Working Papers/Reports
Recent Submissions
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Price setting on the two sides of the Atlantic: evidence from supermarket-scanner data
(2023)ECB Working Paper SeriesWe compare supermarket price setting in the US and the euro area and assess its impact on food inflation. We introduce a novel scanner dataset of Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy (EA4) and contrast it with an equivalent dataset from the US. We find that both higher frequency and stronger state dependence of price changes contribute to higher flexibility of supermarket inflation in the US relative to the euro area. We argue that ...Working Paper -
Price Setting on the Two Sides of the Atlantic: Evidence from Supermarket-Scanner Data
(2023)CEPR Discussion PapersWe compare supermarket price setting in the US and the euro area and assess its impact on food inflation. We introduce a novel scanner dataset of Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy (EA4) and contrast it with an equivalent dataset from the US. We find that both higher frequency and stronger state dependence of price changes contribute to higher flexibility of supermarket inflation in the US relative to the euro area. We argue that ...Working Paper -
Price setting during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
(2023)ECB Occasional Paper SeriesThe coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused a deep recession globally, as well as in the euro area, accompanied by a steep decline in inflation rates in 2020. This paper reviews some of the main challenges created by the pandemic for inflation measurement and provides micro price data analysis of how price setting has reacted to the strong COVID-19 shock. For this purpose, we use three different, but complementary, microdata sources for ...Working Paper -
Cavity-mediated long-range interactions in levitated optomechanics
(2023)The ability to engineer cavity-mediated interactions has emerged as a powerful tool for the generation of non-local correlations and the investigation of non-equilibrium phenomena in many-body systems. Levitated optomechanical systems have recently entered the multi-particle regime, with promise for using arrays of massive strongly coupled oscillators for exploring complex interacting systems and sensing. Here, by combining advances in ...Working Paper -
Improving Cape Town's public lighting policy for informal settlements
(2019)ISTP Policy BriefUnequal access to public lighting in Cape Town is an increasing focus for the public and city government but existing policies prevent the situation from improving in the most underserviced areas – informal settlements.Report -
Higher seed yield through selection for reduced seed shattering in Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum Lam.)
(2023)bioRxivSeed shattering, i.e., the loss of seeds at ripening stage shortly before or during seed harvest, is strongly reducing seed yield in Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum Lam.). The aim of this study was to evaluate the possibility to reduce seed shattering within breeding germplasm via recurrent phenotypic selection on spaced plants. Starting from a founder population of 300 plants serving as F0 population, two cycles of phenotypic selection ...Working Paper -
Realizing the promise of machine learning in precision oncology: expert perspectives on opportunities and challenges
(2023)Research SquareThe application of machine learning in precision oncology is an emerging field. To capture the status quo, challenges, opportunities, ethical implications, and future directions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with academic and clinical experts. Our participants agreed that machine learning in precision oncology is in infant stages, with clinical integration still rare. Overall, participants equated ongoing developments with ...Working Paper -
“Sync fast and solve things”–best-practices for responsible digital health
(2023)Research SquareEstablished regulatory principles, oversight methods and ethical frameworks seem out of sync with digital health innovation. In this study, we shed light on how to address the gap between ethical principles and practice in digital health. We engaged key stakeholders (n= 46) operating at the translational frontier of digital health. After identifying current impediments to responsible digital health innovation, stakeholders proposed solutions ...Working Paper -
CheckMate: Automated Game-Theoretic Security Reasoning
(2023)EasyChair PreprintWe present the CheckMate framework for full automation of game theoretic security analysis, with particular focus on blockchain technologies. CheckMate analyzes protocols modeled as games for their game-theoretic security — that is, for incentive compatibility and Byzantine fault-tolerance. The framework either proves the protocols secure by providing defense strategies or yields all possible attack vectors. For protocols that are not ...Working Paper -
StEER-EERI: 2023 Mw 7.8 Kahramanmaras, Türkiye Earthquake Sequence Joint Preliminary Virtual Reconnaissance Report (PVRR)
(2023)This joint Preliminary Virtual Reconnaissance Report (PVRR) issued by the Structural Extreme Events Reconnaissance (StEER) network and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Learning From Earthquakes (LFE) Program: 1) provides details of the February 6 Mw 7.8 and Mw 7.5 earthquakes, 2) describes local seismic codes and building construction practices, 3) compares the recorded ground shaking with the parameters used for design, ...Report -
Refinement Proofs in Rust Using Ghost Locks
(2023)Refinement transforms an abstract system model into a concrete, executable program, such that properties established for the abstract model carry over to the concrete implementation. Refinement has been used successfully in the development of substantial verified systems. Nevertheless, existing refinement techniques have limitations that impede their practical usefulness. Some techniques generate executable code automatically, which ...Working Paper -
Detecting and Optimising Team Interactions in Software Development
(2023)arXivThe functional interaction structure of a team captures the preferences with which members of different roles interact. This paper presents a data-driven approach to detect the functional interaction structure for software development teams from traces team members leave on development platforms during their daily work. Our approach considers differences in the activity levels of team members and uses a block-constrained configuration ...Working Paper -
Modeling the Impact of Environmental Consciousness on the Supply-Demand Relationship between Firms and Customers
(2023)SSRNAn increasing environmental consciousness of customers can become a strong incentive for firms to supply environmental-friendly products. If these products are not available, supply-demand deficits emerge. We use an agent-based model with an underlying network topology to study different scenarios for mitigating these deficits. Both customers and firms can adjust their tolerance level for environmental pollution, but customers can also ...Working Paper -
Adapting to Disruptions: Flexibility as a Pillar of Supply Chain Resilience
(2023)arXivSupply chain disruptions cause shortages of raw material and products. To increase resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with shocks, substituting goods in established supply chains can become an effective alternative to creating new distribution links. We demonstrate its impact on supply deficits through a detailed analysis of the US opioid distribution system. Reconstructing 40 billion empirical distribution paths, our data-driven model ...Working Paper -
SILC: Improving Vision Language Pretraining with Self-Distillation
(2023)arXivImage-Text pretraining on web-scale image caption dataset has become the default recipe for open vocabulary classification and retrieval models thanks to the success of CLIP and its variants. Several works have also used CLIP features for dense prediction tasks and have shown the emergence of open-set abilities. However, the contrastive objective only focuses on image-text alignment and does not incentivise image feature learning for dense ...Working Paper -
The Robotic Herd: Using Human-Bot Interactions to Explore Irrational Herding
(2023)SocArXivWe explore human herding in a strategic setting where humans interact with automated entities (bots) and study the shift in the behavior and beliefs of humans when they are aware of interacting with bots. The strategic setting is an online minority game, where 1,997 participants are rewarded for following the minority strategy. This setting permits distinguishing between irrational herding and rational self-interesta fundamental challenge ...Working Paper -
Modell
(2023)Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften / Working Papers ~ Begriffe der Digital Humanities. Ein diskursives GlossarWorking Paper -
An elliptic integrable deformation of the Principal Chiral Model
(2023)arXivWe introduce a new elliptic integrable $σ$-model in the form of a two-parameter deformation of the Principal Chiral Model on the group $\text{SL}_{\mathbb{R}}(N)$, generalising a construction of Cherednik for $N=2$ (up to reality conditions). We exhibit the Lax connection and $\mathcal{R}$-matrix of this theory, which depend meromorphically on a spectral parameter valued in the torus. Furthermore, we explain the origin of this model from ...Working Paper -
SemiVL: Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Vision-Language Guidance
(2023)arXivn semi-supervised semantic segmentation, a model is trained with a limited number of labeled images along with a large corpus of unlabeled images to reduce the high annotation effort. While previous methods are able to learn good segmentation boundaries, they are prone to confuse classes with similar visual appearance due to the limited supervision. On the other hand, vision-language models (VLMs) are able to learn diverse semantic knowledge ...Working Paper -
2D Feature Distillation for Weakly- and Semi-Supervised 3D Semantic Segmentation
(2023)arXivAs 3D perception problems grow in popularity and the need for large-scale labeled datasets for LiDAR semantic segmentation increase, new methods arise that aim to reduce the necessity for dense annotations by employing weakly-supervised training. However these methods continue to show weak boundary estimation and high false negative rates for small objects and distant sparse regions. We argue that such weaknesses can be compensated by ...Working Paper