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We use data for a panel of 17 countries over the period 1980-2005 to investigate the impact of fiscal consolidation on the likelihood of financial reforms. We show that fiscal adjustments do not boost the implementation of financial reforms. However, tax-driven fiscal consolidation programs raise the likelihood of banking sector reforms. Moreover, we find that: (i) an increase in the degree of trade openness makes countries less likely to implement financial reforms; (ii) an increase in the interest rate spreads accelerates the path of financial reforms, especially, external capital account reforms; and (iii) an improvement in the quality of political institutions strongly enhances the probability of financial reforms., COMPETE, QREN, FEDER, FCT project ‘FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER- 037268 (PEst-C/EGE/UI3182/2013)’.

We assess the existence of duration dependence in the likelihood of an end in housing booms, busts, and normal times. Using data for 20 industrial countries and a continuous-time Weibull duration model, we find evidence of positive duration dependence suggesting that housing market cycles have become longer over the last decades. Then, we extend the baseline Weibull model and allow for the presence of a change-point in the duration dependence parameter.We show that positive duration dependence is present in booms and busts that last less than 26 quarters, but that does not seem to be the case for longer phases of the housing market cycle. For normal times, no evidence of change-points is found. Finally, the empirical findings uncover positive duration dependence in housing market booms of European and non-European countries and housing busts of European countries. In addition, they reveal that while housing booms have similar length in European and non-European countries, housing busts are typically shorter in European countries., COMPETE, QREN, FEDER, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

The volume collects the essays presented at the 15th Workshop on Public Finance organised by Banca d'Italia in Perugia from 4 to 6 April 2013. The workshop focused on the link between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances and comprised four sessions. The first session concentrated on the interaction between fiscal policy and macroeconomic imbalances. The second session dealt with the specific problems of the euro area, where insufficient attention to macroeconomic developments contributed to increase fiscal and financial tensions. The third session scrutinized fiscal policy with an eye to the inequalities of emerging economies and resource-rich countries. The last session analysed the experiences so far and the potential prescriptions about the use of fiscal tools in addressing macroeconomic problems.

The Proton Resonance Frequency (PRF) shift provide a method for temperature change measurements during thermotherapy. Conventional PRF thermometry works subtracting one or multiple baseline images. The method leads to artifacts caused by tissue motion and frequency drift. Various works estimating the background phase from each acquired image phase are present in literature. These algorithms are called “referenceless” because they don’t require any subtraction of baseline images for calculating temperature increment. Conventional referenceless methods estimate baseline image by fitting the background phase outside the heated region through a polynomial approach. In this work a background phase reconstruction method using Radial Basis Function (RBF) interpolation is presented. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been demonstrated with Magnetic Resonance guided Focused UltraSound (MRgFUS) sonications on ex-vivo porcine muscle. A significant improvement of the proposed RBF referenceless method, against classical PRF and polynomial referenceless methods, has been demonstrated.

We investigate the determinants of the volatility of fiscal policy discretion. Using a linear dynamic panel dataset model for 104 countries from 1980 to 2006 and a system-GMM estimator,we find that more government instability, less democracy and presidentialist systems increase the volatility of the discretionary component of fiscal policy. Additionally, we show that countries with a larger size, a smaller degree of financial openness, and a stable exchange rate system are more insured against the uncertainty about the conduct of fiscal policy. Our results are robust to various regional dummy variables, diferent sub-sets of countries and the presence of high inflation and crisis episodes., The authors would like to thank the following for helpful comments: the Editor, two anonymous referees and participants at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the European Economic Association and the Econometric Society, the Economic Policies Research Unit (NIPE) seminar organised by the University of Minho, the First International Symposium in Computational Economics and Finance (ISCEF 2010), the 2010 Annual Meeting of the European Public Choice Society, the workshop on ‘International Political Economy and Cross-Border Effects’ organised by Queen Mary University of London and the UECE Conference on Economic and Financial Adjustments in Europe.

Using a panel of 17 countries for 1978-2009, we find that tax-driven consolidations increase unemployment by 0.25 percentage points. Labour market flexibility mitigates this: a one-point rise in the flexibility index reduces youth (long-term) unemployment by 0.6-0.7 (1.8-2.2) percentage points., COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Expert Systems can integrate logic based often on computational intelligence methods and they are used in complex problem solving. In this work an Expert System for classifying liver iron concentration in thalassemic patients is presented. In this work, an ANN is used to validate the output of the L.I.O.MO.T (Liver Iron Overload Monitoring in Thalassemia) method against the output of the state-of-the-art method based on MRI T2 assessment for liver iron concentration. The model has been validated with a dataset of 200 samples. The experimental Mean Squared Error results and Correlation show interesting performances. The proposed algorithm has been developed as a plug in for OsiriX Dicom Viewer.

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1978 to 2009, we find that income inequality significantly rises during periods of fiscal consolidation. In addition, while fiscal policy that is driven by spending cuts seems to be detrimental for income distribution, tax hikes seem to have an equalizing effect. We also show that the size of the fiscal consolidation program (in percentage of GDP) has an impact on income inequality. In particular, when consolidation plans represent a small share of GDP, the income gap widens, suggesting that the burden associated with the effort affects disproportionately households at the bottom of the income distribution. Considering the linkages between banking crises and fiscal consolidation, we find that the effect on the income gap is amplified when fiscal adjustments take place after the resolution of such financial turmoil. Similarly, fiscal consolidation programs combined with inflation are likely to increase inequality and the effects of fiscal adjustments on inequality are amplified during periods of relatively low growth. Our results also provide support for a non-linear relationship between inequality and income and corroborate the idea that trade can promote a more equal distribution of income., COMPETE, QREN, FEDER, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Using a panel of annual data for 20 countries we show that synchronized fiscal consolidation (stimulus) programmes in different countries make their business cycles more closely linked, especially in the case of fiscal adjustments lasting 2 or 3 years. We also find: (i) little evidence of decoupling when an inflation targeting regime is unilaterally adopted; (ii) an increase in business cycle synchronization when countries fix their exchange rates and become members of a monetary union; (iii) a positive effect of bilateral trade on the synchronization of business cycles.

This paper assesses the determinants of the length of fiscal consolidation using annual data for 17 industrial countries over the period 1978-2009. Relying on a narrative approach to identify fiscal consolidation episodes, we show that fiscal variables (such as the budget deficit and the level of public debt) and economic factors (such as the degree of openness, the inflation rate, the interest rate and per capita GDP) are crucial for the fiscal consolidation process. Additionally, we employ duration analysis over a set of consolidation spells and find that, as time goes by, the likelihood of a fiscal consolidation ending is higher. However, the hazard function is not monotonic: indeed, it increases until the eighth or ninth year and starts decreasing afterwards. We also find that: (i) spending-driven consolidations are shorter than tax-driven consolidations; (ii) both types of consolidation are longer in Non-European countries than for European countries; and (iii) the size of the consolidation program (in percentage of GDP) does not significantly affect duration. All in all, our results support the importance of cuts in government spending as a way of bringing economies into a sustainable path for a public debt. Moreover, they highlight the role played by a fiscal framework that imposes discipline in governments as a device of credibly shorten the length of a fiscal consolidation episodes., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

This paper tests for nonlinear effects of asset prices on the US fiscal policy. By modeling government spending and taxes as time-varying transition probability Markovian processes (TVPMS), we find that taxes significantly adjust in a nonlinear fashion to asset prices. In particular, taxes respond to housing and (to a smaller extent) to stock price changes during normal times. However, at periods characterized by high financial volatility, government taxation only counteracts stock market developments (and not the dynamics of the housing sector). As for government spending, it is neutral vis-a-vis the asset market cycles. We conclude that, correcting the fiscal balance and, notably, the revenue side for time-varying effects of asset prices provides a more accurate assessment of the fiscal stance and its sustainability., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), COMPETE; QREN; FEDER

E-infrastructures must support the development of heterogeneous applications for workstation network, for mobile and portable systems and devices. In this context and relating to all collaborative and pervasive computational technology a very important role is played by security and authentication systems, which represent the first step of the whole process. Biometric authentication systems represent a valid alternative to conventional authentication systems providing robust procedures for user authentication. On the other hand, Internet of Things involves a heterogeneous set of interacting devices to enable innovative global and local applications and services for users. In this chapter fingerprint and iris based unimodal and multimodal authentication systems will be described, analyzed and compared. Finally, a prototyped embedded multimodal biometric sensor will be outlined. Software and hardware prototypes have been checked against common and widely used databases.

Neuromuscular activation can be influenced by both muscle temperature (Tm) and fatigue.To assess the effects of Tm and fatigue on the electromechanical delay (EMD), 15 participants performed voluntary isometric contractions of different intensities under neutral (TmN), low (TmL), and high (TmH) Tm, before and after a fatiguing exercise. During contraction, electromyogram (EMG), mechanomyogram (MMG), and force (F) were recorded from the biceps brachii muscle. The EMD and the latencies between EMG and MMG (Δt EMG-MMG, which includes the electrochemical processes of EMD) and between MMG and F (Δt MMG-F, which includes the mechanical processes of EMD) were calculated.TmL increased only Δt EMG-MMG, both before and after fatigue. Fatigue lengthened EMD, Δt EMG-MMG, and Δt MMG-F under all Tm to a similar extent.While fatigue increased all EMD components, muscle cooling affected only the electrochemical but not the mechanical processes of EMD.

Prova tipográfica, We assess the response of scal policy to developments in asset markets in the US and the UK. We estimate scal policy rules augmented with aggregate wealth, wealth composition (i.e fi nancial and housing wealth) and asset prices (i.e. stock and housing prices) using: (i) a linear framework based on a fully simultaneous system approach; and (ii) two nonlinear speci cations that rely on a smooth transition regression (STR) and a Markov-switching (MS) model. The linear framework suggests that, while primary spending does not seem to react to wealth composition or asset prices, taxes and primary surplus are signi cantly: (i) cut when fi nancial wealth or stock prices rise; and (ii) raised when housing wealth or housing prices increase. The smooth transition regression model shows that primary spending and scal balance are adjusted in a nonlinear fashion to both wealth and price effects, while the Markov-switching framework highlights the importance of tax cuts (in the US) and spending hikes (in the UK) to offset the decline in wealth during major recessions and nancial crises. Overall, our results provide evidence of a non-stabilizing e¤ect of government debt, a countercyclical policy and a vigilant track of wealth developments by scal authorities., COMPETE;QREN; FEDER;Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Using a statistical approach to identify fiscal adjustments, we find that fiscal consolidation appears to shorten the income gap. Fiscal austerity plans that succeed in bringing public debt to a sustainable path seem to be more likely to reduce inequality. Expansionary fiscal adjustments are particularly important to promote changes in the income distribution.

Available online 8 June 2012, Using a panel of 62 countries for 1973-2005, we assess the impact of financial reforms on income inequality. We find that removal of policies towards directed credit and excessively high reserve requirements, and improvements in the securities market reduce inequality., COMPETE;QREN; FEDER;Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal consolidation on income inequality. Using a panel of 18 industrialized countries from 1970 to 2010, we find that income inequality significantly rises both during periods of fiscal consolidation and in the aftermath of such adjustments. In addition, fiscal authority that is driven by spending cuts seems to be more detrimental for income distribution than in the case of tax hikes. Considering the linkages between banking crises and fiscal consolidation, we show that the impact on the income gap is amplified when fiscal adjustments take place after the resolution of such financial turmoils. Our results also provide support for the Kuznets relationship and corroborate the idea that trade can lead to a more unequal distribution of income., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

NIPE_WP_31_2011, In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal policy discretion on economic activity in the short and medium-term. Using a panel of 132 countries from 1960 to 2008, we find that fiscal policy discretion provides a net stimulus to the economy in the short-run and crowding-in effects are amplified once crisis episodes are controlled for– in particular, banking crises - giving a great scope for fiscal policy stimulus packages. However, crowding-out effects take over in the long-run – especially, in the case of debt crises -, in line with the concerns about long-term debt sustainability., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

This study looks at real estate price booms and busts in industrialised countries. It identifies major and persistent deviations from long term trends for 18 countries and estimates the probabilities of their occurrence using a Random Effects Panel Probit model over the period 1980-2007. It finds that 1) most recent housing booms have been very persistent and of a significant magnitude; 2) there appears to be a strong correlation between the persistence and magnitude of booms and subsequent busts; 3) economic costs (in terms of GDP losses during the post-boom phase) depend significantly on the magnitude and duration of the boom and money and credit developments during that period; 4) a number of policy variables, including short term interest rates, local and global money and credit developments, and the incidence of mortgage market deregulation affect significantly the probability of experiencing booms and busts; and 5) the model is quite successful in identifying booms and busts early on. JEL Classification: E32, R21, R31

In this paper, we assess the impact of fiscal policy discretion on economic activity in the short and medium-term. Using a panel of 132 countries from 1960 to 2008, we find that fiscal policy discretion provides a net stimulus to the economy in the short-run and crowding-in effects are amplified once crisis episodes are controlled for– in particular, banking crises - giving a great scope for fiscal policy stimulus packages. However, crowding-out effects take over in the long-run – especially, in the case of debt crises -, in line with the concerns about long-term debt sustainability.

We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue – responsiveness and persistence–, a feature not captured by automatic stabilisers, we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal deterioration (improvement). Drawing on quarterly data, we estimate recursively these components within a system of government revenue and spending equations using a Three-Stage Least Square method for eight European Union countries plus the US. The results suggest that significant changes in the fiscal stance (including those related to the current crisis) are reflected in the estimates of persistence and responsiveness., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

We use a new approach to assess long-term fiscal developments. By analyzing the time-varying behaviour of the two components of government spending and revenue - responsiveness and persistence - we are able to infer about the sources of fiscal behaviour. Drawing on quarterly data we estimate recursively these components within a system of government revenue and spending equations using a Three-Stage Least Square method. In this way we track fiscal developments, i.e. possible fiscal deteriorations and/or improvements for eight European Union countries plus the US. Results suggest that positions have not significantly changed for Finland, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the US, whilst they have improved for Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Nous decomposons la politique budgetaire en trois composantes : i) reponse, ii) persistance et iii) effet discretionnaire. Utilisant un echantillon de 132 pays, nos resultats montrent que la politique budgetaire tend a etre plus persistante qu’elle ne repond aux variations du PIB. Nous trouvons egalement qu’alors que l’effet des covariations entre pays affecte positivement (negativement) l’effet discretionnaire, il a un effet negatif (positif) sur la persistance. Cela suggere que les pays dotes d’une forte persistance ont un effet discretionnaire plus faible et vice versa. En particulier, alors que la taille du gouvernement, la taille du pays et le revenu ont des effets negatifs sur la composante discretionnaire de la politique budgetaire, ils tendent a augmenter la persistance de la politique budgetaire.

We decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than to respond to output conditions. We also found that while the effect of cross-country covariates is positive (negative) for discretion, it is negative (positive) for persistence thereby suggesting that countries with higher persistence have lower discretion and vice versa. In particular, while government size, country size and income have negative effects on the discretion component of fiscal policy, they tend to increase fiscal policy persistence.

This paper analyzes the different characteristics of fiscal policy using a two-step estimation procedure. First, we decompose both government spending and government revenue into three components: responsiveness, persistence and discretion. Second, we assess the determinants of these characteristics. Using data from 132 countries, our results show that fiscal policy is more persistent than responsive to economic conditions, which implies that the authorities may have less leeway in the short-run notably to curb spending behavior. In addition, countries characterized by greater fiscal persistence have less discretion and responsiveness. Finally, macroeconomic, institutional and geographic variables explain cross-country variation in fiscal characteristics. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

This paper offers an overview on the characteristics of martingales. These latter are markovian processes without underlying trend, in which the stochastic variable depends on its ultimate realisation. Some application fields are in studies relative to financial markets, and especially the derivative securities. Drawing from the theoretical and empirical literature, the main mathematical characteristics are presented. In order to transform processes with increasing or decreasing trends into martingales, the Doob-Meyer decomposition and the change of probability measure approaches can be adopted. Finally, four applications are considered with regard to the pricing of futures, call options and stocks.

We assess the role played by fiscal policy in explaining the dynamics of asset markets. Using a panel of ten industrialized countries, we show that a positive fiscal shock has a negative impact in both stock and housing prices. However, while stock prices immediately adjust to the shock and the effect of fiscal policy is temporary, housing prices gradually and persistently fall. Consequently, the attempts of fiscal policy to mitigate stock price developments (e.g. via taxes on capital gains) may severely de-stabilize housing markets. The empirical findings also point to significant fiscal multiplier effects in the context of severe housing busts, which gives rise to the importance of the implementation of fiscal stimulus packages. In addition, our results suggest that when governments run a budget deficit, they place an upward pressure on real interest rates, which ?crowds-out? private consumption and investment. In contrast, during bust periods, unexpected variation in the fiscal stance ? crowds-in? private spending, which reflects the ?direct? and ?indirect? effects of policy actions? impact arising from a downward movement in real interest rates and an upward revision in price level expectations., Nous étudions le rôle de la politique budgétaire pour expliquer la dynamique des marchés d’actifs. À l’aide d’un modèle de données de panel couvrant une dizaine de pays industrialisés, nous montrons qu’un choc budgétaire positif a un effet négatif sur les prix des actifs boursiers et immobiliers. Les premiers réagissent instantanément au choc et l’effet du choc est temporaire. Les prix des actifs immobiliers réagissent progressivement et l’effet du choc est persistant. Par conséquent, toute tentative de stabilisation des marchés immobiliers à l’aide de la politique budgétaire (par exemple à travers les taxes sur les revenus du capital) peut avoir l’effet opposé à celui recherché en déstabilisant ces marchés. Nous trouvons également des effets multiplicateurs significatifs dans les cas d’éclatement des bulles immobilières, ce qui peut justifier le recours à des plans de stabilisation à partir de l’outil de la fiscalité. Nous mettons également évidence des effets d’éviction des déficits budgétaires sur la consommation et l’investissement (à cause de la pression à la hausse exercée sur les taux d’intérêt)., COMETE, QREN, FEDER, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)