This paper analyses the distribution of total aid and aid to the social sectors between 2009 and 2011. Its key findings are four-fold. First, despite the stated objectives of donors, total aid disbursements are broadly neutral, favouring neither the most deprived nor relatively well-off countries. Second, the pattern of social sector aid disbursements follows those for total aid. Third, the aid...

The real exchange rate real interest rate (RERI) relationship is central to most open economy macroeconomic models. However, empirical support for the relationship, especially when cointegrationbased methods are used, is rather weak. In this paper we reinvestigate the RERI relationship using bilateral real exchange rate data spanning the period 1978 to 1997. We first clarify the logic of applyi...

This paper studies the effects of altruism and spitefulness in a two-sided market in which agents behave strategically and trade according to the ShapleyShubik mechanism. By assuming that altruistic agents have concerns for others on the opposite side of the market, it shows that agents always find advantageous to trade. However, they prefer to stay out of the market and consume their endowment...

This study extends a bilateral gift exchange experiment by Clark et al. (2010) who investigate how feedback of information about wages paid in the market affects both employers’ wage setting and workers’ performance. We provide either quantitative or qualitative information on the average wage paid in all worker-employer-relationships, and we also study repeated relationships (fixedmatching). W...

Gait is an emerging biometric. Current systems are either holistic or feature based and have been demonstrated to be able to recognise people by the way they walk. This paper describes a new system that extends the feature based approach to recognise people by the way they walk and run. A bilateral symmetric and coupled oscillator is the key concept that underlies this model, which includes bot...

This paper tests the hypothesis that a “California Effect” serves to transmit superior labor standards from importing to exporting countries in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards. Our dependent variables measure the extent to which collective labor rights are violated, both in law and in practice. Our main independent variable, the bilateral trade context, measures ...

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitivemarkets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish free riders, stable cooperation is maintained, although punishment is costly for those who punish. This ...

Whether categorical perception of color is lateralized in the left cerebral hemisphere (e.g., Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006) or not (e.g., Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2011) is still controversial. This ongoing debate, however, has been studied with visual search tasks, which seemed to produce residual laterality effects. The present study assessed whether a delayed discrimination task with divi...

In telerobotics two control modes are usually implemented for guiding: position control and rate control. Numerous works have been carried out comparing them. This chapter introduces a new re-configurable system for guiding robots. It is based on the fact that guiding performance depends directly on the task requirement. The system presented is able to change its control scheme during task exec...