Institutional Technology and the Chains of Trust: Capital Markets and Privatization in Russia and the Czech Republic

The introduction of mass privatization policies in Russia and the Czech Republic depended on the creation of impersonal capital markets to finance the needs of privatized companies and to provide a secondary market for the trading of securities. Yet, mass privatization created the contradictory conditions of generating millions of poorly informed shareholders, with no efficient markets for the sale of the shares. The absence of financial markets created systematic pressures to move assets by illegal or non-transparent means to users who value them. Privatization created the incentives to destroy the financial markets critical to its success. A comparative case analysis of post-privatization market formation in both these countries demonstrates that the functional necessity for these markets does not engender their own creation. In the absence of institutional mechanisms of state regulation and trust, markets become arenas for political contests and economic manipulation. The irony of these policies is that a principal lesson has been that market reforms cannot create viable markets, only institutional formation can.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39719/3/wp335.pd

Restructuring or Disintegration of the German Corporate Network: Globalization as a Fifth Column

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39977/3/wp591.pd

Institutional Technology and the Chains of Trust: Capital Markets and Privatization in Russia and the Czech Republic

The introduction of mass privatization policies in Russia and the Czech Republic depended on the creation of impersonal capital markets to finance the needs of privatized companies and to provide a secondary market for the trading of securities. Yet, mass privatization created the contradictory conditions of generating millions of poorly informed shareholders, with no efficient markets for the sale of the shares. The absence of financial markets created systematic pressures to move assets by illegal or non-transparent means to users who value them. Privatization created the incentives to destroy the financial markets critical to its success. A comparative case analysis of post-privatization market formation in both these countries demonstrates that the functional necessity for these markets does not engender their own creation. In the absence of institutional mechanisms of state regulation and trust, markets become arenas for political contests and economic manipulation. The irony of these policies is that a principal lesson has been that market reforms cannot create viable markets, only institutional formation can.

Evons: A Dataset for Fake and Real News Virality Analysis and Prediction

We present a novel collection of news articles originating from fake and real news media sources for the analysis and prediction of news virality. Unlike existing fake news datasets which either contain claims or news article headline and body, in this collection each article is supported with a Facebook engagement count which we consider as an indicator of the article virality. In addition we also provide the article description and thumbnail image with which the article was shared on Facebook. These images were automatically annotated with object tags and color attributes. Using cloud based vision analysis tools, thumbnail images were also analyzed for faces and detected faces were annotated with facial attributes. We empirically investigate the use of this collection on an example task of article virality prediction

Prototypes and Strategy: Assigning Causal Credit Using Fuzzy Sets

Strategies often are stylized on the basis of particular prototypes (e.g. differentiate or low cost) whose efficacy is uncertain often due to uncertainty of complex interactions among its elements. Because of the difficulty in assigning causal credit to a given element for an outcome, the adoption of better practices that constitute strategies is frequently characterized as lacking in causal validity. We apply Ragin\u27s (2000) fuzzy logic methodology to identify high performance configurations in the 1989 data set of MacDuffie (1995). The results indicate that discrete prototypes of practices are associated with higher performance, but that the variety of outcomes points to experimentation and search. These results reflect the fundamental challenge of complex causality when there is limited diversity in observed experiments given the large number of choice variables. Fuzzy set methodology provides an approach to reduce this complexity by logical rules that permit an exploration of the simplifying assumptions. It is this interaction between prototypical understandings of strategy and exploration in the absence of data that is the most important contribution of this methodology

Entreprise et travail en Europe occidentale et aux États-Unis aux XIXe et XXe siècles

Patrick Fridenson, directeur d’études L’entreprise à la lumière de l’histoire et des autres sciences sociales (suite et fin) Cette troisième année de séminaire a eu deux dimensions complémentaires. La première a été de dresser une typologie évolutive des différents types d’espaces économiques dans lesquelles une entreprise depuis le début du XIXe siècle peut s’insérer et qui sont conjointement caractérisés par la concurrence et la coopération. Suzanne Berger (MIT) a ainsi présenté ses nouvell..

Detecting Latent Ideology in Expert Text: Evidence From Academic Papers in Economics

Previous work on extracting ideology from text has focused on domains where expression of political views is expected, but it’s unclear if current technology can work in domains where displays of ide-ology are considered inappropriate. We present a supervised ensemble n-gram model for ideology extraction with topic adjustments and apply it to one such do-main: research papers written by academic economists. We show economists ’ polit-ical leanings can be correctly predicted, that our predictions generalize to new do-mains, and that they correlate with public policy-relevant research findings. We also present evidence that unsupervised models can under-perform in domains where ide-ological expression is discouraged.

Direct Improvement of Hamiltonian Lattice Gauge Theory

We demonstrate that a direct approach to improving Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory is possible. Our approach is to correct errors in the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian by incorporating additional gauge invariant terms. The coefficients of these terms are chosen so that the order $a^2$ classical errors vanish. We conclude with a brief discussion of tadpole improvement in Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory.Comment: 9 page