The distribution of human capital and income lies at the center of a nexus of forces that shape a country’s economic, institutional and technological structure. I develop here a unified model to analyze these interactions and their growth consequences. Five main issues are addressed. First, I identify the key factors that make both European-style “welfare state” and US-style “laissez-faire” soc...

It is shown here that stability of the stochastic approximation algorithm is implied by the asymptotic stability of the origin for an associated ODE. This in turn implies convergence of the algorithm. Several specific classes of algorithms are considered as applications. It is found that the results provide (i) a simpler derivation of known results for reinforcement learning algorithms; (ii) a ...

In this paper, we focus on the efficiency performance of the Vietnamese commercial banks in terms of their efficiency change, productivity growth, and technological change during the period 2001–2003. We use a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model for this purpose. Productivity is measured using the Malmquist total factor productivity index. The panel data of 13 commercial banks in Vietnam are ...

This paper proposes a new multi-objective approach for the problem of power restoration in (n-1) contingency situations. It builds on a previous, mono-objective approach introduced in Mendes et al. (2010) [14]. Power restoration normally relies on network reconfiguration, and typically involves re-switching and adjustment of tap-changers and capacitor banks. In this work, we focus on re-switchi...

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e-learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E-learning is data-intensive, user-driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competive...

Professional football clubs are unusual businesses, their performance judged on and off the field of play. This study is concerned with measuring the efficiency of clubs in the English Premier League. Information from clubs’ financial statements is used as a measure of corporate performance. To measure changes in efficiency and productivity the Malmquist non-parametric technique has been used. ...

This paper discusses the perspective of renewable energy (wind, solar, wave and biomass) in the making of strategies for a sustainable development. Such strategies typically involve three major technological changes: energy savings on the demand side, efficiency improvements in the energy production, and replacement of fossil fuels by various sources of renewable energy. Consequently, large-sca...

Nondiscretionary environmental inputs are critical in explaining relative efficiency differences and productivity changes in public sector applications. For example, the literature on education production shows that school districts perform better when student poverty is lower. In this paper, we extend the nonparametric approach to decompose Malmquist productivity index suggested by Färe et al....

In this paper we present the concept of “slow analytics” that attempts to bridge the gap between humanities tasks and visualization. Often within technological disciplines the pursuit of speed and efficiency are paramount. But, with domain experts like literary critics, slow and methodical interaction with texts is part of the work flow and sense-making process. By challenging the paradigm of e...

the basic type of assembly line balancing (alb) problem is the allocation of work elements to a set of production work stations considering cycle time, precedence constraints, and assembly diagram to achieve predefined performance criteria such as line efficiency and smoothness index. in this paper, a mixed integer programming model for solving multiple product alb problems with processing time...