The present study was aimed to investigate the effects of oil price shocks on discretionary fiscal policies in selected OPEC countries during 1980-2015. In this regard, the heterogeneous dynamic reaction to structural shock was examined using Panel Structural Vector Autoregressive (PSVAR) technique. Based on the findings, the effect of oil price shocks on discretionary fiscal policy was positiv...

The last decade has witnessed a heightened interest in making buildings more sustainable, which has been fueled largely by the increase in energy costs and advancements in manufacturing technology. Lighting consumes a substantial amount of this energy, making it necessary to look for alternative technology that depends more on natural lighting. This study investigated a novel building envelope ...

panels with a genetic algorithm, Applied Acoustics, Volume 70, Issue 3, March 2009, Pages 416-425, ISSN 0003-682X, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2008.06.003. 1 Optimal design of acoustical sandwich panels with a genetic algorithm Tongan Wang, Shan Li, Steven R. Nutt 1. University of Southern California, 3651 Watts Way, VHE 602, Los Angeles, CA 90089, United States Abstract: An optimizati...

This paper proposes a data-to-decisions framework—a methodology and a computational strategy—to assist real-time decisions associated with structural monitoring and informed by incomplete, noisy measurements. The data-to-decision structural assessment problem is described in terms of sensor data measurements (such as strain components) and system capabilities (such as failure indices). A MultiS...

For the future design of smart aerospace structures, the development and application of a reliable, real-time and automatic monitoring and diagnostic technique is essential. Thus, with distributed sensor networks, a real-time automatic structural health monitoring (SHM) technique is designed and investigated to monitor and predict the locations and force magnitudes of unforeseen foreign impacts...

Although identifying the existence and the nature of household-level poverty traps would have important implications for the design of poverty reduction policies empirical evidence is still scant. A small, growing empirical literature has begun testing for poverty traps in the form of threshold points in non-linear welfare dynamics employing a variety of quantitative methods and producing a var...

We examine the investment behavior of a panel of German manufacturing ...rms for the time period from 1992 to 2000. Our methodology is structural and has several steps: First, we identify the pro...tability shocks that move investment demand at the ...rm level. Then, we specify an array of adjustment costs and capital market imperfections possibly in‡uencing optimal ...rm investment response to...

The relative efficiencies of the Riks/Wempner, Crisfield, and normal flow solution algorithms for tracking nonlinear equilibrium paths of structural systems are compared. It is argued that the normal flow algorithm may be both more computationally efficient and more robust compared to the other two algorithms when tracing the path through severe nonlinearities such as those associated with stru...