BUSCADOR RECOLECTA

Datos de investigación generados por José Ignacio Andrés Ucendo (Universidad del País Vasco) y Ramón Lanza García (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) y utilizados en la elaboración del artículo "Prices and real wages in seventeeth-century in Madrid" que se ha publicado en la revista Economic Historic Review 67.3 (2014): 607-626

The Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 is regarded as central turning point in nineteenth-century trade policy, inaugurating a free trade era in Western Europe. We reexamine this story and put it into global perspective with a new database covering more than 7,500 data points for 11 categories of manufactures in 41 countries and colonies around the world between 1846 and 1880. It reveals that bilateralism after 1860 reinforced a process already underway before. Nevertheless, we highlight that trade liberalization was a global phenomenon over most of our period, so that the prominent British case appears as typical rather than exceptional

The database consists of FIR images collected from a vehicle driven in outdoors urban scenarios. Images were acquired with an Indigo Omega imager, with a resolution of 164x129 pixels, a grey-level scale of 14 bits, and focal length of 318 pixels. The camera was mounted on the exterior of the vehicle, to avoid infrared filtering of the windshield. Recorded images were manually annotated, where each pedestrian is labelled as a bounding box. To prevent bias introduced by border artifacts their height is subsequently upscaled by 5%. The pedestrians appear in an up-right position. The dataset is divided in two: (i) Classification dataset: positives and randomly sampled negatives with a fixed height-width ratio of (1/2) and rescaled to 64x32 pixels, and (ii) Detection Dataset: Original positive and negative images with annotations

Hugo Chavez dominated the Venezuelan electoral landscape since his first presidential victory in 1998 until his death in 2013. Nobody doubts that he always received considerable voter support in the numerous elections held during his mandate. However, the integrity of the electoral system has come into question since the 2004 Presidential Recall Referendum. From then on, different sectors of society have systematically alleged electoral irregularities or biases in favor of the incumbent party. We have carried out a thorough forensic analysis of the national-level Venezuelan electoral processes held during the 1998-2012 period to assess these complaints. The second-digit Benford's law and two statistical models of vote distributions, recently introduced in the literature, are reviewed and used in our case study. In addition, we discuss a new method to detect irregular variations in the electoral roll. The outputs obtained from these election forensic tools are examined taking into account the substantive context of the elections and referenda under study. Thus, we reach two main conclusions. Firstly, all the tools uncover anomalous statistical patterns, which are consistent with election fraud from 2004 onwards. Although our results are not a concluding proof of fraud, they signal the Recall Referendum as a turning point in the integrity of the Venezuelan elections. Secondly, our analysis calls into question the reliability of the electoral register since 2004. In particular, we found irregular variations in the electoral roll that were decisive in winning the 50% majority in the 2004 Referendum and in the 2012 Presidential Elections