Cristiana Tudor∗ This study employs Enterprise Survey data to analyze business environment constraints and financing sources for investment for Romanian and Bulgarian companies at the end of 2009 and investigates the change in financing sources after the global financial crisis relative to a pre-crisis period (2005). The study also investigates whether the ownership structure of a firm affects ...

Passage of the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) has focused policymakers’ attention on measuring the performance of employment and training programs. Explicit performance measures can provide timely information to policymakers and program operators for assessing and improving their policies and programs. Under WIA’s predecessor, the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), policymakers relied on two ...

The Return to the Firm Investment in Human Capital In this paper we estimate the rate of return to firm investments in human capital in the form of formal job training. We use a panel of large firms with unusually detailed information on the duration of training, the direct costs of training, and several firm characteristics such as their output, workforce characteristics and capital stock. Our...

t Wilkie's stochastic investment model and its variants have been increasingly applied by actuaries around the world to actuarial modeling and simulation. This paper performs time series outlier analysis on retail price inflation, which is the driving force of Wilkie's composite model. The data come from four developed countries: the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia. The...

fuzzy cognitive maps (fcms) have successfully been applied in numerous domains to show the relations between essential components in complex systems. in this paper, a novel learning method is proposed to construct fcms based on historical data and by using meta-heuristic: genetic algorithm (ga), simulated annealing (sa), and tabu search (ts). implementation of the proposed method has demonstrat...

In this paper we describe a fuzzy Description Logic reasoner which implements resolution in order to provide reasoning services for expressive fuzzy DLs. The main innovation of this implementation is the ability to reason over assertions with abstract (unspecified) fuzzy degrees. The answer to queries is, consequently, an algebraic expression involving the (unknown) fuzzy degrees and the degree...

This research proposes a methodology for ranking decision making units byusing a goal programming model.We suggest a two phases procedure. In phase1, by using some DEA problems for each pair of units, we construct a pairwisecomparison matrix. Then this matrix is utilized to rank the units via the goalprogramming model.

The important growth of available multimedia information shows the limits of traditional information retrieval systems. In this paper, we describe the design of a metadata engine dedicated to retrieve annotated images using meta-information, and part of the more general MediaSys Image Search Engine. As a case study, we use medicinal plant images and their detailed description. We propose a flex...

In many applications spatial data are considered, yet this data quite often are prone to uncertainty and imprecision. For this purpose, fuzzy regions have been developed. Our initial model, a fuzzy set over a two dimensional domain, allowed for both fuzzy regions and fuzzy points to be modelled. The model still had some shortcomings: all points where treated independently, and it was not possib...