1,833 research outputs found
Why Ownership Matters?: Politicization and Entrepreneurship in the Restructuring of Enterprises in Central Europe
This paper, base on a study of mid-sized firms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, examines the sources of performance differences between state and privatized firms, particularly those that may be due to politicization and differences in the degree of entreprenurship. The paper presents empirical evidence that politicization of decision making is responsible for the observed inefficiencies in the cost behavior of state enterprises, but does not explain their inferior revenue performance, which is independent of the degree of state involvement.OWNERSHIP ; PRIVATIZATION ; HUMAN CAPITAL
Why Ownership Matters? Entrepreneurship and the Restructuring of Enterprises in Central Europe
This paper, based on a study of mid-sized firms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, seeks to explain the reasons behind the marked impact of ownership on firm performance which has been observed in a number of studies in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. Focusing in particular on the differential impact of ownership on revenue and cost performance, the paper argues that privatized firms controlled by outside investors are more entrepreneurial than those controlled by corporate insiders or the state. The paper provides evidence that all state and privatized firms in transition economies engage in similar types of restructuring, but that product restructuring by firms owned by outsider investors is significantly more effective (in terms of revenue generation) than that by firms with other types of ownership. The paper also examines the impact of managerial turnover on revenue performance, as well as differences among managers of firms with different types of ownership, and concludes that the more entrepreneurial behavior of outsider-owned firms is due primarily to incentive effects, rather than human capital effects, of privatization. More specifically, the authors argue that the success of outsider-owned firms is due to their greater readiness to accept risks (as evidenced by the higher variance of the revenues generated by restructuring) and a lesser need to defend, and account for, their managerial decisions.OWNERSHIP; PRIVATIZATION; POLITICIZATION; ENTREPRENEURSHIP; INCENTIVES; HUMAN CAPITAL
Screening and conductance relaxations in insulating granular aluminium thin films
We have recently found in insulating granular Al thin film a new experimental
feature (Delahaye et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 186602, 2011), namely the
existence of a conductance relaxation that is not sensitive to gate voltage
changes. This conductance relaxation is related to the existence of a
metallic-like screening in the film and can be used to estimate its
characteristic length scale. In the present paper, we give some experimental
details on how this feature was measured and present our first results on the
screening length temperature dependence.Comment: 14th Transport in interacting disordered systems (TIDS14) conference,
September 5-8 2011, Acre (Israel
The Limits of Discipline: Ownership and Hard Budget Constraints in the Transition Economies
This paper argues that the imposition of financial discipline is not sufficient to remedy ownership and governance-related deficiencies of corporate performance. Using evidence from the postcommunist transition economies, the paper shows that a policy of hard budget constraints falters when state firms, because of inferior revenue performance and lesser willingness to meet payment obligations, continue to pose higher credit risk than privatized firms. The brunt of state firms' lower creditworthiness falls on state creditors. But the "softness" of these creditors is unavoidable if it prevents a demise of firms that are in principle capable of successful restructuring through ownership changes.OWNERSHIP; FINANCIAL DISCIPLINE; PERFORMANCE; TRANSITION.
Universal transport in 2D granular superconductors
The transport properties of quench condensed granular superconductors are
presented and analyzed. These systems exhibit transitions from insulating to
superconducting behavior as a function of inter-grain spacing.
Superconductivity is characterized by broad transitions in which the resistance
drops exponentially with reducing temperature. The slope of the log R versus T
curves turns out to be universaly dependent on the normal state film resistance
for all measured granular systems. It does not depend on the material, critical
temperature, geometry, or experimental set-up. We discuss possible physical
scenarios to explain these findings.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Ulta-slow relaxation in discontinuous-film based electron glasses
We present field effect measurements on discontinuous 2D thin films which are
composed of a sub monolayer of nano-grains of Au, Ni, Ag or Al. Like other
electron glasses these systems exhibit slow conductance relaxation and memory
effects. However, unlike other systems, the discontinuous films exhibit a
dramatic slowing down of the dynamics below a characteristic temperature .
is typically between 10-50K and is sample dependent. For the
sample exhibits a few other peculiar features such as repeatable conductance
fluctuations in millimeter size samples. We suggest that the enhanced system
sluggishness is related to the current carrying network becoming very dilute in
discontinuous films so that the system contains many parts which are
electrically very weakly connected and the transport is dominated by very few
weak links. This enables studying the glassy properties of the sample as it
transitions from a macroscopic sample to a mesocopic sample, hence, the results
provide new insight on the underlying physics of electron glasses.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
PARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF HAZARD FUNCTIONS WITH STOCHASTIC COVARIATE PROCESSES
Let X(t), t âÂÂ¥ 0, be a real or vector valued stochastic process and T a
random killing-time of the process which generally depends on the sample function. In the
context of survival analysis, T represents the time to a prescribed event (e.g. system failure,
time of disease symptom, etc.) and X(t) is a stochastic covariate process, observed up to
time T. The conditional distribution of T, given X(t), t âÂÂ¥ 0, is assumed to be of a known
functional form with an unknown vector parameter ø; however, the distributions of X(â¢) are
not specified. For an arbitrary fixed ñ > 0 the observable data from a single realization of T
and X(â¢) is min(T, ñ), X(t), 0 ⤠t ⤠min(T, ñ). For n âÂÂ¥ 1 the maximum likelihood estimator
of ø is based on n independent copies of the observable data. It is shown that solutions of
the likelihood equation are consistent and asymptotically normal and efficient under specified
regularity conditions on the hazard function associated with the conditional distribution of T.
The Fisher information matrix is represented in terms of the hazard function. The form of the
hazard function is very general, and is not restricted to the commonly considered cases where
it depends on X(â¢) only through the present point X(t). Furthermore, the process X(â¢) is a
general, not necessarily Markovian process.Statistics Working Papers Serie
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