Are rules-based government programs shielded from special-interest politics? Evidence from revenue-sharing transfers in Brazil

Manipulation of government finances for the benefit of narrowly defined groups is usuallythought to be limited to the part of the budget over which politicians exercise discretion inthe short run, such as earmarks. Analyzing a revenue-sharing program between the centraland local governments in Brazil that uses an allocation formula based on local population estimates,I document two main results: first, that the population estimates entering the formulawere manipulated and second, that this manipulation was political in nature. Consistent withswing-voter targeting by the right-wing central government, I find that municipalities withroughly equal right-wing and non-right-wing vote shares benefited relative to opposition orconservative core support municipalities. These findings suggest that the exclusive focus ondiscretionary transfers in the extant empirical literature on special-interest politics may understatethe true scope of tactical redistribution that is going on under programmatic disguise.

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.

A finite-population revenue management model and a risk-ratio procedure for the joint estimation of population size and parameters

Many dynamic revenue management models divide the sale period into a finite number of periods T and assume, invoking a fine-enough grid of time, that each period sees at most one booking request. These Poisson-type assumptions restrict the variability of the demand in the model, but researchers and practitioners were willing to overlook this for the benefit of tractability of the models. In this paper, we criticize this model from another angle. Estimating the discrete finite-period model poses problems of indeterminacy and non-robustness: Arbitrarily fixing T leads to arbitrary control values and on the other hand estimating T from data adds an additional layer of indeterminacy. To counter this, we first propose an alternate finite-population model that avoids this problem of fixing T and allows a wider range of demand distributions, while retaining the useful marginal-value properties of the finite-period model. The finite-population model still requires jointly estimating market size and the parameters of the customer purchase model without observing no-purchases. Estimation of market-size when no-purchases are unobservable has rarely been attempted in the marketing or revenue management literature. Indeed, we point out that it is akin to the classical statistical problem of estimating the parameters of a binomial distribution with unknown population size and success probability, and hence likely to be challenging. However, when the purchase probabilities are given by a functional form such as a multinomial-logit model, we propose an estimation heuristic that exploits the specification of the functional form, the variety of the offer sets in a typical RM setting, and qualitative knowledge of arrival rates. Finally we perform simulations to show that the estimator is very promising in obtaining unbiased estimates of population size and the model parameters.

Demand and revenue implications of an integrated public transport policy: the case of Madrid

One of the most popular options for promoting public transport use is the provision of an integrated and high quality public transport system. This was the strategy adopted by the regional government in Madrid in 1986 and since then public transport patronage has increased by more than 50%. This paper has two objectives. The first is to identify the factors underlying the significant increase in the demand for public transport in Madrid. To do this we estimate an aggregate demand function for bus and underground trips, which allows us to obtain the demand elasticities with respect to the main attributes of public transport services and also to calculate the long-term impact of changes in those explanatory variables on patronage. The second objective is to evaluate the impact on revenue derived from the introduction of the travel card scheme, and to discuss the consequences on revenue of changes in the relative fare levels of different types of ticket without substantially affecting patronage. This latter issue is addressed by estimating a matrix of own and cross-price elasticities for different ticket types.

A rotation method which gives linear Lp-Estimates for powers of the Ahlfors-Beurling operator

"Vegeu el resum a l'inici del document del fitxer adjunt."

New estimates for the maximal singular integral

"Vegeu el resum a l'inici del document del fitxer adjunt."

Weak-type estimates for Haar shift operators: Sharp power on the A(p) characteristic

"Vegeu el resum a l'inici del document del fitxer adjunt."

Gaussian estimates for the density of the non-linear stochastic heat equation in any space dimension

In this paper, we establish lower and upper Gaussian bounds for the probability density of the mild solution to the stochastic heat equation with multiplicative noise and in any space dimension. The driving perturbation is a Gaussian noise which is white in time with some spatially homogeneous covariance. These estimates are obtained using tools of the Malliavin calculus. The most challenging part is the lower bound, which is obtained by adapting a general method developed by Kohatsu-Higa to the underlying spatially homogeneous Gaussian setting. Both lower and upper estimates have the same form: a Gaussian density with a variance which is equal to that of the mild solution of the corresponding linear equation with additive noise.

Regional value added in Italy over the long run (1891-2001): linking indirect estimates with official figures, and implications

This paper presents value added estimates for the Italian regions, in benchmark years from 1891 until 1951, which are linked to those from official figures available from 1971 in order to offer a long-term picture. Sources and methodology are documented and discussed, whilst regional activity rates and productivity are also presented and compared. Thus some questions are briefly reconsidered: the origins and extent of the north-south divide, the role of migration and regional policy in shaping the pattern of regional inequality, the importance of social capital, and the positioning of Italy in the international debate on regional convergence, where it stands out for the long run persistence of its disparities.

Beurling-Landau densities of weighted Fekete sets and correlation kernel estimates

Vegeu el resum a l'inici del document del fitxer adjunt.

Moduli of smoothness and growth properties of Fourier transforms: two-sided estimates

We prove two-sided inequalities between the integral moduli of smoothness of a function on R d[superscript] / T d[superscript] and the weighted tail-type integrals of its Fourier transform/series. Sharpness of obtained results in particular is given by the equivalence results for functions satisfying certain regular conditions. Applications include a quantitative form of the Riemann-Lebesgue lemma as well as several other questions in approximation theory and the theory of function spaces.

Counterexamples to some pointwise estimates of the maximal Cauchy transform in terms of the Cauchy transform

Motivated by the work of Mateu, Orobitg, Pérez and Verdera, who proved inequalities of the form $T_*f\lesssim M(Tf)$ or $T_*f\lesssim M^2(Tf)$ for certain singular integral operators $T$, such as the Hilbert or the Beurling transforms, we study the possibility of establishing this type of control for the Cauchy transform along a Lipschitz graph. We show that this is not possible in general, and we give a partial positive result when the graph is substituted by a Jordan curve.

L2−estimates for the DG IIPG-0 scheme

We discuss the optimality in L2 of a variant of the Incomplete Discontinuous Galerkin Interior Penalty method (IIPG) for second order linear elliptic problems. We prove optimal estimate, in two and three dimensions, for the lowest order case under suitable regularity assumptions on the data and on the mesh. We also provide numerical evidence, in one dimension, of the necessity of the regularity assumptions.

One kind of lawlessness: estimating the welfare cost of Somali piracy

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent increase in shipping costs. We use this estimate to get a sense of the welfare loss imposed by piracy. Our intermediate estimate suggests that the creation of $120 million of revenue for pirates in the Somalia area led to a welfare loss of over $1.5 billion.

Equidistribution estimates for Fekete points on complex manifolds

We study the equidistribution of Fekete points in a compact complex manifold. These are extremal point configurations defined through sections of powers of a positive line bundle. Their equidistribution is a known result. The novelty of our approach is that we relate them to the problem of sampling and interpolation on line bundles, which allows us to estimate the equidistribution of the Fekete points quantitatively. In particular we estimate the Kantorovich-Wasserstein distance of the Fekete points to its limiting measure. The sampling and interpolation arrays on line bundles are a subject of independent interest, and we provide necessary density conditions through the classical approach of Landau, that in this context measures the local dimension of the space of sections of the line bundle. We obtain a complete geometric characterization of sampling and interpolation arrays in the case of compact manifolds of dimension one, and we prove that there are no arrays of both sampling and interpolation in the more general setting of semipositive line bundles.