Poverty analysis is often based on national level indicators that are compared over time or across countries. The broad trends that can be identified using aggregate information are useful for evaluating and monitoring the overall performance of a country. For many policy and research applications, however, the information that can be extracted from aggregate indicators is not sufficient. Resea...

This paper examines the out-of-sample performance of various financial variables as predictors of U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, and monetary aggregates are evaluated individually and in comparison with other financial and nonfinancial indicators. The analysis focuses on out-of-sample performance from one to eight quarters ahead. Results show that stoc...

In this paper, we investigate competition in banking systems in the EU27 as a whole for the period 2004– 2010, but also for old members’ banking systems compared with new members’ banking systems and for banking systems from countries member of euro zone compares with banking systems from countries non-member of euro zone. In order to investigate this issue, we estimate a non-structural indicat...

Understanding the neural basis of behaviour requires studying brain activity in behaving subjects using complementary techniques that measure neural responses at multiple spatial scales, and developing computational tools for understanding the mapping between these measurements. Here we report the first results of widefield imaging of genetically encoded calcium indicator (GCaMP6f) signals from...

It is widely recognized that citation counts for papers from different fields cannot be directly compared because different scientific fields adopt different citation practices. Citation counts are also strongly biased by paper age since older papers had more time to attract citations. Various procedures aim at suppressing these biases and give rise to new normalized indicators, such as the rel...

We present a modular approach for analyzing calcium imaging recordings of large neuronal ensembles. Our goal is to simultaneously identify the locations of the neurons, demix spatially overlapping components, and denoise and deconvolve the spiking activity from the slow dynamics of the calcium indicator. Our approach relies on a constrained nonnegative matrix factorization that expresses the sp...

25 The taxi sector presents many challenges to adequately serve the demand while maximising 26 efficiency and profitability and minimising externalities. Many authors have dealt with the 27 ‘taxi industry’ by modelling and forecasting its activity, usually using limited, incomplete or 28 no trustable data to validate their model. The present paper tackles a different point of view. 29 The appli...

Taxicab service plays a vital role in public transportation by offering passengers quick personalized destination service in a semiprivate and secure manner. Taxicabs cruise the road network looking for a fare at designated taxi stands or alongside the streets. However, this service is often inefficient due to a low ratio of live miles (miles with a fare) to cruising miles (miles without a fare...

Objectives: This paper evaluates the drivers of profitability for a large sample of U.S. hospitals. Following a methodology frequently used by financial analysts, we use a DuPont analysis as a framework to evaluate the quality of earnings. By decomposing returns on equity (ROE) into profit margin, total asset turnover, and capital structure, the DuPont analysis reveals what drives overall profi...

The exchange of information is in many multi-agent systems the essential form of interaction. For this reason, it is crucial to keep agents from providing unreliable information. However, agents that provide information have to balance between being highly competent, in order to achieve a good reputation as information provider, and staying incompetent, in order to minimize the costs of informa...