New residential construction is significantly more procyclical in emerging markets than in developed countries, although the correlation between aggregate investment and output is similar across emerging and developed countries. This paper shows that a multi-sector stochastic growth model with a...

Castro and Coen-Pirani (2008) document that aggregate skilled hours and employment both became more volatile after the mid-1980s, in contrast to the simultaneous volatility decline of most aggregates, including overall hours and employment and unskilled hours and employment. In chapter 1, I...

My thesis explores the following question: how workers of different skill are allocated across jobs and unemployment over the business cycle. I am interestedin understanding the "over-qualification" of workers that occurs during periods of high unemployment, as increased congestion in the labor...

In this paper, we develop a new framework for face recognition based on nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and multi-classifier integration. Traditional LDA-based methods suffer a fundamental limitation originating from the parametric nature of scatter matrices, which are based on the...

Contractor prequalification involves the establishment of a standard for measuring and assessing the capabilities of potential tenderers. The required standard is based on a set of PreQualification Criteria (PQC) that is intended to reflect the objectives of the client and the requirements of...