Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-Term Participation Tax Rates

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for lower income classes and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes how work incentives inherent in the German tax-benefit system evolve when extending the time horizon to three years (long-term). Participation tax rates are computed for 3-year periods 1995-1997 and 2005-2007 to reveal potential effects of the labor market reforms between 2003 and 2005. Results show that long-term work incentives increased even more than short-term work incentives. Particularly for middle-income individuals, this is largely explained by the abolition of earnings-related unemployment assistance.
FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL COMMODITY CONSUMPTION IN THE UNITED STATES: LOOKING AHEAD TO 2020

U.S. consumption of food commodities is projected to rise through the year 2020, mainly due to an increase in population. But the mix of commodities is expected to shift because of an older and more diverse population, rising income, higher educational attainment, improved diet and health knowledge, and growing popularity of eating out. This study analyzes data from USDA's food consumption survey to project the consumption, through the year 2020, of 25 food groups and 22 commodity groups. Per capita consumption of fish, poultry, eggs, yogurt, fruits, nuts and seeds, lettuce, tomatoes, some other vegetables, grains, and vegetable oils is predicted to rise, whereas consumption of beef, pork, other meat, milk, cheese, potatoes, and sugar is expected to fall. The growth of the at-home and away-from-home markets varies from one commodity to another. Fruit consumption is expected to lead all commodities in growth in the at-home market, and fish consumption is expected to lead in growth in the away-from-home market.
Labor demand andtrade reform in Latin America

There are concerns that trade reform and globalization will increase the uncertainty that the average worker, especially the relatively unskilled worker, faces. The increased competitiveness of product markets and greater access to foreign inputs, the argument goes, will lead to more elastic demand for workers. This may have adverse consequences for both labor market volatility and wage dispersion. The authors argue that while the case that trade liberalization should increase own-wage elasticities may be broadly compelling for competitive import-competing industries, it is less so for imperfectly competitive, nontradable, or export industries. They test the hypothesis using establishment-level panel data from three countries with periods of liberalization. The data provide only mixed support for the idea that trade liberalization has an impact on own-wage elasticities. No consistent patterns emerge. If globalization is making the lives of workers more insecure, it is probably working through some other mechanism.
The application of treebank to assist Chinese grammar instruction: A preliminary investigation

： This article discusses the usage of a large-scale Chinese treebank for Chinese language teaching and learning developed by Peking University. It shows that by specifying the features of a tree, for instance, a structure’s immediate constitutes, contexts, tree width and tree depth, one can easily extract the needed language structure from the treebank. It also shows that with the tree structure extracted and the web system developed, one can do structure exercises on the web and the result can be automatically assessed by the treebank.
Finding the Latent Semantics of Haptic Interaction Research: A Systematic Literature Review of Haptic Interaction Using Content Analysis and Network Analysis

As interest in multimodal and tangible interfaces is increasing in the field of human–robot interaction and virtual reality, haptics has been researched across areas such as engineering, computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. The main objective of the study was to construct a comprehensive review of the current haptic‐related literature based on quantitative data derived from content analysis and network analysis. Using the results of content analysis and network analysis of 6,000 research articles on haptic interaction, the haptic‐related literature was classified into two categories: 1) studies on technologies providing haptic stimuli and 2) studies on the human perception of haptic stimuli. Emotions in haptic feedback and haptic perception characteristics of various body sites were identified as potential research topics for further investigation. Greater research effort on understanding human haptic sensation and perception using the proposed systematic approach could accelerate the development of haptic interaction technology.
www.ssoar.info European Monetary Union: nominal convergence, real divergence and slow growth? An investigation into the effects of changing macroeconomic policy institutions associated with monetary union

It is by now widely accepted that the structural characteristics of the countries to become the euro area did not adhere to the conditions of an optimum currency area (OCA) when the euro was introduced in 1999. However, the satisfaction of OCA criteria may not be required for a workable currency union, because the criteria have to rely on a very restrictive concept of money and their satisfaction may be largely endogenous to shifts in the economic policy regime. Growth and convergence of prosperity across a currency union rather depend on the appropriate macroeconomic policy institutions. Therefore, in this paper the effects of the new EMU institutional framework for monetary, fiscal and wage policies on overall growth and on convergence across the euro area are analysed. It is concluded that not only the period of nominal convergence towards EMU but also the initial period of the euro area has suffered from a rather restrictive macroeconomic policy mix which has neither been conducive to aggregate growth nor to real convergence across the euro area. In order to improve growth and convergence some major institutional reforms seem to be required. JEL classification: E58, E61, F15
A distributed real-time system framework design for multi-robot cooperative systems using real-time CORBA

Distributed system frameworks (also known as middlewares) are developed to wrap distributed components regardless of their program languages, operating systems, and hardware platforms. Middleware hides networking details from application developers, and it increases reusability and reconfigurability of developed systems. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is a standard middleware. We adapt CORBA for our multi-robot research since it hides all network program details from programmers. Thus, CORBA increases development efficiency and component reusability. Recently Real-time CORBA (RT-CORBA) has been defined by Object Management Group (OMG), and it supports many real-time properties. Using RT-CORBA, we can define and implement real-time applications with stringent end-to-end quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this research, we tested one of the RT-CORBA properties. We show our testing result of a propagated priority model to guarantee that a high priority client invocation can be processed before that of a low priority client.
Privileging Industry: The Comparative Politics of Trade and Industrial Policy

List of Figures ix List of Tables xi Acknowledgments xiii Chapter 1. Redistributive Politics 1 Chapter 2. Who Are the Decision Makers and What Motivates Them? 39 Chapter 3. Party Strength as a Determinant of Industry Tariffs 73 Chapter 4. Restructuring and Redistribution in the Steel Industry 91 Chapter 5. Redistributive Politics and Industry Stock Prices 119 Chapter 6. A Theory and Direction for Future Research 152 Notes 165 References 185 Index 201
Effects of Country-of-Origin Labeling on Meat Producers and Consumers

Although several studies have estimated the costs of country-of-origin labeling (COOL), no previous study has documented how these costs will be distributed across the livestock sector or how producer and consumer welfare will be affected. This analysis presents an equilibrium displacement model of the farm, wholesale, and retail markets for beef, pork, and poultry that documents how producers and consumers will be affected by COOL. Findings reveal that as the costs of COOL are shifted from the producer to the processor and retailer, producers are made increasingly better off while consumers are made increasingly worse off. Further, an increase in aggregate consumer demand of 2% to 3% is likely sufficient to offset lost producer welfare due to COOL costs.
Online Social Media in Crisis Events.

© 2008 Leysia Palen My research group at the University of Colorado, Boulder, studies the relationship between human behavior and information and communication technology (ICT). The group, the connectivIT lab, includes researchers who are interested in how ICT connects people with each other and the information they seek (http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~palen/ connectivIT/). Our work is cross-disciplinary, with researchers possessing skills in empirical research, social theory development, and technology design. Our current, primary focus is on an area of research called crisis informatics, which examines the technical, social, and information aspects of disasters and crises. We believe that an informatics focus on matters of disasters is critical for the social good. With increasing attention from all sectors on disaster preparation, warning, response, and recovery, we hope that cross-disciplinary examination of information dissemination issues results in effective technology design and technology-related policy development for both official responders and members of the public alike. To that end, we collaborate closely with our colleagues at the University of Colorado’s Natural Hazards Center (http:// www.colorado.edu/hazards), an organization that conducts disaster research and serves as a worldwide information clearinghouse for social and behavioral disaster matters. Here, I report on a particular line of Online Social Media in Crisis Events
State and trends of the carbon market 2006 : a focus on Africa

Many African countries have thin energy and industrial sectors with limited opportunities to reduce carbon emissions, certainly relative to countries such as China and India. Carbon sequestration from avoided deforestation and from agriculture--potentially important areas for climate mitigation and important in many African economies--has been systematically excluded from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). At the same time, CDM-eligible assets from afforestation and reforestation are excluded from entry into the large European Union-Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), substantially limiting their market value and potential share in the multi-billion dollar global carbon market. The Africa share of the CDM market is lower than the share of African countries to developing nations in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) over the past few years, which has been around 10 percent.
Reorder.js: A JavaScript Library to Reorder Tables and Networks

Reordering, also known as seriation, and linear ordering, consists in assigning an order to rows/columns of a table or to vertices of a network to reveal structures. When visualizing a table as a heatmap or when visualizing a network as an adjacency matrix, finding a good order is essential to revealing high-level patterns in the data. The literature on reordering algorithms is dense but few implementations are easily available. Reorder.js is a novel JavaScript library, provided in source code with a BSD license, which provides several of these algorithms and variants to facilitate the use, adoption, and experimentation of these algorithms. Reorder.js is used in several existing Web-based applications such as Bertifier, NodeTrix, and Multipiles. It can be used with e.g. D3.js for adjacency matrices, Heatmaps, and Parallel-coordinates.
Combining Test Statistics and Information Criteria for High Dimensional Data Integration

This research is focused on high dimensional data integration by combing test statistics or information criteria. Our research contains four projects. In the first project, we propose an integration method to perform hypothesis testing and biomarkers selection based on multi-platform data sets observed from normal and diseased populations. The types of test statistics can vary across the platforms and their marginal distributions can be different. The observed test statistics are aggregated across different data platforms in a weighted scheme, where the weights take into account different variabilities possessed by test statistics. The overall decision is based on the empirical distribution of the aggregated statistic obtained through random permutations. In both simulation studies and real biological data analyses, our proposed method has better control over false discovery rates and higher positive selection rates than the uncombined method. In mixed data clustering project, we propose a non-parametric clustering method for handling mixed data with both continuous and discrete random variables. The product space of the continuous and discrete sample space is transformed into a new product space ii based on adaptive quantization on the continuous part. Cluster patterns are detected locally by using a weighted modified Chi-squared test. Results from simulation studies and real data analysis have shown that our method out-performs the benchmark method, AutoClass, in various settings. In the multiple data sets model selection project, we propose weighted integrative AICs as a model selection criterion. Our method combines AICs with different weights across multiple data sets. The weights are chosen to minimize the variance of integrative AICs. In the simulation studies, we compare our method with individual AIC method and integrative AICs with equal weights method. Our method has the better performance over false negative numbers and false detected numbers of the selected variables. In the last project, we extend Linharts and Shirmodarias test statistics under composite likelihood function with local alternatives for correlated data set. Comparing to first order method, our simulation results show that our second order method improves the accuracy for estimating the variance of difference of AICs and reduces the error probability when conduct model comparison test.
Immigration Policy Index

I construct an immigration policy index which is heterogeneous across destinationorigin country pairs and variant over time. This index is based on three types of entry visa restrictions: visa required, visa not required for short stays and visa not required at all. When estimated in levels, visa exempt country pairs account for around 15% more migrants than their counterfactual. I show that the effects of migration determinants vary by the type of visa restrictions. Further, I identify country pairs which changed their visa regime during 2000-2010 and find that the weakening of visa policy is associated with a 10% increase in migrant stocks and a significant shift toward male and less skilled migration from policy affected source countries. In contrast, the tightening of visa policy is not related to a significant change in migrant stocks, their gender or skill composition.
The surgery succeeded. Has the patient died? The impact of enlargement on the European Union

Abstract: The recent enlargement of the European Union (EU) to 10 states, occurred on 1 May 2004, has been surrounded – both in academic and political circles – by two contrasting discourses. The first, prior to enlargement, foresaw dramatic consequences had the expansion not been accompanied by a serious, large-scale effort to reform its institutions. The second, subsequent to enlargement, tended on the contrary to downplay these predictions: despite the little ambition of the Treaty of Nice – so the argument goes – the entry of several new members has not altered the nature of the system, if not for some minimal logistic aspects. In fact, a serious, retrospective assessment of the EU after enlargement has not been performed by its own institutions; researchers who embarked on this exercise raise serious caveats about the significance of their data; political leaders complain that reform is badly needed in an enlarged EU and practitioners report a widespread tendency towards a more informal decision-making process. This study intends to contribute to this debate by developing standards and providing new evidence for a more comprehensive assessment. Results are surprising.
The impact of higher education finance on university participation in the UK (BIS research paper no.11)

In this paper we estimate the separate impacts of upfront fees, grants and maintenance loans on UK higher education participation. We use the panel data element of Labour Force Survey data on the university participation decisions of 18 year olds, covering the period 1992-2007, which saw great variation in HE finance, most importantly the introduction of up-front tuition fees and the abolition of student maintenance grants in 1998 and major reforms of 2004 in which maintenance grants were re-instated and up-front fees were replaced with deferred fees of £3000. To test the robustness of the results, and to help deal with potential measurement error, we create a pseudo-panel of participation by UK region over time and test a number of specifications. Our findings show that the impact of upfront tuition fees in 1998 had a small negative impact on participation among high income groups, while the package of reforms introduced in 2006 had no impact on participation, largely because tuition fees were accompanied by large increases in loans and grants.
Quantitative Evaluation of Web user Session Dissimilarity measures using Medoids based Relational Fuzzy clustering

Background/Objectives: Proficient relational clustering of web users’ sessions not only depends on clustering algorithm’s character but also profoundly influenced by the used dissimilarity measures. Therefore, determining the right dissimilarity measure to capture the actual access behaviour of the web user is imperative for the significant clustering.Methods: In this paper, the concept of an augmented session is used to derive different augmented session dissimilarity measures. The quantitative performance evaluation of different session dissimilarity measures are performed using a relational fuzzy c-medoid clustering approach. The intra-cluster and inter-cluster distance based cluster quality ratio is used for performance evaluation. Findings: The experimental results demonstrated that augmented web user session dissimilarity in general, and intuitive augmented session dissimilarity, in particular, performed better than the other dissimilarity measures. Improvements: It is argued that augmented session similarity measures are more realistic and represent session similarities based on the web user’s habits, interest, and expectations as compared to simple binary session similarity measures.
The CEO Labour Market in China's Public Listed Companies

Using panel data for all of China's public listed firms over the period 2001-2010 we examine how firms have recruited and rewarded their executives over a decade of huge growth and turbulence. CEO pay is sensitive to firm performance, although the elasticities are lower than for the United States and Europe, especially with respect to returns on assets (ROA). CEO pay rises with firm size and growth, with elasticities resembling those for the United States. We find no dramatic response to the stock market crash of 2007/08. The elasticity of pay to stock returns falls to zero after the crash, while elasticities with respect to sales and ROA remain significant. Executive cash compensation rose steeply throughout the period Ð in contrast to the United States. There are steep gradients in executive compensation within firms, consistent with tournament prizes, and around two-thirds of CEO appointments are internal promotions. Within-firm executive compensation rose at a faster rate than executive compensation across firms, helping to explain why CEO turnover rates declined a little over the decade. Turnover rates did not spike with the stock market crash. Privatisation and reforms to corporate governance contributed to growth in executive compensation. A picture emerges of an executive labour market in which firms are linking pay to performance and relying on incentive structures within firms to foster executive talent.
Computing Semantic Relatedness Using Chinese Wikipedia Links and Taxonomy

Any attempt to compute semantics relatedness of natural language words needs a lot of background knowledge.Studies have shown that Wikipedia,which is the largest encyclopedia and could be used not only as a corpus but also a knowledge base with rich semantic information,is the ideal resource for semantic computation.In this paper,a new algorithm based on Wikipedia links and taxonomy is proposed to compute semantic relatedness of words.Since the algorithm uses only Wikipedia link structure and taxonomy,there is no need for complex text processing and the computation overhead required is smaller.Tests on a number of manual defined data sets show that it′s better than algorithms only based on Wikipedia links or on Wikipedia taxonomy.In the best case,the Spearman correlation coefficient has been increased 30.96%.
Politics and power in national REDD+ policy processes

Achieving emission reductions through REDD+ requires four preconditions for overcoming politico-economic hurdles: i) the relative autonomy of nation states from key interests that drive deforestation and forest degradation; ii) national ownership over REDD+ policy processes; iii) inclusive REDD+ policy processes; and iv) the presence of coalitions that call for transformational change. Formulating and implementing effective national REDD+ strategies is most challenging in those countries where international actors are the sole force driving REDD+ policy processes. New coalitions capable of breaking up institutional and political pathdependencies will need the participation of state elites and the engagement of business actors to affect the political agenda in a significant way.
Migration of Data from One Cloud Server to another Cloud Server using the TCP-IP Protocol

Another territory of some hugeness that does not include a particular innovation is information administration. A few organizations had their movement specifically attached to their information administration activity, some had administration extends that weren't connected with the relocation, and others had no information administration set up. The remainder of these were 10% more averse to get on time and on spending ventures than the individuals who had some experience of information administration regardless of the possibility that that governance was not connected with the relocation extend. Truth be told, they prescribe that on the off chance that you have not already selected information administration then an information relocation venture is a decent place to begin in light of the fact that the work that you have to do—profile the information, scrub it, conceivably chronicle and cover it—are all the very same sorts of things that you would do inside an administration activity, in addition to different capacities, for example, developing a business glossary.