Does Partisan Heritage Matter? The Case of the Federal Reserve

Received evidence suggests that changes in appointer- and overseer- preferences influence monetary policy (i.e., partisan heritage matters). Evidence presented here, on the other hand, is consistent with changes in the cost of pursuing a common preference influencing policy. I draw this evidence from a panel of Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) votes and find support for the following conclusions. 1. Federal Reserve Board (FRB) governors who were nominated and confirmed by the same party (Republican or Democrat) prefer significantly looser policy than do other FOMC members. 2. Monetary policy is significantly looser when either party controls the oversight mechanism (i.e., the presidency and Senate) than when control is split. 3. Oversight acts less forcefully on district bank presidents than on FRB governors. In short, the present evidence suggests that political agents from both parties prefer loose money and pursue this preference more efficiently when their parties are aligned.Federal Reserve, Appointments, Oversight

Can Voting Reduce Welfare? Evidence from the US Telecommunications Sector

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members produce political support can, however, retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack credibility when committing to regulatory policies. Consequently, a "healthy" polity's economy can rest at an inferior discretionary equilibrium. I develop evidence that the US telecommunications sector may indeed have realized such an outcome. This evidence is remarkably difficult to dismiss as an artifact of endogeneity bias.Electoral Institutions, Voter Turnout, Distributive Policy, Regulatory Commitment, Telecommunications Policy

Can Voting Reduce Welfare? Evidence from the US Telecommunications Sector

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members produce political support can, however, retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack credibility when committing to regulatory policies. Consequently, a "healthy" polity's economy can rest at an inferior discretionary equilibrium. I develop evidence that the US telecommunications sector may indeed have realized such an outcome. This evidence is remarkably difficult to dismiss as an artifact of endogeneity bias.Electoral Institutions, Voter Turnout, Distributive Policy, Regulatory Commitment, Telecommunications Policy

Cutting the Dividends Tax…and Corporate Governance Too?

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures, the tax cut foregoes debt’s superiority on at least three dimensions: 1. Evaluating and monitoring demanders of financial capital; 2. Constraining managerial agents’ from opportunistically employing capital market proceeds; and 3. Encouraging non-financial stakeholders (e.g., employees, suppliers) to make firm-specific investments. Moreover, because these privately produced services contribute to the integrity of broader financial markets (i.e., a public good), competitive forces may not fully counter the tax cut’s governance consequences.Dividends Tax, Corporate Governance

Voter Turnout, Regulatory Commitment, and Capital Accumulation: Evidence from the US Telecommunications Sector

Voter turnout is frequently cited as gauging a polity's health. The ease with which electoral members can produce political support, however, can retard an economy's productive capacity. For example, while mobile electorates might efficaciously monitor political agents, they may also lack credibility when committing to regulatory policies. Consequently, a "healthy" polity's economy may rest at an inferior discretionary equilibrium. I find evidence for this hypothesis by relating voter turnout to regulated telecommunications capital. Ceteris paribus, local exchange carriers employ relatively little capital in US states that house high turnout electorates. This evidence is remarkably difficult to dismiss as an artifact of endogeneity bias.Electoral Institutions, Voter Turnout, Distributive Policy, Regulatory Commitment, Economic Welfare, Telecommunications Policy

Tensor PCA from basis in tensor space

The aim of this paper is to present a mathematical framework for tensor PCA. The proposed approach is able to overcome the limitations of previous methods that extract a low dimensional subspace by iteratively solving an optimization problem. The core of the proposed approach is the derivation of a basis in tensor space from a real self-adjoint tensor operator, thus reducing the problem of deriving a basis to an eigenvalue problem. Three different cases have been studied to derive: i) a basis from a self-adjoint tensor operator; ii) a rank-1 basis; iii) a basis in a subspace. In particular, the equivalence between eigenvalue equation for a real self-adjoint tensor operator and standard matrix eigenvalue equation has been proven. For all the three cases considered, a subspace approach has been adopted to derive a tensor PCA. Experiments on image datasets validate the proposed mathematical framework.Comment: This version contains a new experiment better showing the potentiality of the paper and a corrected autor list. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Influence of Simulation Parameters in the Combined Loading Compression Testing of CFRP Specimens

In this paper a sensitivity study of a FEM model representing a carbon/epoxy composite material tested in Combined Loading Compression (CLC) is presented and the results are compared to experimental results. The present study aims to simulate the failure of composite materials when subjected to compression and crush loading conditions. This is required as a first step of a Building-Block Approach towards full-scale modelling of complex structures. In the experimental part of the work, a laminate panel was manufactured with carbon unidirectional prepreg (Deltapreg UTS-300-DT120-37EF) in a cross-ply, balanced and symmetric stacking sequence, cured in autoclave at 120°C and 5 bar for 90 min. A number of six samples, extracted from the panel, were tested in compression following ASTM D6641/D6641M-16. Numerical simulations have been implemented by means of the commercial software, ESI-VPS PAM CRASH. Boundary conditions, specimens' dimensions and material properties emulated real test conditions. A sensitivity study was performed on critical simulation parameters: the effect of mesh size and number of shell surfaces representing the composite stacking sequence was initially investigated. Furthermore, the specimen failure mode was inspected by the application of TIED links between the composite plies. Numerical results have been compared with experimental data and the comparison provided references for testing scale-up in the Building-Block Approach

sistemi di interazione vocale per la domotica

Una delle questioni aperte nell’ambito dell’home automation è la realizzazione di interfacce uomo-macchina che siano non solo efficaci per il controllo di un sistema, ma anche facilmente accessibili. La voce è il mezzo naturale per comunicare richieste e comandi, quindi l’interfaccia vocale presenta notevoli vantaggi rispetto alle soluzioni touch-screen, interruttori ecc. Il lavoro di tesi proposto è finalizzato alla realizzazione di un sistema di interazione vocale per l’home automation, in grado non solo di riconoscere singoli comandi veicolati da segnali vocali, ma anche di personalizzare i servizi richiesti tramite il riconoscimento del parlatore e di interagire mediante il parlato sintetizzato. Per ciascuna tipologia di interazione vocale, verranno proposte soluzioni volte a superare i limiti dell’approccio classico in letteratura. In prima analisi, verrà presentato un sistema di riconoscimento vocale distribuito (DSR) per il controllo delle luci, che implementa ottimizzazioni ad-hoc per operare nell’ambiente in modo non invasivo e risolvere le problematiche di uno scenario reale. Nel sistema DSR sarà integrato un algoritmo di identificazione del parlatore per ottenere un sistema in grado di personalizzare i comandi sulla base dell’utente riconosciuto. Un sistema di identificazione vocale deve essere in grado di classificare l’utente con frasi della durata inferiore a 5 s. A tal fine verrà proposto un algoritmo basato su truncated Karhunen-Loève transform con performance, su brevi sequenze di speech (< 3.5 s), migliori della convenzionale tecnica basata su Mel-Cepstral coefficients. Verrà infine proposto un framework di sintesi vocale Hidden Markov Model/unit-selection basato su Modified Discrete Cosine Transform, che garantisce la perfetta ricostruibilità del segnale e supera i limiti imposti dalla tecnica Mel-cepstral. Gli algoritmi ed il sistema proposto saranno applicati a segnali acquisiti in condizioni realistiche, al fine di verificarne l’adeguatezza.One of the open questions in home automation is the realization of human-machine interfaces that are not only effective for the control of the available functions, but also easily accessible. The voice is the natural way to communicate requests and commands, in this way speech interface offers considerable advantages over solutions such as touch-screen, switches etc. The proposed thesis is aimed at studying and realizing a speech interaction system for home automation to be able not only to recognize individual commands conveyed by voice signals, but also to customize the services requested through a speaker recognizer and to interact by means of synthesized speech. For each speech interaction mechanism, solutions are suggested to overcome the traditional limitations of previous work. In the first analysis, it is offered a speech distributed recognition system (DSR), for the voice control of a lighting system, that implements strategies and ad-hoc optimizations and is able to solve the typical problems of a real scenario. The DSR system can also be integrated with a speaker identification algorithm in order to obtain a system able to customize the spoken commands on the user specific settings. In the home automation, a speaker identification system must be able to classify the user with sequences of speech frames of a duration less than 5 s. To this goal, an algorithm based on truncated Karhunen-Loève transform able to produce results, with short sequences of speech frames (< 3.5 s), better than those achieved with the Mel-Cepstral coefficients, is suggested. Moreover, this work presents a novel Hidden Markov Models/unit-selection speech synthesis framework based on Modified Discrete Cosine Transform, which guarantees the perfect reconstruction of the speech signal and overcomes the main lacks of Mel-cepstral technique. The algorithms and the proposed system will be applied to signals acquired under realistic conditions, in order to verify its adequacy