A process of endogenous human capital formation is analyzed in combination with the existence of trade unions and banks. By lowering opportunity costs for schooling, trade unions provide incentive for human capital investments for parts of the workforce. Imperfect competition in the banking sector creates a self-selection situation favorable for long-term investment giving firms the possibility...

The Short Term Fourier Transform (STFT) is a classical linear time-frequency (T-F) representation. Despites its relative simplicity, it has become a standard tool for the analysis of non-stationary signals. Since it provides a redundant representation, it raises some issues such as (i) “optimal” window choice for analysis, (ii) existence and determination of an inverse transformation, (iii) per...

We embed the notion of banks as monitors who reduce risk into a “two-trees” framework, and consider an economy in which capital can be moved between the trees. We characterize how resources are optimally allocated between the intermediated banking sector and a risky sector as a function of the relative size of the banking sector — the bank share — and the speed at which capital can move in and ...

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the synthesis and separation of enantiomers of organic compounds especially because of their importance in the biochemistry and pharmaceutical industry. High-performance liquid Chromatography is a very useful method for the direct separation of enantiomers. However, about 30−40 years ago, commercially available chiral stationary phases wer...

We operate a frequency-stable laser in a non-laboratory environment where the test platform is a passenger vehicle. We measure the acceleration experienced by the laser and actively correct for it to achieve a system acceleration sensitivity of Δf / f = 11(2) × 10(−12)/g, 6(2) × 10(−12)/g, and 4(1) × 10(−12)/g for accelerations in three orthogonal directions at 1 Hz. The acceleration spectrum a...

The emergence of ubiquitous computing offers new possibilities and opportunities for organizations attempting to improve their productivity and effectiveness. In particular, the promises of ubiquitous computing are attractive to organizations such as transport firms, in which coordination of diverse sets of mobile units is central to organizational performance. This article analyzes the use of ...

While widely accepted models of labor market search imply a constant reservation wage policy, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that reservation wages decline in search duration. This paper reports the results of the rst realtime-search laboratory experiment. The controlled environment subjects face is stationary, and the payoff-maximizing reservation wage is constant. Nevertheless, subj...

We consider the problem of stochastic bandits, with the goal of maximizing a reward while satisfying pathwise constraints. The motivation for this problem comes from cognitive radio networks, in which agents need to choose between different transmission profiles to maximize throughput under certain operational constraints such as limited average power. Stochastic bandits serve as a natural mode...

This paper proposes a simple, computationally efficient 2-mixture model approach to discrimination between speech and background noise. It is directly derived from observations on real data, and can be used in a fully unsupervised manner, with the EM algorithm. A first application to sector-based, joint audio source localization and detection, using multiple microphones, confirms that the model...

In this paper we consider the problem of speech enhancement in real-world like conditions where multiple noises can simultaneously corrupt speech. Most of the current literature on speech enhancement focus primarily on presence of single noise in corrupted speech which is far from real-world environments. Specifically, we deal with improving speech quality in office environment where multiple s...