Some implications of a mandatory gender quota for firms implementing at different points in time

This master’s thesis examines some of the implications of the Norwegian gender quota for firms implementing it at different points in time. It is found that firms lose between 14% and 22% of their general board experience dependent on when they implement the quota. Firms implementing earlier lose on average less experience than firms adapting later. However, the earliest implementers nominate women, and the later adapters men with more previous board experience in the same sector of the economy, in the mandatory transition period. The later a firm adapts is also found to be casually related to the probability of the firm changing its board size in order to meet the quota. Further, firms implementing later has higher board turnover among both female and male members in the years prior to and after the quota became mandatory. The compensation offered the CEO increases sharply for the earliest adapters when they implement the quota. This could be consistent with either a stronger governance structure and better incentives, or weaker governance where the CEO utilizes a relatively enhanced bargaining position.nhhma

Free banking and the stability of early joint-stock banking

Proponents of free banking argue that systems adopting their policies will be stable. In this paper, we present evidence suggesting that, in general, early joint-stock banking systems did not adopt free banking, and those that did proved to be unstable. In particular, we demonstrate that those systems imposing regulations were generally stable. We rationalise the success of regulation as a pragmatic solution to the time-inconsistency problem arising from the peculiar nature of the banking firm. Notably, we find that the 'golden age' of free banking stability can be attributed to restrictions on the organisational form of the early banking firm. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Quantifying Vagueness and Possibility: New Trends in Knowledge Representation

International audienceThe advent of the computer age has increased the need for knowledge representation tools, and formal models of reasoning. Knowledge, as handled by people, is often imperfect, sometimes because of uncertainty, sometimes because extra precision would be of no use for carrying out most of the tasks man has to deal with. This has led to conceptual imprecision and lexical vagueness being recognized as important sources of uncertainty in subjective knowledge. L. A. Zadeh, proposing the concept of a fuzzy set in 1965, has created a major breakthrough in the representation of imperfect knowledge. In this paper, we try to consider fuzzy sets from an epistemological point of view, trying to demonstrate that this model lies at the crossroads of two traditions: logic and set theory on the one hand, probability on the other hand. It is shown that accepting imprecision in the probabilistic setting leads to the concept of possibility as a measure of consistency between statements of interest and imprecise knowledge. Symmetrically, accommodating uncertainty in a settheoretic framework leads to generalized forms of logic. As a consequence, the theory of fuzzy sets and the theory of possibility that it supports appear as one basic building block of a general theory of uncertainty, in which probability theory has its own fundamental role. It also shed lights on possible interpretations of membership functions, an issue that has puzzled many a scholar learning about fuzzy sets