Uncertain Information Structures and Backward Induction

In everyday economic interactions, it is not clear whether sequential choices are visible or not to other participants: agents might be deluded about opponents'capacity to acquire,interpret or keep track of data, or might simply unexpectedly forget what they previously observed (but not chose). Following this idea, this paper drops the assumption that the information structure of extensive-form games is commonly known; that is, it introduces uncertainty into players' capacity to observe each others' past choices. Using this approach, our main result provides the following epistemic characterisation: if players (i) are rational,(ii) have strong belief in both opponents' rationality and opponents' capacity to observe others' choices, and (iii) have common belief in both opponents' future rationality and op-ponents' future capacity to observe others' choices, then the backward induction outcome obtains. Consequently, we do not require perfect information, and players observing each others' choices is often irrelevant from a strategic point of view. The analysis extends {from generic games with perfect information to games with not necessarily perfect information{the work by Battigalli and Siniscalchi (2002) and Perea (2014), who provide different sufficient epistemic conditions for the backward induction outcome.

New Keynesian Model Features that Can Reproduce Lead, Lag and Persistence Patterns

This paper uses a new method for describing dynamic comovement and persistence in economic time series which builds on the contemporaneous forecast error method developed in den Haan (2000). This data description method is then used to address issues in New Keynesian model performance in two ways. First, well known data patterns, such as output and inflation leads and lags and inflation persistence, are decomposed into forecast horizon components to give a more complete description of the data patterns. These results show that the well known lead and lag patterns between output and inflation arise mostly in the medium term forecasts horizons. Second, the data summary method is used to investigate a rich New Keynesian model with many modeling features to see which of these features can reproduce lead, lag and persistence patterns seen in the data. Many studies have suggested that a backward looking component in the Phillips curve is needed to match the data, but our simulations show this is not necessary. We show that a simple general equilibrium model with persistent IS curve shocks and persistent supply shocks can reproduce the lead, lag and persistence patterns seen in the data.

How Does the New Keynesian Monetary Model Fit in the U.S. and the Eurozone? an Indirect Inference Approach

This paper estimates a standard version of the New Keynesian monetary (NKM) model under alternative specifications of the monetary policy rule using U.S. and Eurozone data. The estimation procedure implemented is a classical method based on the indirect inference principle. An unrestricted VAR is considered as the auxiliary model. On the one hand, the estimation method proposed overcomes some of the shortcomings of using a structural VAR as the auxiliary model in order to identify the impulse response that defines the minimum distance estimator implemented in the literature. On the other hand, by following a classical approach we can further assess the estimation results found in recent papers that follow a maximum-likelihood Bayesian approach. The estimation results show that some structural parameter estimates are quite sensitive to the specification of monetary policy. Moreover, the estimation results in the U.S. show that the fit of the NKM under an optimal monetary plan is much worse than the fit of the NKM model assuming a forward-looking Taylor rule. In contrast to the U.S. case, in the Eurozone the best fit is obtained assuming a backward-looking Taylor rule, but the improvement is rather small with respect to assuming either a forward-looking Taylor rule or an optimal plan.

Enirio-Aralar mendietako abereen eta basoen ustiapena aro berrian zehar

[EUS]Enirio-Aralarreko mendietako basoek ez dute XVIII. mendera arte ustiapen gogorrik jasango. Ordura arte Batasunetako biztanleek behar zuten egurra soilik ateratzen zuten, ia ustiapen industrialik gabe. XVIII. mendean, beheko aldeko hariztiak agortu zirenean, Enirio-Aralarreko pagoak hasi ziren ustiatzen ikatza, itsasontziak edo arma-kajoiak egiteko. Aldi berean, ordura arte “tokian tokiko” abeltzaintza izan zena, erdi trashumantzia bihurtu zen: kostaldeko eta inguruko artaldeak Enirio-Aralar mendietan hasi ziren uda ematen. Aipatutako bi faktoreek –basoaren ustiapenak eta kanpoko artaldeen etorrerak–, batik bat XVIII. mendearen bukaeran eta XIX. mendearen hasieran, Enirio-Aralarreko basoaren atzerakada eragin zuten. XIX eta XX. mendeetan zehar deforestazioa areagotu egin zen, bertako mendiei gaur egun ezagutzen dugun itxura eman arte.

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech data repository given an acoustic query containing the term of interest as input. Nowadays, it has been receiving much interest due to the high volume of information stored in audio or audiovisual format. QbE STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) and keyword spotting (KWS)/spoken term detection (STD) since ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech signal and KWS/STD relies on a textual transcription of the search term to retrieve the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the ALBAYZIN 2012 QbE STD evaluation held as a part of ALBAYZIN 2012 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2012 Conference(a). The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the input queries, indicating their start and end timestamps within the appropriate speech file. Evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database containing a set of talks from MAVIR workshops(b), which amount at about 7 h of speech in total. We present the database metric systems submitted along with all results and some discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show the difficulty of this task and the limited performance indicates there is still a lot of room for improvement. The best result is achieved by a dynamic time warping-based search over Gaussian posteriorgrams/posterior phoneme probabilities. This paper also compares the systems aiming at establishing the best technique dealing with that difficult task and looking for defining promising directions for this relatively novel task.

España neutral: el impacto económico de las dos guerras mundiales (1914-1945)

Durante las dos grandes guerras mundiales España adoptó una posición de no beligerancia que conllevaría a unas consecuencias y un impacto muy diferente para la economía española en uno y en otro conflicto. Por un lado España se presenta ante la Primera Guerra Mundial como una economía totalmente atrasada y agraria, mientras que con el estallido del conflicto supo aprovechar las necesidades del momento, permitiendo de esta manera un fuerte enriquecimiento. Por otro lado, en la Segunda Guerra Mundial España se encontraba totalmente destruida y con una fuerte inestabilidad, lo cual supuso que junto con las medidas autárquicas de la dictadura conllevaran a un periodo de penuria. IDIOMA: CASTELLANO