Essays in this dissertation address three research questions. (1) What types of persons hold dual jobs and what are their motives for doing so? In essay 1, I investigate multiple factors that affect the decision to hold more than a single job. Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the first essay documents the characteristics of second jobs and multiple job holders in the U.S. I characterize the types of people who hold dual jobs and use additional information from the BLS to find out workers’ motives for holding multiple jobs. I examine how multiple job holding differs with respect to age, education, race and ethnicity, sex, foreign-born status, marital status, public-private worker status, broad industry and occupation. (2) How does dual job holding vary with the business cycle and state of the labor market? Essay 2 explores a large micro data set for 1998-2013 that covers most U.S. urban labor markets. We find clear-cut evidence that multiple job holding across labor markets and over time is weakly cyclical, thus (slightly) exacerbating rather than mitigating the severity of business cycles. Much of the cyclicality in multiple job holding seen across labor markets, however, is not causal, dropping sharply after accounting for MSA fixed effects. Using longitudinal worker data, there is minimal response to unemployment changes within labor markets over time. Our large CPS sample size produces precise estimates, albeit ones close to zero, helping explain conflicting results in prior studies based on far smaller data sets. (3) How might one explain the persistent geographical differences in multiple job holding? Essay 3 documents what are systematic (i.e., long-run) differences in multiple job holding across labor markets (MSAs) and explores possible explanations for these differences. Geographical differences in multiple job holding rates have received little attention, although the multiple job holding rates in some regions of the country are substantially higher than in other regions, and these differences have been persistent over time. Examining correlates of these labor market differences in multiple job holding provides us with a better understanding of the determinants of labor supply and how local labor markets work.

This study uses a simple univariate regression model to assess the cyclicality of fiscal policy, based on government expenditure, in South Africa since 1994. The model suggests that that total government expenditure is highly procyclical, indicating that government spending responds positively to economic growth. The results from similar regression focusing on components of government spending suggests that only capital spending (economic classification) and general services (functional classification) are countercyclical, while other classifications are more procyclical in line with total government spending. The procyclicality of expenditure components such as compensation of employees, goods and services and all functional classification is in line with government’s decisions to reduce taxes in order to boost economic activities during periods of recessions, coupled with South Africa’s high public wage bill. The countercyclicality of capital spending is attributed to government's view on prioritising capital projects during periods of recession, in line with the Keynesian theory. Results of procyclicality confirm most of other empirical findings on South Africa’s fiscal policy. However, this suggests that the procyclicality of South Africa’s government expenditure plays only a small role in demand management and therefore stabilising aggregate demand or economic fluctuations. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Abstract The aim of this study is to deepen current understanding concerning cyclicality in the Finnish sawmill industry. Traditionally, economic actors in the sawmill industry have faced dramatic price and demand fluctuations. Managers often regard cyclicality as natural and unavoidable in the industry. Accordingly, research related to business cycles in the Finnish sawmill industry has consisted of short-term studies that have mainly focused on predicting the turning points of cycles. In contrast to these short-term investigations, this study proffers research on cyclicality that is both empirical and historical. It aims to emphasise the actor perspective that seems to be absent in existing research on business cycles and cyclicality. In line with the adopted perspective, business cycles are not merely objective economic phenomena external to their observers. As regards the research, the above view necessitates a more complete understanding of business cycles and historical knowledge of the industry and the actors in its supply chain. The idea that heavy economic fluctuation is detrimental to all is emphasised in this thesis, though it has been argued that in the short term, some actors at the lower end of a distribution chain may take advantage of cyclicality by game playing. However, in the long run there are very few actors, if any, who profit from business cycles. The empirical data was primarily collected during a number of discussions with sawmill experts and in essence, the problem of cyclicality is observed through the eyes of Finnish sawmill managers. However, interviews with intermediaries as well as many public statistics and archive documents were also used to describe and explain the economic fluctuations over three decades in the industry. Industry-, supply chain- and dyadic business relationship-levels are used in the empirical and theoretical parts of the thesis. Business cycle theories by economists form the context for the study of cyclicality. Systems thinking presents the total picture of cyclicality as a problem in a specific industry, whereas the Bullwhip/Forrester effect describes cyclicality in a supply chain, and explanations for cyclicality in the Finnish sawmill industry are studied in terms of supply chain management. In particular, the presented sub-cases of dyadic business relationships shed light on the power of long-term business relationships as a smoothing-out strategy. The findings of this study reveal that there is another option for managers other than considering the cycles as being "natural", and that there is an opportunity to affect the traditional mode of behaviour in coping with business cycles. It is argued that the structures, behavioural patterns and management components of supply chain management play major roles when the sources of cyclicality and opportunities to moderate business cycles are investigated.

<p>This paper analyzes a manager's optimal ex-ante reporting system using a Bayesian persuasion approach (Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011)) in a setting where investors affect cash flows through their decision to finance the firm's investment opportunities, possibly assisted by the costly acquisition of additional information (inspection). I examine how the informativeness and the bias of the optimal system are determined by investors' inspection cost, the degree of incentive alignment between the manager and the investor, and the prior belief that the project is profitable. I find that a mis-aligned manager's system is informative</p><p>only when the market prior is pessimistic and is always positively biased; this bias decreases as investors' inspection cost decreases. In contrast, a well-aligned manager's system is fully revealing when investors' inspection cost is high, and is counter-cyclical to the market belief when the inspection cost is low: It is positively (negatively) biased when the market belief is pessimistic (optimistic). Furthermore, I explore the extent to which the results generalize to a case with managerial manipulation and discuss the implications for investment efficiency. Overall, the analysis describes the complex interactions among determinants of firm disclosures and governance, and offers explanations for the mixed empirical results in this area.</p> / Dissertation

While the consequences of political distortions on fiscal cyclicality have been thoroughly analyzed, there are few studies that specify which political variables create these distortions. In this paper I use political-economy theories of the deficit as a basis as to why fiscal cyclicality deviates from what is predicted by tax-smoothing and Keynesian models. Specifically, I examine the effects of political polarization, the years an incumbent has been in office, party affiliation, and fiscal federalism to partition how political characteristics affect fiscal responses to changes in GDP growth. I find that governments tend to be more responsive to changes in GDP growth further away from elections, left leaning governments are more responsive than right leaning governments, mixed results for political polarization, and that unitary governments are more responsive than federalist governments.

Being the largest transition economy Russia has interested economists since the collapse of the USSR. This thesis contributes to the literature on Russian labour market. In the first chapter I investigate cyclicality of real wages in Russia, the second chapter looks into consequences of wage arrears for workers' future and the third chapter develops a model of wage arrears that arise as a result of firms' opportunistic behaviour. The principal source of data used in this thesis is the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (the RLMS). The first chapter investigates cyclicality of real wages in Russia. The analysis is carried out both at the country as well as regional levels and the influence of wage arrears on the cyclicality is examined. The estimated cyclicality coefficient is three to four times larger in magnitude than those observed for Germany, the UK, the USA and other developed countries. An increase in unemployment rate by one percentage point leads to an average reduction in real wages of four percent. The results are robust to changes in sample period and estimation technique. Wage arrears do not prove to be the driving force of this strong procyclicality. The second chapter investigates influence of wage arrears on the future of affected workers. Limited dependent variable models are used to analyse the effects of wage arrears on the probability of future wage arrears and frequent separation from employers. Difference-in-difference approach is used to analyse effects on earnings. The results suggest that affected workers are twice as likely to experience wage arrears again within next three years. Job-movers are able to decrease the probability of repeated wage arrears by nine percentage points. The effect on separations is more modest: affected workers are approximately forty percent more likely to change jobs the following year and eleven percent more likely to experience frequent separations within five years after wage arrears. The effect on future earnings is relatively small and short-lived. Take-home wages decrease by 1 000 RUB compared to unaffected workers and recover within the following year. Analysis of stocks and flows of wage arrears indicates that in the period from 1998 to 2012 on average three quarters of wage debts were repaid. The third chapter picks up the discussion of the nature of wage arrears in Russia. An indirect evidence suggests that sometimes the firms choose to withhold wages despite having the resources to pay and in certain circumstances the employees accept it. The chapter presents a model of wage arrears that is based on worker-firm interactions. Calibration to the Russian data indicates that the parameter values observed in the RLMS dataset are consistent with a stable equilibrium in which an approximately half of the labour force experience late payments. The model predicts average duration of wage arrears of four months. This prediction is consistent with the Russian reality in the late 1990s.

This dissertation consists of four empirical papers analysing and discussing central bank policies in the post-crisis period. After the global financial crisis central bankers and other regulators have faced many new challenges, including a prolonged period of acommodative monetary policy, side effects of monetary policy easing on financial stability and interaction of macroprudential, microprudential and monetary policy. On top of that, policy makers must deal with uncertainty surrounding the transmission and the effectiveness of newly introduced macroprudential measures. The empirical analyses focus primarily on the Czech Republic and its banking sector, with an exception of the first essay. Using data for the Czech Republic and five euro area countries, the first essay shows that monetary tightening has a negative impact on the credit-to-GDP ratio and banks' capital-to-asset ratio, while these effects have strengthened considerably since mid-2011. This supports the view that accommodative monetary policy contributes to a build- up of financial vulnerabilities, i.e. it boosts the credit cycle. The second essay assesses the transmission of higher additional capital requirements stemming from capital buffers and Pillar 2 add-ons on banks' capital ratio, capital surplus and implicit risk weights. The results...

The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain controversial issues in the economic literature. In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936) argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework, only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy. The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks (see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to fine tune the business cycle. Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions are proposed. In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy. In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence, there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy. When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly) used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect. The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy. Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand, calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables. Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting. See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis (see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)). The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework, to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment. For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated. Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission (2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers reconciling, at least for the U.K., the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models, generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy. When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks). Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination. Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K. and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically weak for all the subsamples considered. Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies. The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected, and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)). Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies. It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions.

<p>Aggressive fiscal and monetary policies by governments of countries and central banks in developed markets could somehow push inflation to some very high level in the long run. Due to the decreasing of pension fund benefits and increasing inflation rate, pension companies are selling inflation-linked products to hedge against inflation risk. Such companies are seriously considering the possible effects of inflation volatility on their investment, and some of them tend to include inflationary allowances in the pension payment plan. In this dissertation we study the management of pension funds of the defined contribution type in the presence of inflation-recession. We study how the fund manager maximizes his fund&rsquo / s wealth when the salaries and stocks are affected by inflation. In this regard, we consider the case of a pension company which invests in a stock, inflation-linked bonds and a money market account, while basing its investment on the contribution of the plan member. We use a benchmarking approach and martingale methods to compute an optimal strategy which maximizes the fund wealth.</p>

This thesis brings statistical analyses techniques to bear on data derived from an extensive database of satellite launches and on-orbit anomalies and failures. The data collected is analyzed from two different perspectives and addresses, in two separate studies, two research objectives. The first study proposes to identify trends and cyclical patterns in the space industry, and to forecast the volume of launches for the next few years. Satellites have been rightfully described as the lifeblood of the entire space industry and the number of satellites ordered or launched per year is an important defining metric of the industry's level of activity. The structure of the space industry, its financial health and its workforce retention and development is dependent on the volume of satellites contracted. As such, trends and variability in this volume have significant strategic impact on the space industry. Over the past 40+ years, hundreds of satellites have been launched every year. Thus, an important data set is available for time series analysis and identification of trends and cycles in the various markets of the space industry. For the purpose of this first study, we collected data for over 6,000 satellites launched since 1960 on a yearly basis. We separated the satellites into three broad segments: 1) defense and intelligence satellites, 2) science satellites, and 3) commercial satellites. Several techniques are available for the analysis of time series data, both in the time domain and in the frequency domain. In this first study, we conducted spectral analysis of the time series for each of the three satellite populations and identified cycles contained in the data. In addition, once harmonic models were derived and fitted to the data, we built forecasting models of satellite launch volumes in the different market segments for the next few years. The potential implications of the results are discussed as a number of strategic matters for the space industry are contingent on the predictions or forecast of the volume of satellites contracted (the example of the U.S. auto industry is a solemn reminder of such possible strategic issues). The second study uses the previously collected launch data, confined to Earth-orbiting satellites launched between 1990 and 2008, and expanded with the failure information and retirement of each satellite to conduct a comparative analysis of satellite reliability in GEO, LEO, and MEO orbits. Reliability has long been recognized as an essential consideration in the design of space systems. However, there is limited statistical analysis of satellite reliability based on actual flight data. The objective of this second study is to conduct nonparametric satellite reliability analysis, with orbit type as a covariate, and to explore appropriate parametric fits (Weibull, lognormal, and mixture distributions). The results indicate for example that differences exist between the failure behaviors of satellites in different orbits, or that satellite infant mortality exists or dominates more clearly in a particular orbit type. The findings can be useful to satellite manufacturers as they would provide an empirical basis for reviewing and adjusting satellite testing and burn-in procedures.