Whenever unemployment stays high for an extended period, it is common to see analyses, statements, and rebuttals about the extent to which the high unemployment is structural, not cyclical. This essay views the Beveridge curve pattern of unemployment and vacancy rates and the related matching function as proxies for the functioning of the labor market and explores issues in that proxy relations...

In this paper we suggest a new conjugate gradient algorithm that for all both the descent and the conjugacy conditions are guaranteed. The search direction is selected as a linear combination of 0 k ≥ 1 k g + − and where , k s 1 1 ( ) k k g f x + + = ∇ , and the coefficients in this linear combination are selected in such a way that both the descent and the conjugacy condition are satisfied at ...

Private information about prospective borrowers produced by a bank can affect rival lenders due to a "winner’s curse" effect. Strategic interaction between banks with respect to the intensity of costly information production results in endogenous credit cycles, periodic "credit crunches." Empirical tests are constructed based on parameterizing public information about relative bank performance ...

A decision maker is characterized by two binary relations. The first reflects decisions that are rational in an “objective” sense: the decision maker can convince others that she is right in making them. The second relation models decisions that are rational in a “subjective” sense: the decision maker cannot be convinced that she is wrong in making them. We impose axioms on these relations that...

OBJECTIVE To verify the presence of stress among undergraduate nursing students in different stages of hospital practice. METHOD Descriptive, cross-sectional study addressing 86 nursing students in their 6th, 7th, and 9th semesters in 2011. An instrument developed by Costa and Polak for the Assessment of Stress Among Nursing Students was used. It is composed of six domains: performance of pra...

A trapper of eighteenth century needed a box of matches, a gun and a knife, and perhaps, a tent and a canoe or a dogsled to survive in the wilderness. Today, almost anyone of us would feel uncomfortable without, in addition, GPS, a mobile phone with internet access, a medicine-chest with at least aspirin, an antibiotic as well as a serum against snake bite, and a lot more to master the same sit...

This paper reports work done to improve the modeling of complex processes when only small experimental data sets are available. Neural networks are used to capture the nonlinear underlying phenomena contained in the data set and to partly eliminate the burden of having to specify completely the structure of the model. Two different types of neural networks were used for the application of Pulpi...

This paper investigates collective denial and willful blindness in groups, organizations and markets. Agents with anticipatory preferences, linked through an interaction structure, choose how to interpret and recall public signals about future prospects. Wishful thinking (denial of bad news) is shown to be contagious when it is harmful to others, and self-limiting when it is beneficial. Similar...

We provide an axiomatization of generalized utilitarian social welfare functions in the context of Harsanyi’s impartial observer theorem. To do this, we reformulate Harsanyi’s problem such that lotteries over identity (accidents of birth) and lotteries over outcomes (life chances) are independent. We show how to accommodate (…rst) Diamond’s critique concerning fairness and (second) Pattanaik’s ...