Private or public? a taxonomy of optimal ownership and management regimes

We develop a theory of public versus private ownership based on value diversion by managers. Government is assumed to face stronger institutional constraints than has been assumed in previous literature. The model which emerges from these assumptions is fexible and has wide application. We provide amapping between the qualitative characteristics of an asset, its main use - including public goods characteristics, and spillovers toother assets values - and the optimal ownership and management regime. The model is applied to single and multiple related assets. We address questions such as; when is it optimal to have one of a pair ofr elated assets public and the other private; when is joint management desirable; and when should a public asset be managed by the owner of a related private asset? We show that while private ownership can be judged optimal in some cases solely on the basis of qualitative information, the optimality of any other ownership and management regimes relies on quantitative analysis. Our results reveal the situations in which policy makers will have difficulty in determining the opimal regime.

A Common-feature approach for testing present-value restrictions with financial data

It is well known that cointegration between the level of two variables (labeled Yt and yt in this paper) is a necessary condition to assess the empirical validity of a present-value model (PV and PVM, respectively, hereafter) linking them. The work on cointegration has been so prevalent that it is often overlooked that another necessary condition for the PVM to hold is that the forecast error entailed by the model is orthogonal to the past. The basis of this result is the use of rational expectations in forecasting future values of variables in the PVM. If this condition fails, the present-value equation will not be valid, since it will contain an additional term capturing the (non-zero) conditional expected value of future error terms. Our article has a few novel contributions, but two stand out. First, in testing for PVMs, we advise to split the restrictions implied by PV relationships into orthogonality conditions (or reduced rank restrictions) before additional tests on the value of parameters. We show that PV relationships entail a weak-form common feature relationship as in Hecq, Palm, and Urbain (2006) and in Athanasopoulos, Guillén, Issler and Vahid (2011) and also a polynomial serial-correlation common feature relationship as in Cubadda and Hecq (2001), which represent restrictions on dynamic models which allow several tests for the existence of PV relationships to be used. Because these relationships occur mostly with nancial data, we propose tests based on generalized method of moment (GMM) estimates, where it is straightforward to propose robust tests in the presence of heteroskedasticity. We also propose a robust Wald test developed to investigate the presence of reduced rank models. Their performance is evaluated in a Monte-Carlo exercise. Second, in the context of asset pricing, we propose applying a permanent-transitory (PT) decomposition based on Beveridge and Nelson (1981), which focus on extracting the long-run component of asset prices, a key concept in modern nancial theory as discussed in Alvarez and Jermann (2005), Hansen and Scheinkman (2009), and Nieuwerburgh, Lustig, Verdelhan (2010). Here again we can exploit the results developed in the common cycle literature to easily extract permament and transitory components under both long and also short-run restrictions. The techniques discussed herein are applied to long span annual data on long- and short-term interest rates and on price and dividend for the U.S. economy. In both applications we do not reject the existence of a common cyclical feature vector linking these two series. Extracting the long-run component shows the usefulness of our approach and highlights the presence of asset-pricing bubbles.

Evaluation of four molecular typing Methodologies as tools for determining taxonomy relations and for identifying. species among Yersinia isolates

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

A novel algorithm for feature selection using Harmony Search and its application for non-technical losses detection

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

CENSUS HISTOGRAMS: A SIMPLE FEATURE EXTRACTION and MATCHING APPROACH FOR FACE RECOGNITION

Most face recognition approaches require a prior training where a given distribution of faces is assumed to further predict the identity of test faces. Such an approach may experience difficulty in identifying faces belonging to distributions different from the one provided during the training. A face recognition technique that performs well regardless of training is, therefore, interesting to consider as a basis of more sophisticated methods. In this work, the Census Transform is applied to describe the faces. Based on a scanning window which extracts local histograms of Census Features, we present a method that directly matches face samples. With this simple technique, 97.2% of the faces in the FERET fa/fb test were correctly recognized. Despite being an easy test set, we have found no other approaches in literature regarding straight comparisons of faces with such a performance. Also, a window for further improvement is presented. Among other techniques, we demonstrate how the use of SVMs over the Census Histogram representation can increase the recognition performance.

New Insights on Nontechnical Losses Characterization Through Evolutionary-Based Feature Selection

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Adaptive filter feature identification for structural health monitoring in an aeronautical panel

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Feature selection through gravitational search algorithm

In this paper we deal with the problem of feature selection by introducing a new approach based on Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA). The proposed algorithm combines the optimization behavior of GSA together with the speed of Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) classifier in order to provide a fast and accurate framework for feature selection. Experiments on datasets obtained from a wide range of applications, such as vowel recognition, image classification and fraud detection in power distribution systems are conducted in order to asses the robustness of the proposed technique against Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based algorithm for feature selection.

Leaf anatomy as a contribution to the taxonomy of Salacioideae N.Hall, ex Thorne & Reveal (Celastraceae)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Karyotypic diversification and its contribution to the taxonomy of Eleocharis (Cyperaceae) from Brazil

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

A new Coniacian-Santonian conchostracan genus from the Bauru Group, south-east Brazil: Taxonomy, palaeobiogeography and palaeoecology

Abundant conchostracans occur in Coniacian-Santonian dark grey, argillaceous, lacustrine sediments of the Sao Carlos Formation, Bauru Group, Parana Basin, in the central part of São Paulo State, south-east Brazil. They are ascribed to a new genus and species, Bauruestheria sancarlensis, included in the family Jilinestheriidae. The new taxon is similar to some Late Cretaceous species from China and Mongolia. It probably evolved from a Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous ancestral form (Migransia), which first lived in West Gondwana, and later dispersed to Europe and Asia, originating distinct parallel lineages with increasing ornamental complexity. The conchostracans probably lived in oxygenated marginal areas of a very calm, perennial lake with an anoxic bottom, and were transported in suspension to the depositional site by weak turbidity currents or storm-induced flows. Great concentrations of juvenile conchostracans in some thin layers can be related to mass mortality, episodes caused by convection and dispersion of anoxic water during storms. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

TAXONOMY, ONTOGENY and PALEOECOLOGY of TWO SPECIES of HARBINIA TSAO, 1959 (CRUSTACEA, OSTRACODA) FROM THE SANTANA FORMATION, LOWER CRETACEOUS, NORTHEASTERN BRAZIL

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Leaf Structure and Taxonomy of Petunia and Calibrachoa (Solanaceae)

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)