Levioso: Efficient Compiler-Informed Secure Speculation

Does telecommunications infrastructure promote entrepreneurship in developing countries? Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment in China

La especialización en recursos naturales y sus desafíos inherentes han sido dos de los temas más estudiados y discutidos por la literatura de la economía del desarrollo. El presente trabajo pretende sistematizar los ejes del debate en torno a la maldición de los recursos naturales, poniendo énfasis en sus cuatro potenciales canales de transmisión y tratando de identificar las peculiaridades del petróleo y del gas natural que llevan a los países exportadores de estas materias primas a tener tendencia a sufrir los síntomas de dicha maldición. Se insiste en la variable institucional, clave para el diseño de políticas que mitiguen sus canales de transmisión.

Productivity and Tax Evasion

IntroductionIn August 2017, a cholera outbreak started in Muna Garage Internally Displaced Persons camp, Borno state, Nigeria and >5000 cases occurred in six local government areas. This qualitative study evaluated...

SummaryIs corrupt behavior transmitted internationally? Using panel data for 123 countries from 1995 to 2012, our results suggest a positive and statistically meaningful relationship between neighboring countries’ corruption levels and domestic graft. This result is robust to including two‐way fixed effects, country‐specific time trends, and the standard set of control variables. The effect becomes stronger as income increases, if capital cities are located closer to each other, and if countries share a common political union, such as the European Union. We find less evidence for common language or comparable institutional backgrounds (e.g., similar degrees of democracy), but some evidence for trade relationships as potential transmission channels. These findings allow two main conclusions. First, a country with corrupt neighbors will find it difficult to get rid of corruption. Second, on a more positive note, efforts aimed at decreasing domestic corruption levels could produce positive externalities in affecting neighboring countries. This could particularly hold true within a common institutional framework, such as the European Union.

This paper analyzes the effect of remittance inflows on external debt in developing countries, by identifying international reserves as a potential transmission channel. Using panel data over the period 1970–2017 and covering 50 low-and middle-income countries worldwide, we find a positive and significant effect of remittance inflows on the external debt-to-GDP ratio. We also find a negative and significant effect of international reserves on external debt. After controlling for international reserves, the effect of remittance inflows on external debt increases; it remains positive and significant. The results suggest that the role of international reserves as a self-insurance mechanism, and the Dutch disease effect related to remittance inflows are at play. In addition, we find negative and significant effects of economic growth and savings-investment gap on external debt. We also find positive and significant effects of the nominal exchange rate and the United States lending interest rate on external debt. We discuss the policy implications of these findings, while highlighting factors that policymakers should focus on for containing external debt in developing countries in the post-COVID-19.

Spillovers from the ECB's Non-Standard Monetary Policy Measures on South-Eastern Europe

This paper examines the time-varying conditional correlations among Crude oil. EUR/USD and major ETS markets. We apply a trivariate dynamic conditional correlation (cDCC) GARCH models in order to capture potential contagion effects between the markets for the period 2013-2017. Empirical results reveal contagion during the under investigation period regarding the trivariate models, showing potential volatility transmission channels among the markets. Findings have crucial implications for policymakers who provide regulations for the above derivative markets.

The Merchants of Wall Street: Banking, Commerce, and Commodities

A conditional branch predictor based on weightless neural networks

The contribution of memory latency to execution time continues to increase, and latency hiding mechanisms become ever more important for efficient processor design. While high-end processors can use elaborate techniques like multiple issue, out-of-order execution, speculative execution, value prediction etc. to tolerate high memory latencies, they are often not viable solutions for embedded processors, due to significant area, power and chip complexity overheads. This paper proposes a hardware-software cooperative approach, called priority-based execution to hide cache miss penalty for embedded processors. The compiler classifies the instructions into low-priority and high-priority instructions. The processor executes the high-priority instructions, but delays the execution of low priority instructions. They are executed on a cache miss to hide the cache miss penalty. We empirically evaluate our proposal on the Intel XScale compiler and microarchitecture. Experimental results on benchmarks from Multimedia, MediaBench, MiBench, and SPEC2000 demonstrate an average 17% performance improvements, hiding 75% cache miss penalty.

Improving architectural energy efficiency is important to address diminishing energy efficiency gains from technology scaling. At the same time, limiting hardware complexity is also important. This paper presents a new processor architecture, the idempotent processor architecture, that advances both of these directions by presenting a new execution paradigm that allows speculative execution without the need for hardware checkpoints to recover from mis-speculation, instead using only re-execution to recover. Idempotent processors execute programs as a sequence of compiler-constructed idempotent (re-executable) regions. The nature of these regions allows precise state to be reproduced by re-execution, obviating the need for hardware recovery support. We build upon the insight that programs naturally decompose into a series of idempotent regions and that these regions can be large. The paradigm of executing idempotent regions, which we call idempotent processing, can be used to support various types of speculation, including branch prediction, dependence prediction, or execution in the presence of hardware faults or exceptions. In this paper, we demonstrate how idempotent processing simplifies the design of in-order processors. Conventional in-order processors suffer from significant complexities to achieve high performance while supporting the execution of variable latency instructions and enforcing precise exceptions. Idempotent processing eliminates much of these complexities and the resulting inefficiencies by allowing instructions to retire out of order with support for re-execution when necessary to recover precise state. Across a diverse set of benchmark suites, our quantitative results show that we obtain a geometric mean performance increase of 4.4% (up to 25% and beyond) while maintaining an overall reduction in power and hardware complexity.

Microfinance institutions, banking, growth and transmission channel: A GMM panel data analysis from developing countries

ABSTRACT: This study examines the link between macroeconomic volatility and income distribution, including potential transmission channels. Few cross-country studies have directly examined this link: most have explored either the relation between growth and poverty or between growth and income distribution, and, in some cases, between volatility and growth. Analyzing the volatility–inequality link confronts the well-known challenge of linking the macro- and micro-sides of an economy; this study does not attempt to push the envelope in that direction. Rather, the study uses a cross-country regression framework and finds that output volatility has a negative impact on equality (the income share of the bottom quintile), although this finding is not entirely robust across country groups. The study also finds empirical support for some of the presumed main transmission channels, notably inflation, financial sector depth, and government social security expenditures. Accordingly, the main pro-poor policy responses to volatility or negative income shocks would be to contain inflation, develop financial markets, and ensure countercyclical social security spending. Developing labor markets and establishing well-targeted social safety nets are also key ongoing challenges in this regard, to reduce the vulnerability of low-income groups. INTRODUCTION Macroeconomic volatility can affect poverty through its impact on growth as well as its impact on income distribution . Conversely, changes in poverty may be decomposed into a growth effect and an income distribution effect . (See Box 3.1.) Both effects depend on the initial levels of development and income distribution.

Network tail risk estimation in the European banking system