in a general classification, the economy of any country is divided into two parts of official and invisible economies. invisible activities drop outside the scope of the law and official economy and strongly affect socioeconomic development and the formal sector of all countries.these activities which are known under various titles including the shadow economy are influenced by various factors....

In an influential paper, Baily (1978) showed that the optimal level of unemployment insurance (UI) in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters: risk aversion, the consumption-smoothing benefit of UI, and the elasticity of unemployment durations with respect to the benefit rate. This paper examines the key economic assumptions under which these parameters determine the optimal le...

This paper studies the Homeowner Affordability Modification Program (HAMP), a 2009 federal program reducing delinquent homeowners mortgage payments to 31 percent of monthly income. To assess the program I propose and estimate a structural model of mortgage default using program results. The model allows for income, house prices, and exit preference shocks to induce default, and allows homeowner...

The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of weaknesses are considered in this paper: social-welfare arrangements are often not financially robus...

Accelerometry shows promise in providing an inexpensive but effective means of long-term ambulatory monitoring of elderly patients. The accurate classification of everyday movements should allow such a monitoring system to exhibit greater 'intelligence', improving its ability to detect and predict falls by forming a more specific picture of the activities of a person and thereby allowing more a...

In this paper, a method of data visualization and classification performance estimation applied to target classification is proposed. The objective of this paper is to propose a mathematical tool for data characterization. The principle is to use a non linear dimensionality reduction technique to describe our data in a low-dimensional space and to model embedding data by Gaussian mixture model ...

in this paper, the effect of trade openness on growth is examined across the members of organization of the islamic conference (oic) by using convergence-growth equation and gmm-system dynamic panel data estimator over the period 1980-2009. the results show that the overall trade, the trade with non-oic countries, and the investment in physical and human capital stimulate economic growth. in co...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper investigates the relation between growth forecast ...

Inclusion of means testing into pension programs allows governments to better direct benefits to those most in need and to control funding costs by providing flexibility to control the condition for receiving pension benefits (extensive margin) and the benefit level (intensive margin). We investigate how the presence of the extensive margin influences the trade-off between the desirability of p...

This paper proposes new image features for the acoustic scene classification task of the IEEE AASP Challenge: Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events. In classification of acoustic scenes, identical sounds being observed in different places may affect performance. To resolve this issue, a covariance matrix, which represents energy density for each subband, and a double Fourie...