Search results for "Crunch"
showing 10 items of 16 documents
Review: the Use of Electromyography on Food Texture Assessment
2001
Sensory evaluation (SE) involves evoking, measuring and interpreting human responses to the properties of foods. Among these properties texture is an important one for food acceptability. Texture is mainly perceived through mastication, a process that changes food characteristics throughout time by comminuting and salivation. Electromyography (EMG) has emerged as a new tool in sensory evaluation mainly for assessing texture characteristics. Thus, it is interesting to analyze the knowledge so far generated and the procedures employed. Bipolar surface electrodes are placed on the four main masticatory muscles (masseter right-left and temporalis right-left) and their electric activity recorded…
Institutions, crises, and political confidence in seven contemporary democracies. An elite-mass analysis
2017
There is ample consensus in the literature that institutional confidence by the public is needed in democracies and at the same time elites, particularly political elites, need to share this confidence in their guidance of state institutions, if political stability in established democracies and the consolidation of new democracies are desired. The research takes the form of a quantitative analysis based on the World Values Surveys and the elite surveys (parliamentarians) conducted in 2006 (before the financial crisis) and in 2012–2013 (post the crisis when apparently, the worst of the economic crunch had lessened up) in the 7 countries selected. We explore what lies at the base of politica…
Household Leverage and Fiscal Multipliers
2011
We study the size of fiscal multipliers in response to a government spending shock under different household leverage conditions in a general equilibrium setting with search and matching frictions. We allow for different levels of household indebtedness by changing the intensive margin of borrowing (loan-to-value ratio), as well as the extensive margin, defined as the number of borrowers over total population. The interaction between the consumption decisions of agents with limited access to credit and the process of wage bargaining and vacancy posting delivers two main results: (a) higher initial leverage makes it more likely to find output multipliers higher than one; and (b) a positive g…
Is There a Credit Risk Anomaly in FX Markets?
2015
This paper explores whether a link between sovereign credit ratings and currency returns exists. Perhaps contrary to expectations, it finds that currencies of countries with higher credit risk tend to generate lower returns than those with a lower credit risk. The credit risk spread cannot be explained by standard risk factors.
Credit Demand and Supply Shocks in Italy During the Great Recession
2018
In this paper, we use Structural VAR analysis to disentangle credit demand and supply shocks and their eFFect on real economic activity in Italy during the 2008-2014 crisis period. The three endogenous variables considered are the loan interest rate, the loans growth rate and the employment to population ratio. The data are observed at annual frequency for each of 103 Italian provinces. The structural shocks are identified through heteroscedasticity, by letting the variance of the shocks to switch across four Italian macro-regions: North, Centre, South and Islands. Sign restrictions are used to interpret ex post the structural shocks. The empirical findings suggest a more important role of …
Household Debt and Fiscal Multipliers
2015
We study the size of government spending multipliers in a general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions in which we allow for different levels of household indebtedness. The main results of the paper are: (a) the presence of impatient households and private debt helps generate government spending multipliers greater than 1; (b) as financial conditions worsen and impatient consumers find it more difficult to borrow (i.e. in a credit crunch), the size of the government spending multiplier falls; (c) conversely, employment, vacancies and unemployment multipliers are larger when access to credit becomes more difficult; and (d) the model explains the observed pattern of responses …
Combining content extraction heuristics
2008
The main text content of an HTML document on the WWW is typically surrounded by additional contents, such as navigation menus, advertisements, link lists or design elements. Content Extraction (CE) is the task to identify and extract the main content. Ongoing research has spawned several CE heuristics of different quality. However, so far only the Crunch framework combines several heuristics to improve its overall CE performance. Since Crunch, though, many new algorithms have been formulated. The CombinE system is designed to test, evaluate and optimise combinations of CE heuristics. Its aim is to develop CE systems which yield better and more reliable extracts of the main content of a web …
A simple model of income, aggregate demand and the process of credit creation by private banks
2013
This paper presents a small macroeconomic model describing the main mechanisms of the process of creation by the private banking system. The model is composed of a core unit-where the dynamics of income, credit and aggregate demand are determined-and a set of sectoral accounts that ensure its stock-flow consistency. In order to grasp the role of credit and banks on the functioning of the economic system we make an explicit distinction between planned and realized variables, thanks to which, while maintaining the ex-post accounting consistency, we are able to introduce an ex-ante wedge between current aggregate income and planned expenditure. Private banks are the only economic agents capabl…
The Impact of Credit on Economic Growth in the Global Crisis Context
2013
Abstract Is there a connection between credit and economic growth in the present economic context? Credit was one of the factors which triggered the global crisis, thus, in the present paper we attempt to show whether there is a connection between credit and economic growth, the economy being unable to develop in the absence of credit. With the aid of a statistic software we have tried to determine the supposed existence of a connection between the GDP, credits offered to public administration and credits offered to households. The results of the analysis show that credits offered to households contribute to a greater extent to the formation of the GDP than credits offered to public adminis…
Effect of 1-methylcyclopropene on cactus pear fruit at different maturity stages during storage
2019
1-Methylcyclopropene (1‑MCP) is an ethylene antagonist widely used to retain quality and prolong the postharvest storage period of various climacteric fruits. To date, there is little information about the effects of 1‑MCP on postharvest storage performance of cactus pear fruits. Recently, data revealed that exposure of 1‑MCP at 1000 ppb had several beneficial effects in preserving postharvest quality of cactus pear fruits, as indicated by inhibition of peel color change. In this paper, we investigated the effect of 1‑MCP on quality of cactus pear fruit harvested from the scozzolatura crop at early and late ripeness stages. Fruit was tested at two different ripening stages: “commercial ripe…