Search results for "back"
showing 10 items of 2078 documents
Outsourcing within the Nordic context: Care services for older people in Finland.
2018
The early 1990s economic setback brought significant reforms favoring the outsourcing of care in Finnish municipalities. Here, outsourcing refers to the practice of municipalities employing private organizations through different means (e.g., open tendering) to deliver public care services. In this context, this study examines the growth in the outsourcing of service housing and home-help services in 311 municipalities from 2001 to 2015 and investigates the municipal factors associated with outsourcing using four dimensions: care needs, population size, economic situation, and political ideology of the municipality. The findings reveal a steep increase in the outsourcing of home-help and se…
Market efficiency and price discovery relationships between spot, futures and forward prices: the case of the Iberian Electricity Market (MIBEL)
2016
ABSTRACTThis paper analyses the relationships between prices from three different markets within the Spanish zone of the Iberian Electricity Market (MIBEL), namely futures, spot and over the counter (OTC) forward markets. The study focuses on three items: (i) contrasting the Weak-form efficiency hypothesis of the markets involved in the study, (ii) analysing the Semi-strong-form efficient market hypothesis (EMH) of the MIBEL futures market and (iii) examining the price discovery relationships between the series of prices of the considered markets.The empirical results confirm that 1-month-, 1-quarter-, 1-year-ahead futures and spot markets satisfy, generally, the Weak-form efficiency hypoth…
Hidden costs of cuts: austerity, civil service management and the motivation of public officials in Central and Eastern Europe after the crisis
2016
The implementation of austerity measures presents a dilemma for governments. While austerity measures such as cutbacks aim to reduce costs and enhance public sector efficiency, the same measures might undermine the motivation of employees and, consequently, the prospects of effectively implementing austerity programmes. Based on a survey of ministerial officials in Poland and Latvia, this article finds that the scale of cutbacks explains a larger decline of staff motivation in Latvia than in Poland. The article further shows that motivation was more likely to decrease after the crisis if austerity measures involved cutbacks such as staff reductions, recruitment freezes, and a reduction of t…
Pathways to higher education in France and Switzerland: Do vocational tracks facilitate access to higher education for immigrant students?
2014
In this chapter we wish to clarify through which institutional pathways higher education is accessed by immigrant group students in Switzerland and France. We have chosen these two countries because they differ from each other both in their educational systems and in the ways new routes to higher education have been set up through vocationally orientated programmes. The educational landscape in France is characterised by a more school-based system and has a greater tradition of prestigious tertiary education institutions (Duru-Bellat et al., 2008). Moreover, traditional vocational education and training (VET) does not have very high status and therefore fails to attract a large proportion o…
The Euro's Effect on Trade Balance Dynamics
2015
During the pre-EMU period changes in real effective exchange rate or faster-than-trading-partners growth rates Granger caused changes in trade balance in most of the EMU-12 countries. However, our data driven article provides evidence that after the adoption of euro, these Granger causalities disappeared. We decompose trade balances into intra balances (trade balance vis-a-vis the euro area) and extra balances (trade balance vis-a-vis the rest of the world), and find that the disappearance of dynamic feedback effect typically occurred in the intra balances rather than in the extra balances. Our results imply that debtor countries cannot reduce their trade deficits in the short-run by enhanc…
Integration of Peripheral Adiposity Signals and Psychological Controls of Appetite
2007
Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of the major anatomical and neurochemical participants in brain reward circuitry. It also elaborates the evidence available to date that supports the hypothesis that energy regulatory signals can modulate food reward. Psychological modulation of feeding involves taste hedonics and preferences, and the rewarding aspects of food. The brain circuitries implicated in stimulus reward, and in the regulation of energy balance, have traditionally been considered as separate. However, more recently, accumulated evidence suggests that there is both anatomical and functional crosstalk between these sets of central nervous system (CNS) circuitry. Addi…
Effet de l'origine sociale des élèves sur les résultats en lecture d'après PISA
2003
International audience
An entropy-based machine learning algorithm for combining macroeconomic forecasts
2019
This paper applies a Machine Learning approach with the aim of providing a single aggregated prediction from a set of individual predictions. Departing from the well-known maximum-entropy inference methodology, a new factor capturing the distance between the true and the estimated aggregated predictions presents a new problem. Algorithms such as ridge, lasso or elastic net help in finding a new methodology to tackle this issue. We carry out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of such a procedure and apply it in order to forecast and measure predictive ability using a dataset of predictions on Spanish gross domestic product.
Elastic Recoil Detection Analysis
2008
In 1976, a Canadian group described in detail for the first time a new ion beam analytical method based on the elastic recoil of target nuclei collided with high-energy heavy incident ions. In this case, 25–40-MeV 35Cl impinged on a multilayer C or Cu (backing)/LiF or LiOH/Cu (30–150 nm)/LiF or LiOH and H, Li, O, and F recoiled atoms were detected. These exemplified the main characteristics of elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA): its sensitivity to depth distribution and its ability to detect light elements in heavy substrates. In 1979, the use of megaelectronvolt energy 4He beams permitted the use of ERDA to be extended to depth profiling of hydrogen isotopes in the near-surface regio…
Erratum: An Inverse Backscatter Problem for Electric Impedance Tomography
2011
We fix an incorrect statement from our paper [M. Hanke, N. Hyvonen, and S. Reusswig, SIAM J. Math. Anal., 41 (2009), pp. 1948–1966] claiming that two different perfectly conducting inclusions necessarily have different backscatter in impedance tomography. We also present a counterexample to show that this kind of nonuniqueness does indeed occur.