State capacity matters for growth. I test Bates’ explanation of pre-colonial African states. He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states. I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states. This is robust to reverse causation, omitted heterogeneity, and alternative interpretations of the link between diversity and states. Ecologi...

In this article, we present a cross-layer adaptive algorithm that dynamically maximizes the average utility function. A per stage utility function is defined for each link of a carrier sense multiple access-based wireless network as a weighted concave function of energy consumption, smoothed rate, and smoothed queue size. Hence, by selecting weights we can control the trade-off among them. Usin...

Two major topics in recent rounds of international trade negotiations have been environmental concerns, and services trade. While each is undoubtedly important, they are unrelated. The service sector emits only a small part of overall pollution, and those service industries that do pollute do not trade internationally. This paper uses data on trade in services from the U.S. Bureau of Economic A...

The link between trade openness and economic growth remains an open question due to the inconclusive findings provided by empirical studies. We argue that primary reasons for such disagreement ...

This paper begins to explore the determinants of the topological properties of the international-trade network (ITN). We fit bilateral-trade flows using a standard gravity equation to build a " residual " ITN where trade-link weights are depurated from geographical distance, size, border effects, trade agreements, and so on. We then compare the topological properties of the original and residua...

In this paper we examine how preferential trade liberalization affects the terms of trade, external tariffs and welfare of the integrating countries and the rest of the world. Our analysis is based on a three-country, three-good, general equilibrium model with symmetric customs union (CU) members. The model generalizes previous work by considering more general consumer preferences and productio...

The human action classification task is a widely researched topic and is still an open problem. Many state-of-thearts approaches involve the usage of bag-of-video-words with spatio-temporal local features to construct characterizations for human actions. In order to improve beyond this standard approach, we investigate the usage of co-occurrences between local features. We propose the usage of ...