Measuring capital flight : a case study of Mexico

The authors show how the various methods commonly used to measure capital flight produce vastly different estimates (with a 100 percent difference between the lowest and the highest, in Mexico's case). They emphasize the importance of the conceptual approach to its measurement. First of all, they did not try to separate normal capital flows from capital flight. A capital shift outward because of expected taxation is as much a response to anticipated developments in rate of return as is a shift out in response to lower interest rates at home. Nor is it satisfactory to directly measure capital flight by taking short-term asset changes and the balance of errors and omissions from the balance of payments. Neither is necessarily related to the unreported private accumulation of foreign assets. They chose the residual approach, which assumes that capital inflows in the form of increases in external indebtedness and foreign direct investment should finance either the current account or reserve accumulation; any shortfall in reported use can be attributed to capital flight. Implementing the residual approach requires careful data selection and several adjustments. The authors contend that: introducing debt stock data into the analysis - instead of the changes in debt recorded directly in the balance of payments - requires many difficult adjustments and should be avoided; foreign asset changes of public corporations must be subtracted; rather than eliminate interest received on foreign assets from the current account, as some have done, earnings on private assets held abroad should be considered part of the flight capital that might have been repatriated, given different incentives and macroeconomic conditions; and the effect on capital flight of the faking of trade invoices should be assessed, since import overinvoicing and export underinvoicing can be used to channel capital abroad. They demonstrate the empirical importance of these choices with a new set of capital flight estimates for Mexico, based on the recommendations they present. They contrast the results of this approach with those of other approaches, to demonstrate the effect of conceptual choices.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,International Terrorism&Counterterrorism,Settlement of Investment Disputes

A Bayesian Approach to Graphical Record Linkage and De-duplication

We propose an unsupervised approach for linking records across arbitrarily many files, while simultaneously detecting duplicate records within files. Our key innovation involves the representation of the pattern of links between records as a bipartite graph, in which records are directly linked to latent true individuals, and only indirectly linked to other records. This flexible representation of the linkage structure naturally allows us to estimate the attributes of the unique observable people in the population, calculate transitive linkage probabilities across records (and represent this visually), and propagate the uncertainty of record linkage into later analyses. Our method makes it particularly easy to integrate record linkage with post-processing procedures such as logistic regression, capture-recapture, etc. Our linkage structure lends itself to an efficient, linear-time, hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which overcomes many obstacles encountered by previously record linkage approaches, despite the high-dimensional parameter space. We illustrate our method using longitudinal data from the National Long Term Care Survey and with data from the Italian Survey on Household and Wealth, where we assess the accuracy of our method and show it to be better in terms of error rates and empirical scalability than other approaches in the literature.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables. Longer version of arXiv:1403.0211, In press, Journal of the American Statistical Association: Theory and Methods (2015

Passion: Engine of Creative Teaching in an English University?

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleLiterature suggests that whilst creativity is frequently seen as ubiquitous and taken for granted (Dawson, Tan, & McWilliam, 2011; Livingston, 2010) there is evidence that creative approaches in higher education can be seen as unnecessary work (Chao, 2009; Clouder et al., 2008; Gibson, 2010; McWilliam et al., 2008), and creative teaching is not always recognised or valued (Clouder et al., 2008; Dawson et al., 2011; Gibson, 2010). Forming part of a cross-cultural study of creative teaching (although reporting on only one part of it), the research explored student and lecturer perspectives in four universities in England, Malaysia and Thailand, using mixed methods within an interpretive frame. This paper reports on findings from the English University site. Key elements of creative teaching in this site were having a passion for the subject and for using sensitised pedagogical strategies, driven by an awareness of student perspective and relationship. Crucial goals were fostering independent thinking; striving for equality through conversation and collaboration; and orchestrating for knowledge-building. The lecturers’ passion for the subject was a powerful engine for creative teaching across all academic disciplines spanning the arts, the humanities, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects

Graduation Recital, Rebecca Hall, flute; Sally Rowsell, piano

Graduation Recital, Rebecca Hall, flute; Sally Rowsell, pianoBöhm, Theobald written Boehm in progra