Available online 12 August 2011 JEL classifications:

Available online 1 July 2010 JEL classifications:

Decision makers in the field of national security, counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are faced with an uncertain, adaptive and asymmetrical threat. It should come as no surprise that a great need exists to understand covert organizations, the structure of which becomes known partially only after an attack or operation has occurred. What is known however is that many covert networks are org...

In order to improve the on-orbit measurement accuracy of star sensors, the effects of image-plane rotary error, image-plane tilt error and distortions of optical systems resulting from the on-orbit thermal environment were studied in this paper. Since these issues will affect the precision of star image point positions, in this paper, a novel measurement error model based on the traditional err...

this article is a comparative study of estimation power of artificial neural networks and autoregressive time series models in inflation forecasting. using 37 years iran’s inflation data, neural networks performs better on average for short horizons than autoregressive models. this study shows usefulness of early stopping technique in learning stage of neural networks for estimating time series...

We present an updated catalog of 1300 objects in the field of M31, including 670 likely star clusters of various types, the rest being stars or background galaxies once thought to be clusters. The coordinates in the catalog are accurate to 0.2 ̋, and are based on images from the Local Group Survey (LGS, Massey et al. 2006) or from the DSS. Archival HST images and the LGS were inspected to confir...

This study analyses the physical stature of runaway apprentices and military deserters based on advertisements collected from 18-century newspapers, in order to explore the biological welfare of colonial and early-national Americans. The results indicate that heights declined somewhat at mid-century, but increased substantially thereafter. The findings are generally in keeping with trends in mo...

Based on survey data for Switzerland, new empirical findings on direct democracy are presented. In the first part, we show that, on average, public employees receive lower financial compensation under more direct democratic institutions. However, top bureaucrats are more constrained in direct democracies and have to be compensated by higher wages for that loss of power. In the second part, we d...

Previous research on the determinants of international migration has largely focused on objective factors, such as income. We instead use subjective well-being (SWB) to explain international migration desires, an expressed willingness to migrate. We find that individuals with higher SWB have lower international migration desires. At the individual level, the SWB-migration relationship appears t...

spatial autocorrelation (sa) is the correlations of the observed data of an area in the form of spatial pattern. the criterion of sa phenomenon occurrence is when the distribution of one observed variable value follows a particular pattern systematically. the sa analysis is most useful and an important tool for investigating the spatial database, this analysis not only itself gives useful infor...