Search results for "probability"
showing 10 items of 3417 documents
Productivity, R&D Spillovers and Educational Attainment*
2012
Economists have long agreed that the local availability of a more qualified workforce generates significant spillovers. This study suggests that these externalities may arise because plants by having access to a more qualified workforce at a regional level, can benefit more from R&D spillovers than those located in areas with less qualified workforce. This hypothesis is tested on a sample of British establishments drawn from the Annual Business Inquiry over the period 1997–2002. The main results are consistent with our expectations that the regional differences in the industry-level educational attainment of the workforce available to a plant will condition its capability of absorbing R&D s…
Spatial Vote Redistribution in Redrawn Polling Units
2012
Summary A large proportion of electoral analyses using geography are performed on a small area basis. In each new election there are always modifications to the previously existing polling units. The use of past voting results in small area aggregate data electoral forecasting models and political analyses therefore requires establishing a correspondence between old and new polling units. Traditionally, the task of tracking changes to assign an electoral history to the new units properly has been carried out by hand, comparing unit codes and census figures. This is an extremely cumbersome task that cannot always be performed, as when a massive (geographically intense) reorganization of poll…
Is the productivity premium of internationalized firms technology-driven?
2020
AbstractWe ask whether the productivity advantage of internationalized firms documented by the international trade literature can be interpreted most accurately in terms of proximity to the “technological frontier”. We answer in the affirmative using a methodology (based on mixture models) of unbundling technology and total factor productivity (TFP) by estimating “technology-specific” production function parameters. Exploiting detailed data provided by the EFIGE database (a sample of firms distributed across Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, and the UK), we find technology gaps (with respect to the frontier) more than three times larger than the TFP gaps on average. We also f…
Olley–Pakes productivity decomposition: computation and inference
2016
Summary We show how a moment-based estimation procedure can be used to compute point estimates and standard errors for the two components of the widely used Olley–Pakes decomposition of aggregate (weighted average) productivity. When applied to business level microdata, the procedure allows for autocovariance and heteroscedasticity robust inference and hypothesis testing about, for example, the coevolution of the productivity components in different groups of firms. We provide an application to Finnish firm level data and find that formal statistical inference casts doubt on the conclusions that one might draw on the basis of a visual inspection of the components of the decomposition.
Booms, Busts and normal times in the housing market
2015
We assess the existence of duration dependence in the likelihood of an end in housing booms, busts, and normal times. Using data for 20 industrial countries and a continuous-time Weibull duration model, we find evidence of positive duration dependence suggesting that housing market cycles have become longer over the last decades. Then, we extend the baseline Weibull model and allow for the presence of a change-point in the duration dependence parameter.We show that positive duration dependence is present in booms and busts that last less than 26 quarters, but that does not seem to be the case for longer phases of the housing market cycle. For normal times, no evidence of change-points is fo…
R&D, Competition and Growth with Human Capital Accumulation Revisited
2012
In this paper, we have presented a generalization of Bucci's (2003) model in which have disentangled the monopolistic mark-up in the intermediate goods sector, the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization in order to have a better measurement of competition. Indeed, unlike Bucci (2003), in our model, the measure of competition is completely independent of the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization. Our main finding is that, unlike Bucci (2003), we show that the competition does not play any role in growth. This result is explained by the complementarity of innovation and human capital assumed in the research produ…
Temporal evolution of some mortality indicators: Application to Spanish data
2012
[EN] In Spain, as in other developed countries, significant changes in mortality patterns have occurred during the 20th and 21st centuries. One reflection of these changes is life expectancy, which has improved in this period, although the robustness of this indicator prevents these changes from being of the same order as those for the probability of death. If, moreover, we bear in mind that life expectancy offers no information as to whether this improvement is the same for different age groups, it is important and necessary to turn to other mortality indicators whose past and future evolution in Spain we are going to study. These indicators are applied to Spanish mortality data for the pe…
Mean-field games and dynamic demand management in power grids
2013
This paper applies mean-field game theory to dynamic demand management. For a large population of electrical heating or cooling appliances (called agents), we provide a mean-field game that guarantees desynchronization of the agents thus improving the power network resilience. Second, for the game at hand, we exhibit a mean-field equilibrium, where each agent adopts a bang-bang switching control with threshold placed at a nominal temperature. At equilibrium, through an opportune design of the terminal penalty, the switching control regulates the mean temperature (computed over the population) and the mains frequency around the nominal value. To overcome Zeno phenomena we also adjust the ban…
Weighted samples, kernel density estimators and convergence
2003
This note extends the standard kernel density estimator to the case of weighted samples in several ways. In the first place I consider the obvious extension by substituting the simple sum in the definition of the estimator by a weighted sum, but I also consider other alternatives of introducing weights, based on adaptive kernel density estimators, and consider the weights as indicators of the informational content of the observations and in this sense as signals of the local density of the data. All these ideas are shown using the Penn World Table in the context of the macroeconomic convergence issue.
Weighted weak semivalues
2000
We introduce two new value solutions: weak semivalues and weighted weak semivalues. They are subfamilies of probabilistic values, and they appear by adding the axioms of balanced contributions and weighted balanced contributions respectively. We show that the effect of the introduction of these axioms is the appearance of consistency in the beliefs of players about the game.