We estimate the respective contributions of institutions, geography, and trade in determining income levels around the world, using recently developed instrumental variables for institutions and trade. Our results indicate that the quality of institutions “trumps” everything else. Once institutions

outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks

is much better than those found by existing algorithms. Furthermore, they demonstrate that random sampling and partitioning enable CURE to not only outperform existing algorithms but also to scale well for large databases without sacrificing clustering quality. 1

This paper presents an approach to automatically optimizing the retrieval quality of search engines using clickthrough data. Intuitively, a good information retrieval system should present relevant documents high in the ranking, with less relevant documents following below. While previous

the less trustworthy. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative

RON is an application-layer overlay on top of the existing Internet routing substrate. The RON nodes monitor the functioning and quality of the Internet paths among themselves, and use this information to decide whether to route packets directly over the Internet or by way of other RON nodes

increasingly prominent as a strategy for attempting to improve simultaneously the productivity and the quality of the work experience of employees in contemporary organizations. Although the benefits of work redesign (or "job enrichment" or "job enlargement") are widely touted

is heavily weighted toward the positive end of the scale. Of course, this imbalance does not in and of itself provide evidence that such views are unrealistic or illusory. Evidence of this nature is, however, available. First, there exists a pervasive tendency to see the self as better than others

of existing ones is gaining a significant momentum. Since many available Web services provide overlapping or identical functionality, albeit with different Quality of Service (QoS), a choice needs to be made to determine which services are to participate in a given composite service. This paper presents a

relatively few proposals for W-LANs. In this paper we present a rate adaptive MAC protocol called the Receiver-Based AutoRate (RBAR) protocol. The novelty of RBAR is that its rate adaptation mechanism is in the receiver instead of in the sender. This is in contrast to existing schemes in devices like