1,721,014 research outputs found
Keynesian and new-Keynesian models: the impact of military spending on the United States economy
Full text linkMy thesis is in EnglishThe aim of my thesis is to analyze whether the government defence expenditure, as a component of total public spending, is able to affect the economic performance of U.S., and/or account for the potential role in explaining fiscal policy fluctuations. Broadly speaking, my work aims to answer to the following question: does military spending provide economic stimulation through higher aggregate demand for goods and services, or does military spending retard economic performance because it draws resources from more productive activities that can be devolved to the civilian sector?
The thesis is composed by three chapters which capture different aspects about these arguments. The first chapter empirically assesses the so called "Military Keynesianism", i.e. the approach that treats the military budget as a source of aggregate demand for goods and services and, therefore, a source of economic stimulation. The military Keynesianism took centre stage in the policy debate with John Maynard Keynes, who argued that in extreme situations the government should spend on anything as a means of stimulating aggregate demand. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to empirically test the Keynesian hypothesis, by using a long-run equilibrium model for the U.S. economy. My contribution, with respect to previous works, is twofold. First, inferences are adjusted for structural breaks exhibited by the data concerning fiscal and monetary variables. Second, I show that the results are sensitive to sub sample choices.
In the second chapter, my goal is to disentangle the components of government spending in civilian and military expenditures into a standard DSGE new-Keynesian model and analyze their role on the U.S. economy, with particular attention on private consumption and wages. In particular, I focus on the changes in the effects of public spending components before and after a structural break that occurred in U.S. economy around 1980. I assume that this break is related to a change in consumer behaviour, i.e. the increased asset market participation.
From a theoretical point of view, I assume a standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Model (DSGE) with an economy with sticky prices and limited asset market participation. Moreover, I assume the existence of a fiscal policy authority that purchases consumption goods (divided in spending for military and non-military sectors), raises (lump-sum and income) taxes and issues nominal debt. Finally, I include a monetary authority, which sets its policy instrument, the nominal interest rate. I estimate the theoretical model with a Bayesian approach, the so called “strong econometric approach”, which allows providing a full characterization of the data generating process and a proper testing specification. The latter aspect is particularly important for the fiscal shocks assessment.
In the last chapter, I focus on government spending multiplier and, in particular, on the effects of different components of public spending on the U.S. economy. I disaggregate total government spending into civilian and military expenditures and estimate, through a structural VAR approach, their effects separately on GDP and private consumption. In this chapter, I introduce three main novelties with respect to previous literature. First, I analyze the effects of public spending on the economy accounting for "within" complementarity/substitutability of military and non-military expenditures. Second, I show that the financing mechanism of the different spending components is crucial for agent’s decision about consumption.
Finally, I assess that crowding in/out effects of government spending components on aggregate consumption are related to the existence of a precise portion of public expenditure that stimulates/depresses a fraction of consumers. In this chapter, I also develop a simple DSGE new-Keynesian model that can potentially account for that evidence. My framework shares many ingredients with recent dynamic optimizing sticky price models, though I improve on the assumption of the fiscal sector by introducing non-military and military spending components. This allows me to show that my empirical results can be reproduced by the theoretical model by comparing empirical and simulated impulse response functions
Oil price fluctuations, US banks, and macroprudential policy
No full textUsing US micro-level data on banks, we document a negative effect of high oil prices on US banks’ balance sheets, more negative for highly leveraged banks. We set and estimate a general equilibrium model with banking and oil sectors that rationalizes those findings through the financial accelerator mechanism. This mechanism amplifies the effect of oil price shocks, making them non-negligible drivers of the dynamics of US banks’ intermediation activity and of the US real economy. Macroprudential policy, in the form of a countercyclical capital buffer, can meaningfully address oil price fluctuations and reduce the volatility they cause in the US economy
The effects of military and non-military government expenditures on private consumption
Full text linkIn this article, we provide evidence that civilian and military government spending have specific characteristics that can affect private consumption differently. Our vector autoregressive (VAR) estimates for the US economy for the period 1960–2013 show that civilian expenditure induces a positive and significant response on private consumption, whereas military spending has a negative impact. We also analyze the effects of these public spending components for the subsamples 1960–79 and 1983–2013, respectively. Our results show that the main transmission channels of both civilian and military expenditures have changed over time. We adopt a new Keynesian approach and develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model in order to simulate the empirical evidence. Both the larger persistence of shocks in military spending and the different financing mechanisms, which account for the propensity of policymakers to use budget deficits to finance wars, mimic the differences in the empirical responses of private consumption. Simulated impulse response functions of alternative specification models prove the robustness of our analysis. In particular, we assess the impact of civilian and military shocks in the presence of different (i) shares of heterogeneous households, (ii) price rigidities, and (iii) monetary reactions in response to different government shocks
La guerra dei droni e «il campo della battaglia»
No full textDopo una genealogia dell'oggeto drone- icona delle guerre del XXI secolo - si analizza il suo utilizzo nella guerra ucraina considerando come ha cambiato la funzione del campo della battaglia e le categorie di nemico/amico civile/militare. Infatti, la resistenza ucraina ha strategicamente tramutato il campo della battaglia in una territorialità digitalizzata sottraendo il corpo geopolitico dello Stato alla presa degli alti comandi russi. Sul piano del tempo invece, i droni hanno agito nello iato tra il regime di istantaneità delle connessioni e quello della materiale lentezza dei mezzi in movimento. In una simile territorialità il corpo sociale viene ricompreso in quella che viene definita la «growing civilianisation of the digital battlefield». Da un lato, questo implica la micidiale sospensione della discriminazione giuridica tra combattenti e non combattenti estendendo potenzialmente lo statuto di target anche alla totalità dei civili – salta insomma la già fragile cornice giuridica che istituisce la categoria di violenza regolare e irregolare. Dall’altro, si sostanzia la possibilità di creare una pluralità di territori digitali e connessioni strategiche in cui continuare l’attacco. L’utilizzo dei droni e l’inattesa «kill web» ucraina riescono a garantire, almeno nella prima fase del conflitto, il carattere di caccia asimmetrica
Machine Learning inference using PYNQ environment in a AWS EC2 F1 Instance
Full text linkIn the past few years, using Machine and Deep Learning techniques has become more and more viable, thanks to the availability of tools which make the need of specific knowledge in the realm of data science and complex networks less vital to achieve a satisfactory final result in a variety of research fields. This process has caused an explosion in the adoption of such techniques, e.g. in the context of High Energy Physics.
The range of applications for ML becomes even larger if we consider the implementation of these algorithms on low-latency hardware like FPGAs which promise smaller latency with respect to traditional inference algorithms running on general purpose CPUs.
This paper presents and discusses the activity running at the University of Bologna and INFN-Bologna where a new open-source project from Xilinx called PYNQ is being tested. Its purpose is to grant designers the possibility to exploit the benefits of programmable logic and microprocessors using the Python language and libraries. This new software environment can be deployed on a variety of Xilinx platforms, from the simplest ones like ZYNQ boards, to more advanced and high performance ones, like Alveo accelerator cards and AWS EC2 F1 instances.
The use of cloud computing in this work lets us test the capabilities of this new workflow, from the creation and training of a Neural Network and the creation of a HLS project using HLS4ML, to testing the predictions of the NN using PYNQ APIs and functions written in Pytho
Fiscal policy, labour market, and inequality Diagnosing South Africa’s anomalies in the shadow of racial discrimination
No full textMilitary Spending, Corruption, Persistence and Long Run Growth
No full textThis paper contributes to the analysis of the impact of military spending and corruption on economic growth, by considering not only the political dimension of corruption, distorting the allocation of resources to sectors, but also the impact on the efficiency of the bureaucratic environment. It does this by developing the model of Mauro (2004) in the context of an endogenous growth model to deal with corruption in the defence sector. It then uses data from the International Country Risk Guide to produce a novel measure of corruption that combines corruption within the political system, institutional strength, quality of bureaucracy and the degree of military participation in the country and estimates the model for a large panel of countries. The results suggest that both military spending (as a share of total government spending) and corruption have significant negative long run effects on output. As the model also suggests that multiple equilibria can exist, a comparison is made between high and low corruption groups of countries and clear differences are indeed found. This suggests that effort is needed to encourage and coerce high corruption and military spending countries, but low corruption and military spending countries are likely to need little attention
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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