8,168 research outputs found
Oil shocks, monetary policy, and economic activity
Various reasons have been given to explain downturns in U.S. economic activity since World War II. Romer and Romer (1989) argued that these recessions were primarily associated with monetary contractions, while Hamilton (1983) and others attributed them to oil price increases. We investigate these competing hypotheses and find that when measures of oil prices are included, the Romers’ measure of monetary policy does not significantly explain economic downturns. However, alternative measures of monetary policy, specifically the federal funds rate the spread between the ten-year Treasury rate and the federal funds rate, are significantly linked to economic activity. We also find that Hamilton’s result that oil prices significantly influence real activity are robust to the inclusion of these alternative indicators of monetary policy.Petroleum industry and trade ; Monetary policy ; Economic conditions
General calculation of transition rates for rare-earth ions using many-body perturbation theory
The transition rates for rare-earth ions in crystals can be
calculated with an effective transition operator acting between model
and states calculated with effective Hamiltonian, such as
semi-empirical crystal Hamiltonian. The difference of the effective transition
operator from the original transition operator is the corrections due to mixing
in transition initial and final states of excited configurations from both the
center ion and the ligand ions. These corrections are calculated using
many-body perturbation theory. For free ions, there are important one-body and
two-body corrections. The one-body correction is proportional to the original
electric dipole operator with magnitude of approximately 40% of the uncorrected
electric dipole moment. Its effect is equivalent to scaling down the radial
integral \ME {5d} r {4f}, to about 60% of the uncorrected HF value. The
two-body correction has magnitude of approximately 25% relative to the
uncorrected electric dipole moment. For ions in crystals, there is an
additional one-body correction due to ligand polarization, whose magnitude is
shown to be about 10% of the uncorrected electric dipole moment.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur
Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s Works
This article is the introduction to the special theme issue consisting of four essays on Authorizing Tolkien. Reid and Elam discuss medieval and postmodern theories of adaptation and interpretation and introduce the essays in the issue
Who receives a mortgage modification? Race and income differentials in loan workouts
Loan modifications offer one strategy to prevent mortgage foreclosures by lowering interest rates, extending loan terms and/or reducing principal balance owed. Yet we know very little about who receives loan modifications and/or the terms of the modification. This paper uses data from a sample of subprime loans made in 2005 to examine the incidence of loan modifications among borrowers in California, Oregon and Washington. The results suggest although loan modifications remain a rarely used option among the servicers in these data, there is no evidence that minority borrowers are less likely to receive a modification or less aggressive modification than white borrowers. Most modifications involve reductions in the loan’s interest rate, and an increase in principal balance. We also find that modifications reduce the likelihood of subsequent default, particularly for minority borrowers.Mortgage loans
Fano 3-folds in codimension 4, Tom and Jerry, Part I
This work is part of the Graded Ring Database project [GRDB], and is a sequel
to [Altinok's 1998 PhD thesis] and [Altinok, Brown and Reid, Fano 3-folds, K3
surfaces and graded rings, in SISTAG (Singapore, 2001), Contemp. Math. 314,
2002, pp. 25-53]. We introduce a strategy based on Kustin-Miller unprojection
that constructs many hundreds of Gorenstein codimension 4 ideals with 9x16
resolutions (that is, 9 equations and 16 first syzygies). Our two basic games
are called Tom and Jerry; the main application is the biregular construction of
most of the anticanonically polarised Mori Fano 3-folds of Altinok's thesis.
There are 115 cases whose numerical data (in effect, the Hilbert series) allow
a Type I projection. In every case, at least one Tom and one Jerry construction
works, providing at least two deformation families of quasismooth Fano 3-folds
having the same numerics but different topology.Comment: 34pp. This article links to the Graded Ring Database
http://grdb.lboro.ac.uk/, and more information is available from webloc. cit.
+ Downloads. Update includes several clarifications and improvements; results
essentially unchanged. To appear in Comp. Mat
The ASEAN Economic Community and the European experience
In November 2002, it was proposed at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Heads of Government meeting in Phnom Penh that the region should consider the possibility of creating an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2020. The name is evocative, for an Economic Community immediately brings to mind the European experience. In fact, when the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was re-inventing itself, it was proposed that the words behind the organization's acronym be replaced with Asia-Pacific Economic Community. This idea was rejected explicitly for fear that it would give the impression that APEC was intending to move in the direction of the EC model, which was thought to be too controversial. --
Responding to Public and Private Politics: Corporate Disclosure of Climate Change Strategies
The challenges associated with climate change will require governments, citizens, and firms to work collaboratively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a task that requires information on companies' emissions levels, risks, and reduction opportunities. This paper explores the conditions under which firms participate in this endeavor. Building on theories of how social activists inspire changes in organizational norms, beliefs, and practices, we hypothesize that shareholder actions and regulatory threats are likely to prime firms to adopt practices consistent with the aims of a broader social movement. We find empirical evidence of direct and spillover effects. In the domain of private politics, shareholder resolutions filed against it and others in its industry increase a firm's propensity to engage in practices consistent with the aims of the related social movement. Similarly, in the realm of public politics, threats of state regulations targeted at a firm's industry as well as regulations targeted at other industries increase the likelihood that the firm will engage in such practices. These findings extend existing theory by showing that both activist groups and government actors can spur changes in organizational practices, and that challenges mounted against a single firm and an industry can inspire both firm and field-level changes.social movements theory; institutional change theory; private politics; activist shareholder resolutions; climate change; environmental sustainability
Addressing Challenging Place Recognition Tasks using Generative Adversarial Networks
Place recognition is an essential component of Simultaneous Localization And
Mapping (SLAM). Under severe appearance change, reliable place recognition is a
difficult perception task since the same place is perceptually very different
in the morning, at night, or over different seasons. This work addresses place
recognition as a domain translation task. Using a pair of coupled Generative
Adversarial Networks (GANs), we show that it is possible to generate the
appearance of one domain (such as summer) from another (such as winter) without
requiring image-to-image correspondences across the domains. Mapping between
domains is learned from sets of images in each domain without knowing the
instance-to-instance correspondence by enforcing a cyclic consistency
constraint. In the process, meaningful feature spaces are learned for each
domain, the distances in which can be used for the task of place recognition.
Experiments show that learned features correspond to visual similarity and can
be effectively used for place recognition across seasons.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE International Conference on Robotics
and Automation (ICRA), 201
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