17,975 research outputs found
Is acting prosocially beneficial for the credit market?
This article argues that behaving prosocially implies more transparent information during the negotiation process of a financial contract and more cooperation among the parties to respect the terms of the contract. For this reason this work considers interest rate on loans and insolvency rate functions of prosocial behaviour along with the traditional socio-economic and financial collaterals. The context of study is Italy and the analysis is developed at a cross-regional level. We collect data from the two reports on “Relatives and Safety Net” produced by the Italian Centre Bureau of Statistics (ISTAT) in 1998 and 2003 and from the reports on “Regional Economics” produced by the Bank of Italy in the same years. A two-period panel model shows two interesting outcomes. Firstly, regions with a higher proportion of prosocial individuals report lower interest rates on loans and insolvency rates. Secondly, when we include the efficiency of legal enforcement, evidence supports the idea that a more efficient legal framework can act as a more reliable transmission mechanism of institutional norms and facilitate the internalisation of social norms
Untangling the Lion's Tale: Violent masculinity and the ethics of biography in the 'Curious' case of the apartheid-era policeman Donald Card
Donald Card (1928–) is a former policeman in South Africa who became the subject of
international media attention on 21 September 2004. In a highly publicised and symbolic
ceremony of reconciliation inaugurating the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory Project, he
handed back to Mandela two notebooks containing 78 hitherto unknown letters written by
Mandela on Robben Island. A starkly contrasting image of Card as a torturer had, however,
come to light during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in the Eastern
Cape in 1996 and 1997. This article begins by making a case for a direct connection between
these two events. We argue that the sanitised version of his life history in recent
scholarship traces back to his own attempts to defend his reputation from these allegations of
torture and that the Mandela notebooks served both to obscure these allegations and provide
Card with a respectable, even heroic, biography. We then present our alternative version of
his life history. Drawing on Robert Morrell’s periodisation of masculinities in southern
Africa, we read the story of Card’s life in early–mid-twentieth century South Africa in terms
of changing masculine identities, each strongly associated with violence: first the
‘oppositional’ masculinity of a child growing up in an abusive patriarchal Irish settler
family, second the ‘settler’ masculinity of an athletic teenager at a white school in the former
Transkei, and third his ‘hegemonic’ white South African masculine identity defined in
opposition to emergent black masculinities into which he was initiated as a young adult
during four months of intensive training at a police college in Pretoria. It is in this context,
along with extensive new independently acquired oral and documentary evidence of his
human rights abuses in East London in the 1950s and the early 1960s, that we situate the TRC
testimonies about Card’s torture between 1962 and 1964.Department of HE and Training approved lis
The new resilience of emerging and developing countries: systemic interlocking, currency swaps and geoeconomics
The vulnerability/resilience nexus that defined the interaction between advanced and developing economies in the post-WWII era is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Yet, most of the debate in the current literature is focusing on the structural constraints faced by the Emerging and Developing Countries (EDCs) and the lack of changes in the formal structures of global economic governance. This paper challenges this literature and its conclusions by focusing on the new conditions of systemic interlocking between advanced and emerging economies, and by analysing how large EDCs have built and are strengthening their economic resilience. We find that a significant redistribution of ‘policy space’ between advanced and emerging economies have taken place in the global economy. We also find that a number of seemingly technical currency swap agreements among EDCs have set in motion changes in the very structure of global trade and finance. These developments do not signify the end of EDCs’ vulnerability towards advanced economies. They signify however that the economic and geoeconomic implications of this vulnerability have changed in ways that constrain the options available to advanced economies and pose new challenges for the post-WWII economic order
Polar Varieties and Efficient Real Elimination
Let be a smooth and compact real variety given by a reduced regular
sequence of polynomials . This paper is devoted to the
algorithmic problem of finding {\em efficiently} a representative point for
each connected component of . For this purpose we exhibit explicit
polynomial equations that describe the generic polar varieties of . This
leads to a procedure which solves our algorithmic problem in time that is
polynomial in the (extrinsic) description length of the input equations and in a suitably introduced, intrinsic geometric parameter, called
the {\em degree} of the real interpretation of the given equation system .Comment: 32 page
Polar Varieties, Real Equation Solving and Data-Structures: The hypersurface case
In this paper we apply for the first time a new method for multivariate
equation solving which was developed in \cite{gh1}, \cite{gh2}, \cite{gh3} for
complex root determination to the {\em real} case. Our main result concerns the
problem of finding at least one representative point for each connected
component of a real compact and smooth hypersurface. The basic algorithm of
\cite{gh1}, \cite{gh2}, \cite{gh3} yields a new method for symbolically solving
zero-dimensional polynomial equation systems over the complex numbers. One
feature of central importance of this algorithm is the use of a
problem--adapted data type represented by the data structures arithmetic
network and straight-line program (arithmetic circuit). The algorithm finds the
complex solutions of any affine zero-dimensional equation system in non-uniform
sequential time that is {\em polynomial} in the length of the input (given in
straight--line program representation) and an adequately defined {\em geometric
degree of the equation system}. Replacing the notion of geometric degree of the
given polynomial equation system by a suitably defined {\em real (or complex)
degree} of certain polar varieties associated to the input equation of the real
hypersurface under consideration, we are able to find for each connected
component of the hypersurface a representative point (this point will be given
in a suitable encoding). The input equation is supposed to be given by a
straight-line program and the (sequential time) complexity of the algorithm is
polynomial in the input length and the degree of the polar varieties mentioned
above.Comment: Late
Polar Varieties and Efficient Real Equation Solving: The Hypersurface Case
The objective of this paper is to show how the recently proposed method by
Giusti, Heintz, Morais, Morgenstern, Pardo \cite{gihemorpar} can be applied to
a case of real polynomial equation solving. Our main result concerns the
problem of finding one representative point for each connected component of a
real bounded smooth hypersurface. The algorithm in \cite{gihemorpar} yields a
method for symbolically solving a zero-dimensional polynomial equation system
in the affine (and toric) case. Its main feature is the use of adapted data
structure: Arithmetical networks and straight-line programs. The algorithm
solves any affine zero-dimensional equation system in non-uniform sequential
time that is polynomial in the length of the input description and an
adequately defined {\em affine degree} of the equation system. Replacing the
affine degree of the equation system by a suitably defined {\em real degree} of
certain polar varieties associated to the input equation, which describes the
hypersurface under consideration, and using straight-line program codification
of the input and intermediate results, we obtain a method for the problem
introduced above that is polynomial in the input length and the real degree.Comment: Late
Real root finding for equivariant semi-algebraic systems
Let be a real closed field. We consider basic semi-algebraic sets defined
by -variate equations/inequalities of symmetric polynomials and an
equivariant family of polynomials, all of them of degree bounded by .
Such a semi-algebraic set is invariant by the action of the symmetric group. We
show that such a set is either empty or it contains a point with at most
distinct coordinates. Combining this geometric result with efficient algorithms
for real root finding (based on the critical point method), one can decide the
emptiness of basic semi-algebraic sets defined by polynomials of degree
in time . This improves the state-of-the-art which is exponential
in . When the variables are quantified and the
coefficients of the input system depend on parameters , one
also demonstrates that the corresponding one-block quantifier elimination
problem can be solved in time
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