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...

Soil dehydrogenase activity is a good indicator of overall microbial activity in soil, and it can serve as a good indicator of soil condition. However, seasonal changes in soil moisture content may have an effect on soil dehydrogenase activity, making an accurate assessment of soil condition difficult. In this study, we attempted to determine the significance of soil dehydrogenase activity for ...

Assessment tools are needed to evaluate agronomic management effects on critical soil functions such as carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling and water partitioning. These tools need to be flexible in terms of selection of soil functions to be assessed and indicators to be measured to ensure that assessments are appropriate for the management goals. The soil management assessment framework (SM...

A new type of chemical sensor to detect explosive related compounds has been designed and fabricated with an organic photovoltaic cell as the active element. The detection of chemical molecules is performed by optically exciting the cell while its photovoltaic open-circuit voltage is continuously sampled. Upon exposure to compounds like nitroaromatics, the sensors exhibit a significant increase...