The effect of candidate quality on electoral equilibrium: an experimental study

When two candidates of different quality compete in a one dimensional policy space, the equilibrium outcomes are asymmetric and do not correspond to the median. There are three main effects. First, the better candidate adopts more centrist policies than the worse candidate. Second, the equilibrium is statistical, in the sense that it predicts a probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single degenerate outcome. Third, the equilibrium varies systematically with the level of uncertainty about the location of the median voter. We test these three predictions using laboratory experiments, and find strong support for all three. We also observe some biases and show that they canbe explained by quantal response equilibrium.

Spillover effects of public capital formation: evidence from the spanish regions

Maybe because of the inconclusive nature of the results on the impact of public capital on output at the regional level, the issue of the possible existence of the regional spillovers from public capital formation has received little attention. The objective of this paper is to provide evidence on the possible existence of such spillovers. We consider the case of Spain and its seventeen regions. Our methodological approach consists in estimating an aggregate VAR model for Spain as well as seventeen region-specific VAR models in which both capital installed in the region and capital installed outside the region are allowed to play a role in enhancing regional output. The estimation results can be summarized as follows. The aggregate effects of public capital formation in Spain are important. They cannot, however, be captured in their entirety by the direct effects in each region from public capital installed in the region itself. When for each region both the capital installed in the region and the capital installed outside the region are considered the total disaggregated effect from the seventeen regional models are very much in line with the aggregate results. Furthermore, the aggregate effect seems to be due in almost equal parts to the direct and spillover effects of public capital formation. Ultimately, this paper establishes the relevance of both capital installed in each region and spillover effects in the understanding of the regional decomposition of the aggregate effects of public capital formation. In doing so it opens the door to some tantalizing and potentially highly charged research issues in terms of the determination of the optimal location of public investment projects.

Agglomeration and location: a nonparametric approach

The aim of this article is to assess the effects of several territorial characteristics, specifically agglomeration economies, on industrial location processes in the Spanish region of Catalonia. Theoretically, the level of agglomeration causes economies which favour the location of new establishments, but an excessive level of agglomeration might cause diseconomies, since congestion effects arise. The empirical evidence on this matter is inconclusive, probably because the models used so far are not suitable enough. We use a more flexible semiparametric specification, which allows us to study the nonlinear relationship between the different types of agglomeration levels and location processes. Our main statistical source is the REIC (Catalan Manufacturing Establishments Register), which has plant-level microdata on location of new industrial establishments. Keywords: agglomeration economies, industrial location, Generalized Additive Models, nonparametric estimation, count data models.

Characterizations of Lojasiewicz inequalities and applications

The classical Lojasiewicz inequality and its extensions for partial differential equation problems (Simon) and to o-minimal structures (Kurdyka) have a considerable impact on the analysis of gradient-like methods and related problems: minimization methods, complexity theory, asymptotic analysis of dissipative partial differential equations, tame geometry. This paper provides alternative characterizations of this type of inequalities for nonsmooth lower semicontinuous functions defined on a metric or a real Hilbert space. In a metric context, we show that a generalized form of the Lojasiewicz inequality (hereby called the Kurdyka- Lojasiewicz inequality) relates to metric regularity and to the Lipschitz continuity of the sublevel mapping, yielding applications to discrete methods (strong convergence of the proximal algorithm). In a Hilbert setting we further establish that asymptotic properties of the semiflow generated by -∂f are strongly linked to this inequality. This is done by introducing the notion of a piecewise subgradient curve: such curves have uniformly bounded lengths if and only if the Kurdyka- Lojasiewicz inequality is satisfied. Further characterizations in terms of talweg lines -a concept linked to the location of the less steepest points at the level sets of f- and integrability conditions are given. In the convex case these results are significantly reinforced, allowing in particular to establish the asymptotic equivalence of discrete gradient methods and continuous gradient curves. On the other hand, a counterexample of a convex C2 function in R2 is constructed to illustrate the fact that, contrary to our intuition, and unless a specific growth condition is satisfied, convex functions may fail to fulfill the Kurdyka- Lojasiewicz inequality.

Tax differentials and agglomeration economies in intraregional firm location

This paper analyses empirically how differences in local taxes affect the intraregional location of new manufacturing plants. These effects are examined within the random profit maximization framework while accounting for the presence of different types of agglomeration economies (localization/ urbanization/ Jacobs’ economies) at the municipal level. We look at the location decision of more than 10,000 establishments locating between 1996 and 2003 across more than 400 municipalities in Catalonia, a Spanish region. It is necessary to restrict the choice set to the local labor market and, above all, to control for agglomeration economies so as to identify the effects of taxes on the location of new establishments.

A first attempt of geographically-distributed Multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM): mapping human time and energy throughput in metropolitan Barcelona

This study presents a first attempt to extend the “Multi-scale integrated analysis of societal and ecosystem metabolism (MuSIASEM)” approach to a spatial dimension using GIS techniques in the Metropolitan area of Barcelona. We use a combination of census and commercial databases along with a detailed land cover map to create a layer of Common Geographic Units that we populate with the local values of human time spent in different activities according to MuSIASEM hierarchical typology. In this way, we mapped the hours of available human time, in regards to the working hours spent in different locations, putting in evidence the gradients in spatial density between the residential location of workers (generating the work supply) and the places where the working hours are actually taking place. We found a strong three-modal pattern of clumps of areas with different combinations of values of time spent on household activities and on paid work. We also measured and mapped spatial segregation between these two activities and put forward the conjecture that this segregation increases with higher energy throughput, as the size of the functional units must be able to cope with the flow of exosomatic energy. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness of the approach by comparing our geographic representation of exosomatic throughput to the one issued from conventional methods.

M-Library in an m-University : changing Models in the Open University of Catalonia

The general perspective of M-technologies and M-Services at the Spanish universities is not still in a very high level when we are ending the first decade of the 21st century. Some Universities and some of their libraries are starting to try out with M-technologies, but are still far from a model of massive exploitation, less than in some other countries. A deep study is needed to know the main reasons, study that we will not do in this paper. This general perspective does not mean that there are no significant initiatives which start to trust in M-technologies from Universities and their libraries. Models based in M-technologies make more sense than ever in open universities and in open libraries. That's the reason why the UOC's Library began in late 90s its first experiences in the M-Technologies and M-Libraries developments. In 1999 the appropriate technology offered the opportunity to carry out the first pilot test with SMS, and then applying the WAP technology. At those moments we managed to link-up mobile phones to the OPAC through a WAP system that allowed searching the catalogue by categories and finding the final location of a document, offering also the address of the library in which the user could loan it. Since then, UOC (and its library) directs its efforts towards adapting the offer of services to all sorts of M-devices used by end users. Left the WAP technology, nowadays the library is experimenting with some new devices like e-books, and some new services to get more feedback through the OPAC and metalibrary search products. We propose the case of Open University of Catalonia, in two levels: M-services applied in the library and M-technologies applied in some other university services and resources.

Analyzing shapes as compositions of distances

We propose to analyze shapes as “compositions” of distances in Aitchison geometry asan alternate and complementary tool to classical shape analysis, especially when sizeis non-informative.Shapes are typically described by the location of user-chosen landmarks. Howeverthe shape – considered as invariant under scaling, translation, mirroring and rotation– does not uniquely define the location of landmarks. A simple approach is to usedistances of landmarks instead of the locations of landmarks them self. Distances arepositive numbers defined up to joint scaling, a mathematical structure quite similar tocompositions. The shape fixes only ratios of distances. Perturbations correspond torelative changes of the size of subshapes and of aspect ratios. The power transformincreases the expression of the shape by increasing distance ratios. In analogy to thesubcompositional consistency, results should not depend too much on the choice ofdistances, because different subsets of the pairwise distances of landmarks uniquelydefine the shape.Various compositional analysis tools can be applied to sets of distances directly or afterminor modifications concerning the singularity of the covariance matrix and yield resultswith direct interpretations in terms of shape changes. The remaining problem isthat not all sets of distances correspond to a valid shape. Nevertheless interpolated orpredicted shapes can be backtransformated by multidimensional scaling (when all pairwisedistances are used) or free geodetic adjustment (when sufficiently many distancesare used)

Application for fault location in electrical power distribution systems

Fault location has been studied deeply for transmission lines due to its importance in power systems. Nowadays the problem of fault location on distribution systems is receiving special attention mainly because of the power quality regulations. In this context, this paper presents an application software developed in Matlabtrade that automatically calculates the location of a fault in a distribution power system, starting from voltages and currents measured at the line terminal and the model of the distribution power system data. The application is based on a N-ary tree structure, which is suitable to be used in this application due to the highly branched and the non- homogeneity nature of the distribution systems, and has been developed for single-phase, two-phase, two-phase-to-ground, and three-phase faults. The implemented application is tested by using fault data in a real electrical distribution power system

Evaluation of the chicken transcriptome by SAGE of B cells and the DT40 cell line

Background: The understanding of whole genome sequences in higher eukaryotes depends to a large degree on the reliable definition of transcription units including exon/intron structures, translated open reading frames (ORFs) and flanking untranslated regions. The best currently available chicken transcript catalog is the Ensembl build based on the mappings of a relatively small number of full length cDNAs and ESTs to the genome as well as genome sequence derived in silico gene predictions.Results: We use Long Serial Analysis of Gene Expression (LongSAGE) in bursal lymphocytes and the DT40 cell line to verify the quality and completeness of the annotated transcripts. 53.6% of the more than 38,000 unique SAGE tags (unitags) match to full length bursal cDNAs, the Ensembl transcript build or the genome sequence. The majority of all matching unitags show single matches to the genome, but no matches to the genome derived Ensembl transcript build. Nevertheless, most of these tags map close to the 3' boundaries of annotated Ensembl transcripts.Conclusions: These results suggests that rather few genes are missing in the current Ensembl chicken transcript build, but that the 3' ends of many transcripts may not have been accurately predicted. The tags with no match in the transcript sequences can now be used to improve gene predictions, pinpoint the genomic location of entirely missed transcripts and optimize the accuracy of gene finder software.

New Trends in Public Facility Location Modeling

The past four decades have witnessed an explosive growth in the field of networkbased facility location modeling. This is not at all surprising since location policy is one of the most profitable areas of applied systems analysis in regional science and ample theoretical and applied challenges are offered. Location-allocation models seek the location of facilities and/or services (e.g., schools, hospitals, and warehouses) so as to optimize one or several objectives generally related to the efficiency of the system or to the allocation of resources. This paper concerns the location of facilities or services in discrete space or networks, that are related to the public sector, such as emergency services (ambulances, fire stations, and police units), school systems and postal facilities. The paper is structured as follows: first, we will focus on public facility location models that use some type of coverage criterion, with special emphasis in emergency services. The second section will examine models based on the P-Median problem and some of the issues faced by planners when implementing this formulation in real world locational decisions. Finally, the last section will examine new trends in public sector facility location modeling.

On optimal location with treshold requirements

The optimal location of services is one of the most important factors that affects service quality in terms of consumer access. On theother hand, services in general need to have a minimum catchment area so as to be efficient. In this paper a model is presented that locates the maximum number of services that can coexist in a given region without having losses, taking into account that they need a minimum catchment area to exist. The objective is to minimize average distance to the population. The formulation presented belongs to the class of discrete P--median--like models. A tabu heuristic method is presented to solve the problem. Finally, the model is applied to the location of pharmacies in a rural region of Spain.

The P-median problem in a changing network: The case of Barcelona

In this paper a p--median--like model is formulated to address theissue of locating new facilities when there is uncertainty. Severalpossible future scenarios with respect to demand and/or the travel times/distanceparameters are presented. The planner will want a strategy of positioning thatwill do as ``well as possible'' over the future scenarios. This paper presents a discrete location model formulation to address this P--Medianproblem under uncertainty. The model is applied to the location of firestations in Barcelona.

Revenue management under general discrete choice model of consumer behavior

Customer choice behavior, such as 'buy-up' and 'buy-down', is an importantphe-nomenon in a wide range of industries. Yet there are few models ormethodologies available to exploit this phenomenon within yield managementsystems. We make some progress on filling this void. Specifically, wedevelop a model of yield management in which the buyers' behavior ismodeled explicitly using a multi-nomial logit model of demand. Thecontrol problem is to decide which subset of fare classes to offer ateach point in time. The set of open fare classes then affects the purchaseprobabilities for each class. We formulate a dynamic program todetermine the optimal control policy and show that it reduces to a dynamicnested allocation policy. Thus, the optimal choice-based policy caneasily be implemented in reservation systems that use nested allocationcontrols. We also develop an estimation procedure for our model based onthe expectation-maximization (EM) method that jointly estimates arrivalrates and choice model parameters when no-purchase outcomes areunobservable. Numerical results show that this combined optimization-estimation approach may significantly improve revenue performancerelative to traditional leg-based models that do not account for choicebehavior.

Probabilistic maximal covering location-allocation models with constrained waiting time or queue length for congested systems

When dealing with the design of service networks, such as healthand EMS services, banking or distributed ticket selling services, thelocation of service centers has a strong influence on the congestion ateach of them, and consequently, on the quality of service. In this paper,several models are presented to consider service congestion. The firstmodel addresses the issue of the location of the least number of single--servercenters such that all the population is served within a standard distance,and nobody stands in line for a time longer than a given time--limit, or withmore than a predetermined number of other clients. We then formulateseveral maximal coverage models, with one or more servers per service center.A new heuristic is developed to solve the models and tested in a 30--nodesnetwork.