The challenges to the liberal trading system

Free trade has been a universally accepted economic tenet for almost two centuries. Despite challenges, Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage has proven to be one of the most enduring of all economic laws. In recent decades, however, the liberal trading system has come under increasing attacks in the form of strategic trade and industrial policies, the deindustrialization in advanced countries, rapid globalization and outsourcing, and others. This paper reviews each of these attacks and concludes that they do not justify abandoning or moving away from the general preference of a liberal trading system.     

Who Makes the Most? Measuring the “Urban Environmental Virtuosity”

This paper advances a composite indicator called urban environmental virtuosity index (UEVI), in order to measure the efforts made by public local bodies in applying an ecosystem approach to urban management. UEVI employs the less exploited process-based selection criteria for representing the original concept of virtuosity, providing makes a cross cities comparison. In developing such a framework the main technical issue of constructing a composite indicator, involving the weighting and the aggregation phases will be overcame by using a multivariate approach.     

Drawing a Line: Comparing the Estimation of Top Incomes between Tax Data and Household Survey Data

The Journal of Economic Inequality - The paper uses the flexibility of household survey data to align their income categories and recipient units with the income categories and units found in data...     

OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY AND FINANCIAL STABILITY IN A NON‐RICARDIAN ECONOMY

I present a model with discontinuous asset‐market participation (DAMP), where all agents are non‐Ricardian, and where heterogeneity among market participants implies financial‐wealth effects on aggregate consumption. The implied welfare criterion shows that financial stability arises as an additional and independent target, besides inflation and output stability. Evaluation of optimal policy under discretion and commitment reveals that price stability may no longer be optimal, even absent inefficient supply shocks: some fluctuations in output and inflation may be optimal as long as they reduce financial instability. Ignoring the heterogeneity among market participants may lead monetary policy to induce substantially higher welfare losses.     

Modeling Network Latency and Parallel Processing in Distributed Database Design

The design of responsive distributed database systems is a key concern for information systems managers. In high bandwidth networks latency and local processing are the most significant factors in query and update response time. Parallel processing can be used to minimize their effects, particularly if it is considered at design time. It is the judicious replication and placement of data within a network that enable parallelism to be effectively used. However, latency and parallel processing have largely been ignored in previous distributed database design approaches. We present a comprehensive approach to distributed database design that develops efficient combinations of data allocation and query processing strategies that take full advantage of parallelism. We use a genetic algorithm to enable the simultaneous optimization of data allocation and query processing strategies. We demonstrate that ignoring the effects of latency and parallelism at design time can result in the selection of unresponsive distributed database designs.     

A MATHEMATICAL PROGRAMMING APPROACH TO THE SELECTION OF ACCESS PATHS FOR LARGE MULTIUSER DATA BASES*

The selection of an efficient set of access paths is critical to the design of large multiuser data bases. This task is formulated as an integer, linear mathematical program, and an approach to its solution is presented. A series of experiments support the assertion that this approach is sufficient for quickly producing an efficient, if not optimal, set of access paths for data-base problems of practical significance.     

Differences in drinking expectancies and motives for regular education and special education high school students with emotional/behavioral disorders

Alcohol expectancies and drinking motives were compared for regular education students (n=159) and students with emotional/behavioral disorders (EBD) receiving special education services (n=51). Differences existed between groups with respect to expected negative social consequences and emotional and physical outcomes associated with drinking. Across groups, drinkers reported more positive alcohol expectancies than non-drinkers, while non-drinkers reported more negative alcohol expectancies than drinkers. Differences also existed between the regular education and EBD students who drank with respect to coping, conformity, and social motives. Accounting for sample sizes differences, the relationship between alcohol use and negative physical effect was stronger for regular education students, while the relationship between alcohol use and conformity motives was stronger for the EBD group.     

On the Methodological Framework of Composite Indices: A Review of the Issues of Weighting,Aggregation, and Robustness

Social Indicators Research - In recent times, composite indicators have gained astounding popularity in a wide variety of research areas. Their adoption by global institutions has further captured...