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This study takes advantage of abundant data from the Economics Department at National Tsing Hua University to empirically evaluate whether there exist academic performance differentials between undergraduate students from two entrance channels (exam-based and application-based methods) across courses and grades. We first evaluate the academic performance between the students based on two entrance channels, and then incorporate the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT) score (including five subjects of Chinese Literature, Mathematics, English, Science, and Society) into the independent variables to control for the students' ability. Our empirical results exhibit the students recruited through the application-based method outperform those admitted from the exam-based method in required courses after controlling for the students' individual characteristics. Nevertheless, we found that the advantage disappears for the elective courses. Furthermore, the academic gaps between the two groups of students tend to decline or disappear when students are seniors. The findings indicate that entrance exam scores (e.g., the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) scores in the United States) are good indicators for predict college academic performance, making the potential function of entrance exam in Taiwan relatively comparable to that in the United States. The findings also detail that individual GSAT scores on English, Math, and Society are positively and significantly associated with his/her performance on the core courses in Economics, supporting a significant learning progression from the curricula of senior high school to the undergraduate college education.

This study examines the interindustry gender wage gap in Taiwan with a focus on the financial industry, using individual level data from the 1978–2013 Manpower Utilization Survey. We consider this issue from two perspectives. First, by decomposing, examining, and breaking down the overall gender wage gap, we find that 2–14% of the overall gender wage gap during this period can be attributed to workers’ industry affiliation. Second, through the analysis of the gender wage gap across industries in Taiwan, we notice that the financial industry is the most monetarily advantageous industry for women during the past 15 years based on the interindustry ranking approach. The wage level for women in the financial industry was only 3–20% below that of men, compared to 15–93% for women in the mining industry. A cross country comparison with the results from the literature suggests that the range of the interindustry gender wage gap in Taiwan is larger than that in the U.S. The financial industry is more likely to rank the highest (with a smaller gender wage gap) in Taiwan, while ranking the lowest in the U.S. labor market.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: to develop the college-attendance value scale (CAVS) in the Taiwan context to understand undergraduates’ reasons for or benefits from college education, and to examine how the value relates to additional motivational goals, academic performance, and expected terminal degree. Design/methodology/approach Data analyses involved sophomores (n=729) who completed a learning-experience survey that included CAVS of the personal value and collective value subscales, expected terminal degree, Achievement Goal Questionnaire, and cumulative grade point average (CGPA). Construct validity evidence was substantiated by the results of exploratory factor analysis (n=364) for two-factor identification, and by the results of confirmatory factor analysis (n=365) for a good model-fit. Findings The interrelations between variables in regression analysis supported the predictive validity; achievement goals were predictors of CGPA, while personal value was a sole predictor of expected terminal degree. Findings suggest that CAVS is a predictive measure for Taiwanese undergraduates’ academic performance and choices. Practical implications In terms of policy implications, college students’ values of college attendance should not only be regularly investigated by institutional research, but should be widely applied by university students, educators and administrators to facilitate the optimal learning development for each undergraduate. Originality/value The study develops a short but effective scale of college-attendance value for the Taiwanese students who usually attend college after graduating from high school. The CAVS is useful in manifesting the students’ major reasons for pursuing college education.

Dunne, Smith, and Willenbockel (2005) argue that the mainstream growth literature has not found military spending to be a significant determinant of economic growth, yet much of the defense economics literature has noted significant effects. This paper revisits this issue by using a DSGE-VAR approach, combining both theoretical and empirical methods. We present that the DSGE approach (estimated with the Bayesian technique) and the Bayesian VAR with the Minnesota Prior both lead to worse in-sample fit than our proposed DSGE-VAR framework. The DSGE-VAR approach reveals that a positive military spending shock boosts the U.S. economy, increasing per capita real GDP growth, consumption, inflation and interest rate. Our results are robust to alternative model specifications. Future investigations such as exploring an optimal military spending policy could adopt the approach in this paper to determine the best model – empirical, theoretical, or a combination of the two.

The purpose of this study is twofold, testing how hierarchical motivation modeling explains college students’ academic performances over subsequent semesters; extending the motivation modeling on the university graduate attributes of another sample at a certain time point, by the regular, contextualized institutional-research (IR) practices. The hierarchical motivation modeling denotes that college-attendance values explain achievement goals, eliminating the effect of prior academic performance (i.e., the covariate). Participants were two cohorts of college sophomores with a 1-year gap in Taiwan who voluntarily responded to regular university-wide surveys. The path analysis results of Study 1 (N = 652, 39% female, 61% male) confirmed that the modeling explains the subsequent academic performance, and study hours. Those of Study 2 (N = 681, 43% female, 57% male) further confirmed that achievement goals mediate the values and the attributes. These IR findings indicate directions for college education innovation in boosting the motivated trajectory and the desired learning outcomes worldwide.

Using normalized regression equations, we propose an alternative estimator of industrial gender wage gaps which is identified in the sense that it is invariant to the choice of an unobserved non-discriminatory wage structure, and to the choice of the reference groups of any categorical variables. The proposed estimator measures the pure impact of industry on gender wage gaps after netting out wage differentials due to differences in characteristics and their coefficients between men and women. Furthermore, the proposed estimator is easy to implement, and hypothesis testing is straightforward. We compare the proposed estimator with existing estimators using samples from the 1998 US Current Population Survey.

It is quite common to observe heteroskedasticity in real data, in particular, cross-sectional or micro data. Previous studies concentrate on improving the finite-sample properties of tests under heteroskedasticity of unknown forms in linear models. The advantage of a heteroskedasticity consistent covariance matrix estimator (HCCME)-type small-sample improvement for linear models does not carry over to the nonlinear model specifications since there is no obvious counterpart for the diagonal element of the projection matrix in linear models, which is crucial for implementing the finite-sample refinement. Within the framework of nonlinear models, we develop a straightforward approach by extending the applicability of HCCME-type corrections to the two-step GMM method. The Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed method not only refines the testing procedure in terms of the error of rejection probability, but also improves the coefficient estimation based on the mean squared error (MSE) and the mean abso...

In modeling the foreign direct investment (FDI) behavior of firms, existing studies tend to classify multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) production activities into two broad strategies, namely, standard vertical integration and horizontal integration. In practice, the production behavior of multinational enterprises is much more complex. Based on the production relations between parent firms and their foreign subsidiaries, this study divides MNEs’ production behavior into five strategies: vertical integration, foreign concentration, home concentration, horizontal integration, and heterogeneous horizontal integration. We then propose three sets of interesting hypotheses associated with the five different production strategies. A uniquely compiled firm-level data set of Taiwanese manufacturing firms over the 2004–2007 period is adopted to empirically verify the proposed hypotheses. The empirical estimates are in general consistent with the proposed predictions and suggest that the various production behaviors of MNEs depend on the foreign market size, trade costs, factor advantage, fixed investment costs and firm characteristics. Moreover, each production strategy is influenced by different determinants as implied by our hypotheses.

This study empirically investigates the difference in employment status between marriage immigrants and native women in Taiwan based on a combined dataset from the 2003 Survey of Foreign and Mainland Spouses’ Life Status and 2003 Women’s Marriage, Fertility and Employment Survey. The conceptual framework is based on the family labor supply model, the human and social capital theories, and the immigrant assimilation theory. From the Probit model of the employment probability, our findings indicate that family background variables, including the presence of small children and husbands’ characteristics, play fairly significant roles in determining the employment probability of marriage immigrants. As for native women, human capital variables such as schooling and age are the most significant factors affecting their employment probability, while husbands’ characteristics play a less important role in this respect. The finding that the employment probability of foreign spouses rises rapidly with the number of years that have elapsed since migration may confirm the employment assimilation for marriage immigrants. This study further applies the nonlinear decomposition analysis developed in the work of Yun (2004) to examine the gap in employment probability between native women and foreign spouses in Taiwan. Our findings show that the employment probability differentials are mostly due to the difference in coefficients and that the effects of the two age variables play dominant roles. The difference in coefficients, in sum, contributes to increasing the gap of employment probability, while the difference in characteristics, in sum, tends to reduce the employment probability differentials.

This paper takes advantage of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey data set to empirically evaluate whether a student's academic performance, measured by his or her test score, is affected by the body weight status of the student. We show that a student's weight status has no impact on his or her academic performance based on an OLS estimation; however, this result is likely to be incorrect due to the strong distributional and functional assumptions, and we further use the propensity score matching method to address this issue. If the entire sample is considered, we find that both overweight and underweight students perform worse than students of normal weight. If we separate the sample students into two groups according to their gender, we obtain different results for the different groups. While the male students tend to perform worse when they are either underweight or overweight, the adverse effect on the academic performance is larger for underweight students than for overweight students. By contrast, the academic performance of a female student will be affected only if she is overweight, but not if she is underweight. The policy implication that the government or the schools should have different plans for different gender groups can be drawn from our empirical finding.

This paper investigates the role that studying overseas or domestically plays in Taiwanese students obtaining a doctoral degree and, in particular, whether doctorates can be completed faster overseas than domestically. This feature is quite different from the literature in the sense that previous studies focus mainly on students with different countries of origin earning their doctoral degrees in a host program/institution/country and could provide a professional reference for main source countries with a great number of students studying abroad. By taking advantage of a large data set compiled by the National Profiles of Human Resources in Science and Technology in Taiwan, we find that Taiwanese students studying in foreign schools (and who will come back to Taiwan) on average take 9.61 months (reflecting approximately a $60,000 opportunity cost) less than those earning PhD degrees domestically after netting out other controls. Other factors such as males, starting a PhD when older, younger cohorts, holding a master’s degree, school types matching, and studying in non-top tier universities, are associated with a shorter elapsed time to a doctoral degree.

This article examines the relationship between defense and social welfare expenditures using a panel of 29 OECD countries from 1988 to 2005. It is quite difficult to take into account the simultaneous channels empirically through which the eventual allocation of defense and welfare spending is determined for the guns-and-butter argument. Taking advantage of our collected panel data-set, the panel generalized method of moments method is adopted to control the country-specific heterogeneity and to mitigate the potential simultaneity problem. The main finding of this article suggests a positive trade-off between military spending and two types of social welfare expenditures (i.e. education and health spending). One of the reasons may be that the OECD countries are more supportive of the social welfare programs; therefore, when the military spending is increased (e.g. military personnel and conscripts), the government may raise the health and education spending as well.

This article examines the impacts of industrial agglomeration and outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) on the total factor productivity (TFP) of Taiwanese firms. A vertical FDI-based model of heterogeneous firms is proposed to analyze how agglomeration economies and technology incompatibilities between parent firms and their affiliates can affect firm productivity. This model suggests that firms located in areas with more concentrated industrial agglomerations are more productive, while those engaging in OFDI may not perform better in terms of TFP. Using plant-level data, this article constructs an indicator of industrial agglomeration to appraise agglomeration economies on firm productivity. Based on the data for 578 manufacturing firms and the agglomeration indicator, we estimate a cross-sectional econometric model to empirically assess the productivity effects of industrial agglomeration and OFDI. The empirical results show that local industrial agglomerations exert a positive contribution to firm ...

In this note, we provide the application of HCCME-type refinements to nonlinear GMM models with Bayesian interpretations.

In this article we survey military spending, the evolution of national defense policy, and the role that defense spending played in economic activities in Taiwan from 1952 to 2009. With the ongoing cross-Strait dialogue and closer commercial ties between Taiwan and China, the share of military spending in government expenditures (or GDP) has tended to gradually decline, which is in accordance with the change in defense policy from an offensive posture to a defensive-oriented attitude. In addition, we investigate the defense spending–inflation nexus in Taiwan. The multivariate structural change test identifies two break points and three regimes are categorized accordingly. The Granger causality test based on the VAR model reveals that the heavy defense burden in Taiwan during 1952–71 (the first regime) is essentially an important factor causing the higher price levels. However, when the tension across the Taiwan Strait is alleviated as well as the defense-oriented policy adopted, the military spending no l...

Using a richer panel data set with more representative price indexes, this article adopts Pesaran's (2007) panel unit root test to study the validity of Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) across the eurozone countries both before and after the launch of the euro in 1999. We find that PPP holds before the introduction of the single currency, whereas it fails to hold after 1999. Our result is consistent with the finding in Engel and Rogers (2004) and Rogers (2007) that there is no longer a tendency to support the law of one price following the birth of the euro.

Previous studies generally find mixed empirical evidence on the relationship between government spending and economic growth. In this paper, we re-examine the causal relationship between government expenditure and economic growth by conducting the panel Granger causality test recently developed by Hurlin, 2004 , Hurlin, 2005 and by utilizing a richer panel data set which includes 182 countries that cover the period from 1950 to 2004. Our empirical results strongly support both Wagner's law and the hypothesis that government spending is helpful to economic growth regardless of how we measure the government size and economic growth. When the countries are disaggregated by income levels and the degree of corruption, our results also confirm the bi-directional causality between government activities and economic growth for the different subsamples of countries, with the exception of the low-income countries. It is suggested that the distinct feature of the low-income countries is likely owing to their inefficient governments and inferior institutions.

Ashley (Journal of Forecasting 1983; 2(3): 211–223) proposes a criterion (known as Ashley's index) to judge whether the external macroeconomic variables are well forecast to serve as explanatory variables in forecasting models, which is crucial for policy makers. In this article, we try to extend Ashley's work by providing three testing procedures, including a ratio-based test, a difference-based test, and the Bayesian approach. The Bayesian approach has the advantage of allowing the flexibility of adapting all possible information content within a decision-making environment such as the change of variable's definition due to the evolving system of national accounts. We demonstrate the proposed methods by applying six macroeconomic forecasts in the Survey of Professional Forecasters. Researchers or practitioners can thus formally test whether the external information is helpful. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article investigates the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI, including outward FDI and inward FDI), imports and exports, and product innovation. Our theoretical model predicts that inward FDI, outward FDI, imports, and exports have positive influences on firm innovative activities, which would evaluate the effects of the relative magnitude of different sources on innovation. The empirical results based on the 2003 First Taiwan Technological Innovation Survey confirm three of the proposed hypotheses for the entire sample. However, when focusing on the manufacturing sector, outward FDI, inward FDI, imports, and exports all exhibit strongly positive effects on the determination of conducting product innovation (i.e., the four hypotheses are verified). A consistent trend is that outward FDI has the largest effect on innovation, regardless of the measurement of product innovation and the division of the entire sample, which may imply that in Taiwan a positive effect of "deindustrialization" is to innovate more.

Withholding food or providing it during a conflict is vital for peace missions and challenges for building sustainable peace. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new perspective in considering the impact of wars on relative wages in the food sector. We define the foodcost as the share of wages paid to the food sector versus total manufacturing wages. We try to estimate the effect of two types of wars (namely, civil and international wars) on the foodcost and explore the policies that are likely to reduce that cost. We use panel data for 41 countries from 1960 to 1999 to answer these questions. The empirical results show that civil wars positively affect the foodcost, while international wars apparently do not. The policy implication of this analysis is that, in the event of a civil war, policy-makers lack the resources to exert control on a rising foodcost. A rise in the foodcost could be translated into higher food prices or lower purchasing power over food, either of which may have devastating impacts on social and economic well-being. In the event of an international war, as opposed to a civil war, governments have a greater capacity to prioritize and mobilize resources. Therefore, the impact of an international war on the foodcost is positive but weak. The foreign aid remains an effective countervailing tool for reducing the increase in the foodcost.

The present study examines the employment status and choice of employment sector of female foreign spouses from Southeast Asia and Mainland China in Taiwan. The conceptual framework is based on the family labour supply model, human and social capital theory, and immigrant assimilation theory. Our findings indicate that in regard to employment status, family background variables, including the presence of small children and husbands' characteristics, play a more significant role in determining the employment probability for these foreign spouses than do human capital variables. In particular, for spouses from Southeast Asia, each additional child is correlated with a decrease in working probability of 11.3%, whereas college education has an insignificant effect on their employment probability. Employment assimilation for these marriage immigrants may be confirmed by the finding that the employment probability of foreign spouses rises rapidly with the number of years that have elapsed since migration. As for the choice of employment sector, a strong linkage between the employment sector of the foreign spouses and their husbands' employment sector is found in this study.

In this article, we examine the effect of incorporating the fields of study on the explained and unexplained components of the standard Oaxaca decomposition for the gender wage gaps in Taiwan using 1997–2003 Manpower Utilization Survey data. Using several existing and lately developed measures, we inspect the gender wage gap by college major to investigate whether gender wage discrimination exists in a specific field of study in Taiwan. We find that controlling for the major dummies does enhance the proportion of the characteristic effects in the Oaxaca-type decomposition. This finding is similar to those results found in western countries. However, using decomposition methods designed to assess within sector wage gaps, we find gender wage differences are statistically negligible in all majors except medicine. Our results can provide useful information on the economic returns to different disciplines to current and future college students, institutions, and government policy-makers.

This paper develops a simple age-period-cohort framework in completing incomplete cohort fertility schedules, and makes full use of 1917--2005 U.S. data to obtain robust outcomes. Empirically, we indicate that the period effect is the key to transforming a fertility level into a fertility schedule. Accompanied by the smoothed version of tempo-variance-adjusted total fertility rates proposed in Kohler and Philipov (2001), we approximate the cohort fertility schedules fairly well and the estimates of all distributional parameters can be thereby obtained. Our approach is easy to implement and the data requirement is relatively light, indicating that the proposed method is readily applicable to countries whose data lengths are insufficiently long, and would be helpful for further empirical investigation of the relationship between cohort fertility behavior and other cohort-specific socioeconomic factors.

We take advantage of Taiwan Education Panel Survey data to evaluate the timing of the coaching effect on mathematics learning for junior high-school students. Our main finding suggests that the best strategy for the budget-limited parents is to send their children to cram schools for intensive learning in the 8th rather than earlier in the 7th grade, in order to enhance the scores for the math tests being held in the 9th grade.

This paper investigates the empirical relationships between military expenditure and unemployment rates. A set of global panel data on 46 countries is utilized, and a panel data version of the Granger causality test is applied. The results indicate that there is little evidence of the causality running from unemployment to military expenditure regardless of how we measure military spending and determine group countries. In contrast, the causality running from military expenditure to unemployment receives empirical support if military expenditure is measured in terms of its share of GDP and if data are taken from middle‐ and low‐income countries or non‐OECD countries.

Individuals’ contributions are affected by their lottery outlays if they consider their spending of lottery funds on charities to be a substitute for or a complement to their direct charitable contributions. This study investigates the effect of lottery outlays on charitable contributions based on the experience of lottery introduction in Taiwan. The estimates reveal that lottery outlays exert a positive effect on charitable contributions while the quantitative impact is significant. This study thus provides evidence ameliorating the pessimistic prospect that people may reduce their direct charitable contributions when they spend more on lotteries. Possible explanations for the positive effect are also discussed.

Horrace and Oaxaca (2001) treat the regressors in gender wage gap by industry measures as non-stochastic when computing the corresponding standard errors. However, the non-stochastic regressors assumption is thought to be inappropriate in modern econometrics. In this paper, we derive the correct standard errors for the measures proposed by Horrace and Oaxaca (2001). We then empirically apply the derived correct standard errors in regard to the March 1998 Current Population Survey data adopted in Horrace and Oaxaca (2001), as well as the Manpower Utilization Survey in the Taiwan area conducted by the Census Bureau over the years from 1978 to 2003. The empirical results suggest that the researchers would be better to use the correct standard errors derived in this paper, accompanied by the White correction, to arrive at a more accurate statistical inference.

Using normalized regression equations, we propose an alternative estimator of industrial gender wage gaps which is identified in the sense that it is invariant to the choice of an unobserved non-discriminatory wage structure, and to the choice of the reference groups of any categorical variables. The proposed estimator measures the pure impact of industry on gender wage gaps after netting out wage differentials due to differences in characteristics and their coefficients between men and women. Furthermore, the proposed estimator is easy to implement, including hypothesis tests. We compare the proposed estimator with existing estimators using samples from 1998 Current Population Survey of US.

Postdoc is a special transitional position for those with a doctoral degree and is usually regarded as an investment to accumulate the additional human and social capital needed to facilitate future job searches or to add to an academic reserve army of unemployed PhDs. Given the prevalence of postdoctoral positions nowadays, it is crucial to explore the role played by postdoctoral participation in the post-PhD labor market. By taking advantage of a comprehensive data set from the National Profiles of Human Resources in Science and Technology in Taiwan, we first explore several characteristics associated with the choice of a postdoctoral position for newly-minted doctoral degree holders, such as age, discipline or the time taken to complete the degree. It is found that older doctorates have a lower probability of taking up a postdoctoral position, and a longer elapsed time to the PhD degree is less likely to result in a postdoctoral position. The postdoctoral engagement also hinges on the field of study, implying that those majoring in Science tend to engage in postdoctoral work more than those majoring in Social Science. The control function approach is utilized to address the possible endogenous decision of postdoctoral experience when estimating the effects of postdoctoral positions on the current career choices between academic and non-academic jobs. The empirical results suggest that engaging in postdoctoral positions could increase the probability of advancing to the academic sector by about 6.1 %. The heterogeneous effects of gender, major and cohort in regard to the postdoctoral experience are also found by splitting the data. In particular, gaining postdoctoral experience does help males engineering majors and older cohorts obtain jobs in academia. Moreover, we experiment with several groupings for the definition of being awarded an academic position and obtain very robust empirical results.

This paper takes advantage of the Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement data set to empirically evaluate whether the test score differentials between pupils with immigrant and native mothers are substantial across subjects, grades and years. Our results show that there exist test score differentials between the two groups after controlling for the students' individual characteristics and family background. The Chinese, Maths and English subjects exhibit larger test score gaps relative to Science and Society. We also find that the academic gaps between native students and pupils with mothers from Southeast Asian countries tend to widen, while the students' performance is about the same as that for native students if their mothers are from mainland China, confirming that the language proficiency of immigrant mothers significantly affects pupils' learning. Our empirical results may suggest that remedial teaching (or an equivalent preferential policy) for the lower-grade pupils with immigrant mothers might...

Nanocomposites are becoming known as a class of materials that possess the capability to operate at high switching frequencies and handle high power levels. Understanding how their loss characteristics scale and thermal behaviors change as core geometries are altered is vital when designing for grid applications. This article utilizes ANSYS Maxwell finite element analysis (FEA) software to predict the Steinmetz coefficients associated with the core loss in toroids that geometrically vary. Results of the simulation are supported with experimental verification. Secondly, this article experimentally shows temperature contour variation with changes in toroid geometry pulsed with a 20 kHz switching square wave that could be predicted using FEA.

This paper discusses the methodology for the electromagnetic design of an aircraft synchronous generator with high power-density. A new method is proposed to more accurately model the air-gap of a salient pole rotor through expanding the inverse of an effective air-gap function. The corresponding magnetic fields from the rotor and stator windings, as well as the expressions of back EMF, are derived using the air-gap model. The stator inner diameter and length are designed by considering a proper cooling scheme and maximum peripheral-speed of the rotor. This allows for design of the stator winding and slot geometry, including the derivation of a formula for the stator core thickness. The air-gap and salient pole shoe face can be designed using the desired specifications for power factor and torque angle. The rotor windings and geometry are subsequently designed. Following the above procedure, a 200 KVA high power-density synchronous generator with 12 krpm rotational velocity is obtained. Finally, the design is verified and finely tuned using ANSYS RMxprt, Maxwell FEM software, and SimuLink.

Divorce laws are a means by which government seeks to regulate the sexual relationship, property distribution, child-rearing, and overall the power struggle between the couple. Making divorces laws more equal and balance for both sides, short of prohibiting divorce, has appeared to have some impacts on this trend toward marriage breakup and divorce.

KMT, often translated as the Chinese Nationalist Party, seized assets from the Japanese colonial government and private business at the end of World War II. As the current ruling party, KMT remains one of the richest political organizations in the world. The entire KMT property and division of wealth in Taiwan after WW II is often referred to as the “disputed assets.” Under the early years of the authoritarian regime, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) was able to conceal most of its stolen assets by setting its own set of rules and regulation. Outside of the KMT organization, political parties and social groups have all demanded that KMT accept more social and political responsibility by releasing a complete history of all its assets and transactions, including the documentation of title transfers, account management, and account transfers. There are several dimensions to this issue: politics, policy, history, and law. This research predicts how KMT will solve the issue, and the ultimate result is very close to that predicted in advance, with an expected utility model.

The relationship between military spending and economic inequality is not well documented within the empirical literature, while numerous studies have uncovered the linkages between military spending and other macroeconomic variables, such as economic growth, unemployment, purchasing power parity, black market premium, poverty and investment. The purpose of this article is to examine the causal relationship between military spending and inequality using BVC and SIPRI data across 58 countries from 1987 to 1999. Panel unit root tests indicate that two inequality measures (Theil and EHII) under consideration are likely to be non-stationary. The authors’ work addresses the adverse implications of modeling with non-stationary variables, since this omission casts serious doubt on the reliability of the relationship between military spending and inequality. The recently developed panel Granger non-causality tests provide no evidence to support the causal relationship in either direction between the military spending and the change in economic inequality. The results are consistently robust to alternative data sources for military spending, to alternative definitions of the inequality measures, to the log transformation of the military spending, to the deletion of some data points, and to the division of OECD and non-OECD countries. Finally, the impulse responses and variance decompositions based on the panel vector autoregressive regression model are consistent with the findings from Granger non-causality tests.

There are several ways of describing a design in VHDL which are functionally equivalent, yet are mapped to circuits of different sizes. Although certain transformation rules can be applied to optimize some “redundant descriptions”, it is generally a designer’s responsibility to develop a design description which will lead to an efficient circuit implementation. Take the following VHDL program as an example. TWO is declared as a signal in Process_A and a constant 2 is assigned to it. In Process_B, it is multiplied by signal B and the result is stored in signal C. Since TWO is assigned outside the process Mult_By_Two, the synthesizer may not able to recognize that TWO can be reduced to a constant. Thus, a regular multiplier will be synthesized to the assignment statement in Process_B. Fig. 13.1(a) shows a circuit using a regular multiplier for the operation.

From the Publisher: The purpose of VHDL Modeling for Digital Design Synthesis is to introduce VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) and its use for synthesis. VHDL is a hardware description language which provides a means of specifying a digital system over different levels of abstraction. It supports behavior specification during the early stages of a design process and structural specification during the later implementation stages. VHDL was originally introduced as a hardware description language that permitted the simulation of digital designs. It is now increasingly used for design specifications that are given as the input to synthesis tools which translate the specifications into netlists from which the physical systems can be built. One problem with this use of VHDL is that not all of its constructs are useful in synthesis. The specification of delay in signal assignments does not have a clear meaning in synthesis, where delays have already been determined by the implementation technology. VHDL has data-structures such as files and pointers, useful for simulation purposes but not for actual synthesis. As a result, synthesis tools accept only subsets of VHDL. This book covers the synthesis aspect of VHDL, while keeping the simulation-specifics to a minimum. VHDL Modeling for Digital Design Synthesis is designed for working professionals as well as for graduate or undergraduate students. Readers can use this book to get acquainted with VHDL and to learn how it can be used in modeling of digital designs.