House Price Shocks, Negative Equity and Household Consumption in the UK in the 1990s

We examine the impact of housing capital gains on savings behaviour during the 1990s British housing market cycle using microdata from the British Household Panel Survey and county-level house price data. We condition the models on household real financial capital gains using Family Resources Survey data. We find a marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth of between 0.01 and 0.03, depending on specification. Among our novel findings are asymmetric behaviour between periods of house price rises and falls, with stronger consumption response during periods of house price increases, and a disproportionate impact on saving if the household has negative housing equity.

On the Complexity of the Numerically Definite Syllogistic and Related Fragments

In this paper, we determine the complexity of the satisfiability problem for various logics obtained by adding numerical quantifiers, and other constructions, to the traditional syllogistic. In addition, we demonstrate the incompleteness of some recently proposed proof-systems for these logics.Comment: 24 pages 1 figur

Jevons e o princípio da utilidade marginal: pesquisa empírica e teoria econômica

Por medio de un análisis crítico e comparativo de los tratados sobre lógica (The Principles of Science) y economía (Theory of Political Ecoonomy), este trabajo tiene como objetivo realizar una lectura del pensamiento de W.S Jevons a partir de su definición de lógica inductiva y de su aplicación en economía tomando como base el principio de la utilidad. El objetivo de Jevons es llevar la economía a la condición de ciencia a través de una aplicación de la lógica inductiva que se encuentra en su trabajo sobre el método científico (The Principles of Science). Dentro de esta propuesta, el principio de la utilidad puede ser concebido como una hipótesis sobre el comportamiento individual apto para verificación empírica.This paper in based on a critical and comparative analysis done over the logic treaty (Principles of Science) and economic treaty (Theory of political Economy), which objective is to analyze W.S Jevons thoughts on his definition on inductive logic and its application in economics, taking as base the profit principle. Jevons objective is to analyze economics as a science under the proposed inductive logic methodology included in his scientific method treaty (Principles of Science). Within this proposal, the profit principal can be conceived as a hypothesis for individual behavior appealable by empiric behavior.Por meio de uma análise crítica e comparativa dos tratados sobre lógica (The Principles of Science) e de economia (Theory of Political Economy), este trabalho tem por escopo produzir uma leitura do pensamento de W.S. Jevons a partir de sua definição de lógica indutiva e de sua aplicação em economia, tomando por base o principio da utilidade. O objetivo de Jevons é trazer a economia para a condição de ciência pela aplicação de uma proposta metodológica de lógica indutiva contida em seu tratado sobre o método científico (The Principles of Science). Dentro desta proposição, o princípio da utilidade pode ser concebido como uma hipótese sobre o comportamento individual, passível de verificação empírica

Space Climate Manifestation in Earth Prices - from Medieval England Up to Modern Usa

In this study we continue to search for possible manifestations of space weather influence on prices of agricultural products and consumables. We note that the connection between solar activity and prices is based on the causal chain that includes several nonlinear transition elements. These non-linear elements are characterized by threshold sensitivity to external parameters and lead to very inhomogeneous local sensitivity of the price to space weather conditions. It is noted that "soft type" models are the most adequate for description of this class of connections. Two main observational effects suitable for testing causal connections of this type of sensitivity are considered: burst-like price reactions on changes in solar activity and price asymmetry for selected phases of the sunspot cycle. The connection, discovered earlier for wheat prices of Medieval England, is examined in this work on the basis of another 700-year data set of consumable prices in England. Using the same technique as in the previous part of our work (Pistilnik and Yom Din 2004) we show that statistical parameters of the interval distributions for price bursts of consumables basket and for sunspot minimum states are similar one to another, like it was reported earlier for wheat price bursts. Possible sources of these consistencies between three different multiyear samples are discussed. For search of possible manifestations of the "space weather - wheat market" connection in modern time, we analyze dynamics of wheat prices in the USA in the twentieth century. We show that the wheat prices revealed a maximum/minimum price asymmetry consistent with the phases of the sunspot cycle. We discuss possible explanations of this observed asymmetry, unexpected under conditions of globalization of the modern wheat market.Comment: First International Symposium on Space Climate: Direct and Indirect Observations of Long-Term Solar Activity, 20-23 June 2004, Oulu, Finlan

Subitizing with Variational Autoencoders

Numerosity, the number of objects in a set, is a basic property of a given visual scene. Many animals develop the perceptual ability to subitize: the near-instantaneous identification of the numerosity in small sets of visual items. In computer vision, it has been shown that numerosity emerges as a statistical property in neural networks during unsupervised learning from simple synthetic images. In this work, we focus on more complex natural images using unsupervised hierarchical neural networks. Specifically, we show that variational autoencoders are able to spontaneously perform subitizing after training without supervision on a large amount images from the Salient Object Subitizing dataset. While our method is unable to outperform supervised convolutional networks for subitizing, we observe that the networks learn to encode numerosity as basic visual property. Moreover, we find that the learned representations are likely invariant to object area; an observation in alignment with studies on biological neural networks in cognitive neuroscience