This paper analyzes the role of credit frictions in a trade model where producers differ their capabilities to conduct process and quality innovations require external finance for investments. Accounting cost-based quality-based sorting firms unified framework allows us demonstrate that reactions prices commonly used productivity measures do not necessarily reflect welfare implications. Credit ...

the objective of this study is to provide a partial equilibrium analysis of the effects of tariff and exchange rate policy on the net exports with the particular emphasis on the selected economic sectors. the eight economic sectors in the model are agriculture; food, beverages and tobacco; textiles; wood; chemicals; construction; paper and miselaneous which contains metallic and non merallic pr...

In this paper, we address the design of any number of balanced multiple descriptions using the multiple description scalar quantization(MDSQ) technique. The proposed scheme has the advantages of low complexity, the possibility of being extended easily to any number of descriptions and the possibility to trade off between the side, partial and central distortions. Unlike existing schemes, it can...

As part of the pension reform recently approved in Chile, the government introduced a centralized auction mechanism to provide the Disability and Survivors (D&S) Insurance that covers recent contributors among the more than 8 million participants in the mandatory private pension system. This paper is intended as a case study presenting the main distortions found in the decentralized operation o...

We study the joint determination of fund managers’ contracts and equilibrium asset prices. Because of agency frictions, investors make managers’ fees more sensitive to performance and benchmark performance against a market index. This makes managers unwilling to deviate from the index and exacerbates price distortions. Because trading against overvaluation exposes managers to greater risk of de...

We solve the problem of uplink video streaming in CDMA cellular networks by jointly design the rate control and scheduling algorithms. In the pricing-based distributed rate control algorithm, the base station announces a price for the per unit average rate it can support, and the mobile devices choose their desired average transmission rates by balancing their video quality and cost of transmis...

Recent years have seen substantial progress in our understanding of pricing decisions at the micro level. Access to large scale data sources on prices at the level of individual products has given us rich information on how frequently prices change, by what magnitudes, and how the aggregation of price changes in individual firms maps into aggregate inflation (see, among many others, Mark Bils a...

Document images produced by scanner or digital camera, usually suffer from geometric and photometric distortions. Both of them deteriorate the performance of OCR systems. In this paper, we present a novel method to compensate for undesirable geometric distortions aiming to improve OCR results. Our methodology is based on finding text lines by dynamic local connectivity map and then applying a l...

The price dispersion means different prices for same goods. In the Internet economy, many economists reckon that the price dispersion in the e-commerce markets should descend along with the dropping of search cost. However, the correlative empirical studies reach a contrary opinion: there not only exist price dispersion in the e-commerce market, but also has larger dispersion degree than the tr...

Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) are the most widely-used measure of health in cost– effectiveness analysis and cost–benefit analysis. Within a welfarist framework QALYs are consistent with people’s preferences under stringent assumptions. Several authors have argued that QALYs are a valid measure of health within an extra-welfarist framework. This paper studies the applicability of QALYs wi...