panelists: David Andolfatto (Vice President and Economist, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University; RCEA), David E.W. Laidler (Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario; Fellow-in-Residence, C.D. Howe Institute; FRSC; Honorary Senior Fellow RCEA), John Murray (Deputy Governor, Bank of Canada).

Moving Monetary Policy Forward: Why Small Steps - and a Lower Inflation Target - Make Sense for the Bank of Canada

The current monetary policy agreement between the Bank of Canada and the Department of Finance is set to expire at the end of 2011. Among the policy options under consideration is the adoption of either a lower inflation target or a switch to price-level targeting. The recent financial crisis provided a costly reminder that price stability does not necessarily guarantee financial stability, and the Bank’s post-2011 mandate might include a role for asset market stability. This Commentary offers an overview of the policy options now being contemplated for the renewal of the monetary policy framework in 2011 and addresses some of the more technical issues related to the post-2011 monetary policy framework.Monetary Policy, Bank of Canada, inflation targeting (IT), price-level targeting (PLT)

Duration Dependence and Nonparametric Heterogeneity: A Monte Carlo Study

We examine the behaviour of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) for a discrete duration model with unobserved heterogeneity and unknown duration dependence. We find that a nonparametric specification of either the duration dependence or unobserved heterogeneity, when the other feature of the hazard is known to be absent, leads to estimators that are well behaved even in modestly sized samples. In contrast, there is a large and systematic bias in the parameters of these components when both are specified nonparametrically, as well as a complementary bias in the coefficients on observed heterogeneity. Furthermore, these biases diminish very gradually as sample size increases. We find that a minor modification of the quasilikelihood that penalizes specifications with many points of support leads to a dramatic improvement.Duration model, unobserved heterogeneity, NPMLE

Greater Transparency Needed

Financial market participants would benefit from a better understanding of how the Bank of Canada sets the overnight interest rate in response to economic developments. More accurate forecasts of the Bank’s future policy choices would lead to better financial decisions and better price and wage-setting decisions, making it easier for the Bank to hit its 2 percent inflation target. Currently, the Bank’s internal model predicts a path for the overnight rate that is inconsistent with the expectations of the Bank’s Governing Council. The Bank could achieve greater transparency by publishing its own conditional forecasts of the future path of the overnight rate or, failing that, by publishing such forecasts with a six-month lag. This would enable market participants to better understand what these forecasts mean and how to use them in economic decision-making.Monetary Policy, Bank of Canada, overnight interest rate, inflation target

State Dependent Preferences Can Explain the Equity Premium Puzzle

We introduce state dependent recursive preferences into the Mehra-Prescott economy. We show that such preferences can match the historical first two moments of the returns on equity and the risk free rate. Other authors have reported similar results using state dependent expected utility preferences. These authors have tended to emphasize the importance of countercyclical risk aversion in explaining the equity premium puzzle. We find that countercyclical risk aversion plays an important role but only when combined with modest cyclical variation in intertemporal substitution.

Cyclical Behavior of Prices and Quantities in the Automobile Market

This paper has a simple goal, that of understanding the joint behaviorof prices and quantities in a particular market. More precisely, it examines whether we can find decision problems for suppliers and buyers, together with a market equilibrium structure, which are consistent with the observed price and quantity time series. Because of the relative homogeneity of the product, of the size of the market, end of the quality of the data, the market chosen is the automobile market.The first conclusion we reach is that this goal is difficult to achieve.The behavior of prices appears inconsistent with simple -- competitive, monopolistically competitive or monopolistic -- market structures. Prices appear, in a well defined sense, to be too "sticky". We then consider potentiail explanations and extensions. None appears completely satisfactory. In particular, the introduction of costs of changing prices does not seem able to explain the joint behavior of prices and quantities.

Assessment of Barriers of Contraceptive Use in Rural Burundi: A Mixed Methods Study

Burundi’s high maternal and child mortality is caused in part by the high fertility rate, prompted by low rate of contraceptive use. Available sources report a contraceptive use of 18% among married women, but this excludes unmarried sexually active women. This study employed mixed methods to understand rates of contraceptive use in rural Burundi. We first assessed availability and uptake of contraceptives in 39 health clinics in the rural districts of Rumonge and Bururi. We selected sites with different utilization rates and conducted individual interviews and focus group discussions. 56 individuals participated including women, men, facility managers and community leaders. Uptake of family planning averaged 2.96%. Greater uptake was positively associated with the number of health professionals engaged and trained in family planning service provision as well as the number of different types of contraceptives available. Uptake was inversely associated with duration of stockouts and number of contraceptives stocked out. Qualitative data pointed to scarce resources, sociocultural factors, fear of disclosure and side effects, partner’s disapproval, and lack of information on modern contraceptives as explanations of low uptake. Interventions would need to take into account one or more of these factors in order to improve uptake of family plannin

Real-time rendering of cities at night

En synthèse d’images, déterminer la couleur d’une surface au pixel d’une image doit considérer toutes les sources de lumière de la scène pour évaluer leur contribution lumineuse sur la surface en question. Cette évaluation de la visibilité et en l’occurrence de la radiance incidente des sources de lumière est très coûteuse. Elle n’est généralement pas traitée pour chaque source de lumière en rendu temps-réel. Une ville en pleine nuit est un exemple de telle scène comportant une grande quantité de sources de lumière pour lesquelles les rendus temps-réel modernes ne peuvent pas évaluer la visibilité de toutes les sources de lumière individuelles. Nous présentons une technique exploitant la cohérence spatiale des villes et la co-hérence temporelle des rendus temps-réel pour accélérer le calcul de la visibilité des sources de lumière. Notre technique de visibilité profite des bloqueurs naturels et pré-dominants de la ville pour rapidement réduire la liste de sources de lumière à évaluer etainsi, accélérer le calcul de la visibilité en assumant des bloqueurs sous forme de boîtes alignées majoritairement selon certains axes dominants. Pour garantir la propagation des occultations, nous fusionnons les bloqueurs adjacents dans un seul et même bloqueur conservateur en termes d’occultations. Notre technique relie la visibilité de la caméra avec la visibilité des surfaces pour réduire le nombre d’évaluations à effectuer à chaque rendu, et ne calcule la visibilité que pour les surfaces visibles du point de vue de la caméra. Finalement, nous intégrons la technique de visibilité avec une technique de rendu réaliste, Lightcuts, qui a été mise à jour sur GPU dans un scénario de rendu temps-réel. Même si notre technique ne permettra pas d’atteindre le temps-réel en général dans une scène complexe, elle réduit suffisamment les contraintes pour espérer y arriver un jour.In image synthesis, to determine the final color of a surface at a specific image pixel,we must consider all potential light sources and evaluate if they contribute to the illumination. Since such evaluation is slow, real-time renderers traditionally do not evaluate each light source, and instead preemptively choose locally important light sources for which to evaluate visibility. A city at night is such a scene containing many light sources for which modern real-time renderers cannot allow themselves to evaluate every light source at every frame.We present a technique exploiting spatial coherency in cities and temporal coherency of real-time walkthroughs to reduce visibility evaluations in such scenes. Our technique uses the natural and predominant occluders of a city to efficiently reduce the number of light sources to evaluate. To further accelerate the evaluation we project the bounding boxes of buildings instead of their detailed model (these boxes should be oriented mostly along a few directions), and fuse adjacent occluders on an occlusion plane to form larger conservative occluders. Our technique also integrates results from camera visibility to further reduce the number of visibility evaluations executed per frame, and evaluates visible light sources for facades visible from the point of view of the camera. Finally, we integrate an offline rendering technique, Lightcuts, by adapting it to real-time GPU rendering to further save on rendering time.Even though our technique does not achieve real-time frame rates in a complex scene,it reduces the complexity of the problem enough so that we can hope to achieve such frame rates one day

Static Load Bolted Joint Elastic Resilience Testing Methodology

Elastic resilience is the ratio of deformation over force an object experiences when under stress. Knowing the how much the bolt and clamped part deform under load is critical when determining fasteners for a bolted joint. VDI 2230 is the internationally recognized bolt sizing standard and contains the equations used to determine each of the bolted joint component’s resilience as well as values for embedment estimates based on component surface roughness. Embedment is the local plastic deformation due to uneven contact over the contact planes of a bolt-clamped interface (Bolt head to plate, plate to plate, plate to nut, and in the thread). Embedment that occurs after initial assembly causes losses in the preload force. This thesis devises the test methodology to experimentally determine bolt and clamped part resilience, compares each to VDI 2230, alternative methods, and FEA simulations using different contact methods. Ultimately, a testing practice to measure embedment is developed