9,166 research outputs found
Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War
Assassinations are a persistent feature of the political landscape. Using a new data set of assassination attempts on all world leaders from 1875 to 2004, we exploit inherent randomness in the success or failure of assassination attempts to identify assassination's effects. We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy. We also find that assassinations affect the intensity of small-scale conflicts. The results document a contemporary source of institutional change, inform theories of conflict, and show that small sources of randomness can have a pronounced effect on history.
Liberal democracy as the result of an "aborted" communist revolution
We propose a model of the transition from a ”big man” authoritarian regime to either a
liberal democracy or a communist regime. An underground organization votes on
whether to summon a mass event. If it is summoned, the organization members decide
whether to put effort into the event. Higher effort makes regime change more likely, but
it is individually risky. This creates the possibility, in principle, of high and low effort
equilibria. But we show, using weak dominance arguments, that only the high effort
equilibrium is ”credible.” Thus, internal party democracy is shown to be an efficiency
enhancing element for political transitions. We extend the model to show that other
internal organization aspects are key for the existence and welfare properties of this
equilibrium. Finally we also show when is the process likely to end up in either
democracy (and its ”quality”) or a full communist regime
Speculative Attacks
Models with multiple equilibria are a popular way to explain currency attacks. Morris and Shin (1998) have shown that, in the context of those models, unique equilibria may prevail once noisy private information is introduced. In this paper, we generalize the results of Morris and Shin to a broader class of probability distributions and show - using the technique of iterated elimination of dominated strategies - that uniqueness will hold, even if we allow for sunspots and individual uncertainty about strategic behavior of other agents. We provide a clear exposition of the logic of this model and we analyse the impact of transparency on the probability of a speculative attack. For the case of uniform distribution of noisy signals, we show that increased transparency of government policy reduces the likelihood of attacks
High Schools for the New Millennium: Imagine the Possibilities
Provides an overview of the current large comprehensive public school system model and outlines ideas for transforming schools to better prepare students for college and for today's economy, including the transition to smaller high-quality high schools
Assessment and analysis of H.pylori infection treatment strategies of St. Vincent Hospital\u27s family and internal medicine clinics
Helicobacter pylori is a gram-negative bacteria that is responsible for causing chronic gastritis, ulcers in the stomach and intestine, and eventually even gastric lymphoma or cancer. Multiple treatment options have been recommended for treating an H. pylori infection based on kidney function, previous antibiotic exposure, and whether or not the infection is recurrent. The most common regimens used at St. Vincent\u27s primary care centers closely mimic the American College of Gastroenterology\u27s clinical guidelines. However, these medications (clarithromycin and levofloxacin) have been associated with high rates of resistance in other countries. The United States has very limited data on H. pylori\u27s resistance rates to these medications and there is not sufficient data to prove the efficacy of these regimens. This project aims to identify what percentage of H. pylori infections diagnosed at St. Vincent\u27s Family Medicine and Internal Medicine clinics are being successfully treated with current, guideline-directed therapy. It also aims to obtain a general understanding of H. pylori resistance rates to clarithromycin and levofloxacin in the Indianapolis area based on treatment failure rates
Corporate debt restructuring : evidence on lender coordination in financial distress
In the recent theoretical literature on lending risk, the coordination problem in multi-creditor relationships have been analyzed extensively. We address this topic empirically, relying on a unique panel data set that includes detailed credit-file information on distressed lending relationships in Germany. In particular, it includes information on creditor pools, a legal institution aiming at coordinating lender interests in borrower distress. We report three major findings. First, the existence of creditor pools increases the probability of workout success. Second, the results are consistent with coordination costs being positively related to pool size. Third, major determinants of pool formation are found to be the number of banks, the distribution of lending shares, and the severity of the distress shock
Behavior Trees in Robotics and AI: An Introduction
A Behavior Tree (BT) is a way to structure the switching between different
tasks in an autonomous agent, such as a robot or a virtual entity in a computer
game. BTs are a very efficient way of creating complex systems that are both
modular and reactive. These properties are crucial in many applications, which
has led to the spread of BT from computer game programming to many branches of
AI and Robotics. In this book, we will first give an introduction to BTs, then
we describe how BTs relate to, and in many cases generalize, earlier switching
structures. These ideas are then used as a foundation for a set of efficient
and easy to use design principles. Properties such as safety, robustness, and
efficiency are important for an autonomous system, and we describe a set of
tools for formally analyzing these using a state space description of BTs. With
the new analysis tools, we can formalize the descriptions of how BTs generalize
earlier approaches. We also show the use of BTs in automated planning and
machine learning. Finally, we describe an extended set of tools to capture the
behavior of Stochastic BTs, where the outcomes of actions are described by
probabilities. These tools enable the computation of both success probabilities
and time to completion
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