Working Paper
Recent Submissions
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More Laws, More Growth? Evidence from U.S. States
(2020)Center for Law & Economics Working Paper SeriesWorking Paper -
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Fixing the Achilles Heel of E-Voting: The Bulletin Board
(2020)Cryptology ePrint ArchiveWorking Paper -
A Theory of Black-Box Tests
(2020)arXivThe purpose of testing a system with respect to a requirement is to refute the hypothesis that the system satisfies the requirement. We build a theory of tests and refutation based on the elementary notions of satisfaction and refinement. We use this theory to characterize the requirements that can be refuted through black-box testing and, dually, verified through such tests. We consider refutation in finite time and obtain the finite ...Working Paper -
Frontal Attack: Leaking Control-Flow in SGX via the CPU Frontend
(2020)arXivWe introduce a new timing side-channel attack on Intel CPU processors. Our Frontal attack exploits the way that CPU frontend fetches and processes instructions while being interrupted. In particular, we observe that in modern Intel CPUs, some instruction's execution times will depend on which operations precede and succeed them, and on their virtual addresses. Unlike previous attacks that could only profile branches if they contained ...Working Paper -
Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Matching of Optimality Profiles
(2020)arXivThe goal of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function that explains the behavior of an agent performing a task. The assumption that most approaches make is that the demonstrated behavior is near-optimal. In many real-world scenarios, however, examples of truly optimal behavior are scarce, and it is desirable to effectively leverage sets of demonstrations of suboptimal or heterogeneous performance, which are easier ...Working Paper -
Noise Regularization for Conditional Density Estimation
(2020)Modelling statistical relationships beyond the conditional mean is crucial in many settings. Conditional density estimation (CDE) aims to learn the full conditional probability density from data. Though highly expressive, neural network based CDE models can suffer from severe over-fitting when trained with the maximum likelihood objective. Due to the inherent structure of such models, classical regularization approaches in the parameter ...Working Paper -
Fiscal Pressures and Discriminatory Policing: Evidence from Traffic Stops in Missouri
(2020)SSRNWorking Paper -
Remaining Useful Life Estimation Under Uncertainty with Causal GraphNets
(2020)arXivIn this work, a novel approach for the construction and training of time series models is presented that deals with the problem of learning on large time series with non-equispaced observations, which at the same time may possess features of interest that span multiple scales. The proposed method is appropriate for constructing predictive models for non-stationary stochastic time series.The efficacy of the method is demonstrated on a ...Working Paper -
LELAM-TVET4INCOME: Synthesis of results from the first phase of the project
(2020)LELAM Working PapersWorking Paper -
Design Choices for Central Bank Digital Currency: Policy and Technical Considerations
(2020)NBER Working Paper SeriesCentral banks around the world are exploring and in some cases even piloting Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). CBDCs promise to realize a broad range of new capabilities, including direct government disbursements to citizens, frictionless consumer payment and money-transfer systems, and a range of new financial instruments and monetary policy levers. CBDCs also give rise, however, to a host of challenging technical goals and design ...Working Paper -
Does ICT Affect the Demand for Vocationally Educated Workers in Switzerland?
(2020)CES Working Papers SeriesThis paper examines the effect of information and communication technologies (ICT) on the demand for workers in Switzerland. We compare the hypotheses that an increase in ICT leads to either upskilling or job polarization, and investigate their implications for countries with a diffuse vocational education and training (VET) system. Using data from a large employer-employee survey, we create a novel measure of ICT based on the percentage ...Working Paper -
On existence and uniqueness properties for solutions of stochastic fixed point equations
(2019)arXivThe Feynman-Kac formula implies that every suitable classical solution of a semilinear Kolmogorov partial differential equation (PDE) is also a solution of a certain stochastic fixed point equation (SFPE). In this article we study such and related SFPEs. In particular, the main result of this work proves existence of unique solutions of certain SFPEs in a general setting. As an application of this main result we establish the existence ...Working Paper -
Detecting Receptivity for mHealth Interventions in the Natural Environment
(2020)arXivJust-In-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) is an emerging technique with great potential to support health behavior by providing the right type and amount of support at the right time. A crucial aspect of JITAIs is properly timing the delivery of interventions, to ensure that a user is receptive and ready to process and use the support provided. Some prior works have explored the association of context and some user-specific traits on ...Working Paper -
Personalized Digital Information and Tax-favoured Retirement Savings: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Administrative Data
(2020)Economics Working Paper SeriesWorking Paper -
MOBIS-COVID19/28
(2020)Arbeitsberichte Verkehrs- und RaumplanungOn March 16, 2020, 3700 participants who completed the MOBIS study between September 2019 and January 2020 were invited to reinstall the GPS Logger and Travel Diary App ‘Catch-My-Day’, developed by MotionTag, to record their mobility behaviour during the period of special measures implemented to control the spread of the Corona Virus. The first 4 weeks of mobility data from the original MOBIS Study is taken for each participant as a ...Working Paper -
Performance-Driven Internet Path Selection
(2020)arXivInternet routing can often be sub-optimal, with the chosen routes providing worse performance than other available policy-compliant routes. This stems from the lack of visibility into route performance at the network layer. While this is an old problem, we argue that recent advances in programmable hardware finally open up the possibility of performance-aware routing in a deployable, BGP-compatible manner. We introduce ROUTESCOUT, a hybrid ...Working Paper -
FnF-BFT: Exploring Performance Limits of BFT Protocols
(2020)arXivWe introduce FnF-BFT, a parallel-leader byzantine fault-tolerant state-machine replication protocol for the partially synchronous model with theoretical performance bounds during synchrony. By allowing all replicas to act as leaders and propose requests independently, FnF-BFT parallelizes the execution of requests. Leader parallelization distributes the load over the entire network -- increasing throughput by overcoming the single-leader ...Working Paper -
Divide and Scale: Formalization of Distributed Ledger Sharding Protocols
(2020)arXivSharding distributed ledgers is the most promising on-chain solution for scaling blockchain technology. In this work, we define and analyze the properties a sharded distributed ledger should fulfill. More specifically, we show that a sharded blockchain cannot be scalable under a fully adaptive adversary, but it can scale up to O(n/logn) under an epoch-adaptive adversary. This is possible only if the distributed ledger creates succinct ...Working Paper -
SIPEC: the deep-learning Swiss knife for behavioral data analysis
(2020)bioRxivAnalysing the behavior of individuals or groups of animals in complex environments is an important, yet difficult computer vision task. Here we present a novel deep learning architecture for classifying animal behavior and demonstrate how this end-to-end approach can significantly outperform pose estimation-based approaches, whilst requiring no intervention after minimal training. Our behavioral classifier is embedded in a first-of-its-kind ...Working Paper