Values and Norms Matter – On the Basic Determinants of Long-Run Economic Development

Over the last couple of decades, it has become a commonplace to claim that “institutions matter” for economic development. Yet, institutions are not exogenous but the result of hu-man action. It is argued here that the values and norms held by substantial parts of society’s members are an important determinant of its institutions. It is further argued that values and norms have both a direct and an indirect effect on economic development: the direct effect materializes because the values and norms also contain the work ethic which, if transformed into behavior, should have direct consequences on economic development. The indirect effect is conjectured to work via the relevant institutions: if institutions are important for economic development and institutions are influenced by the values and norms, then this is a more indi-rect channel through which values and norms can display their impact.Institutions, Values and Norms, Democracy, Rule of Law, Culture, Social Capi-tal, Civil Society, Economic Development, Total Factor Productivity

Empirical Analysis of Informal Institutions

The New Institutional Economics has established itself as widely accepted extension to the standard neoclassical paradigm. Here, institutions are defined as commonly known rules that structure recurring interaction situations and the corresponding sanctioning mechanism. For-mal institutions describe rules with a sanction mechanism that is organized by the state. In-formal institutions describe rules with a sanction mechanism that is not organized by the state but by other societal members. Most studies providing empirical evidence that “institutions matter” focus solely on formal institutions. This is in stark contrast to the theoretical acknowledgement that human decisions are shaped by both formal and informal institutions. This dissertation brings together five contributions in the empirical analysis of informal institutions. The first contribution provides a conceptual framework for the measurement of informal institutions. The second and third contribution analyze the impact of informal institutions on economic outcomes. The fourth contribution is concerned with the trade-off between formal and informal contract enforcement, while the fifth contribution is concerned with the effect of individual level religiosity on acceptance of corruption

Application of polarized Raman spectroscopy for analysis of phase transitions and anisotropic behavior of soft condensed matter

The importance of soft matter research, as a major class of materials including liquid crystals, polymers, colloids, emulsions, and forms, is attributed to the behavior resemblances in each branch of soft matter responding to the external perturbations. Hence, one of the most required inquiries in soft matter physics is understanding how the structures with characteristic length scales evolve in response to external perturbations, and concomitant phase transitions. We have focused on adopting polarized Raman spectroscopy to probe phase transitions in soft materials consisting of anisometric components and the evolution of molecular orientational ordering as a complementary tool to other methodologies, but distinct in some respects. The primary task is quantifying the degree of molecular orientation, i.e., obtaining orientational order parameters, in liquid crystal (LCs) system. Thermal evolution of orientation degree in a hitherto elusive biaxial nematic (Nb) phase as well as a commonly known uniaxial nematic (Nu) phase were interrogated from the measurements of anisotropy in polarized Raman intensities. We demonstrated reliable and applicable method to quantify the orientation degree for systems possessing anisotropic ordering. We also addressed a strong potential of Raman spectroscopy that the changes of vibrational energy reflect the variations of intermolecular interactions and structural changes on the molecular level induced by phase transitions. As a subfield of soft matter, we characterized phase transitions and anisotropic ordering observed in an evaporating conjugated polymer solution and elucidated the mechanism of the entities undergoing phase transitions using mainly polarized Raman spectroscopy. In addition, we have shown that tracking Raman spectral changes can provide valuable information for understanding structure-property relations when the measurements of the evolution in physical properties are carried out simultaneously.PhDCommittee Chair: Srinivasarao, Mohan; Committee Member: El-Sayed, Mostafa; Committee Member: Fernandez, Alberto; Committee Member: Griffin, Anselm; Committee Member: Park, Jung Ok; Committee Member: Reichmanis, Elsa; Committee Member: Rey, Alejandro; Committee Member: Tolbert, Lare

Effects of Foreign Presence in a Transition Economy: Regional and Industry-Wide Investments and Firm-Level Exports in Ukrainian Manufacturing

We investigate the effects of regional and industry-wide foreign presence and foreign direct investment (FDI) on export volumes of Ukrainian manufacturing firms using unpublished panel data from 1996-2000. Foreign presence through FDI may have negative competition effects on domestic firms' performance while, at the same time, domestic firms' productivity may be increased by technology transfer or through training and demonstration effects. From a Cournot competition model including negative competition and positive technology-spillover effects, we derive the hypotheses that foreign presence and foreign investment might positively affect domestic firms' output and exports. Our estimation results support these hypotheses and suggest in particular that large firms and durable-goods producers benefit most from foreign presence and investments.transition, foreign direct investment, spillovers, firm performance.

The Effects of Regional and Industry: Wide FDI Spillovers on Export of Ukrainian Firms

In this paper we investigate the effects of region and industry?wide spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) on the volumes of export of Ukrainian manufacturing firms, using unpublished panel data from 1996?2000. Economic theory suggests that FDI has direct and indirect effects on firm?s performance. Our analysis focuses on the indirect effects like competition and linkage effects through industrial and regional spillovers respectively. We use a simple Cournot competition model in order to test for industrial and regional spillovers. The estimation results suggest that large firms, durable?goods makers, and firms located in urban areas benefit most from FDI spillovers. --transition economies,Ukraine,foreign direct investment,spillovers

The effects of regional and industry-wide FDI spillovers on export of Ukrainian firms

In this paper we investigate the effects of region and industrywide spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) on the volumes of export of Ukrainian manufacturing firms, using (name of the data set) panel data from 1996-2000. Economic theory suggests that FDI has direct and indirect effects on firm’s performance. Our analysis focuses on the indirect effects like competition and linkage effects through industrial and regional spillovers respectively. We use a simple Cournot competition model in order to test for industrial and regional spillovers. The estimation results suggest that large firms, durablegoods makers, and firms located in urban areas benefit most from FDI spillovers. --transition economies,Ukraine,foreign direct investment,spillovers

Effective fault localization techniques for concurrent software

Multicore and Internet cloud systems have been widely adopted in recent years and have resulted in the increased development of concurrent programs. However, concurrency bugs are still difficult to test and debug for at least two reasons. Concurrent programs have large interleaving space, and concurrency bugs involve complex interactions among multiple threads. Existing testing solutions for concurrency bugs have focused on exposing concurrency bugs in the large interleaving space, but they often do not provide debugging information for developers to understand the bugs. To address the problem, this thesis proposes techniques that help developers in debugging concurrency bugs, particularly for locating the root causes and for understanding them, and presents a set of empirical user studies that evaluates the techniques. First, this thesis introduces a dynamic fault-localization technique, called Falcon, that locates single-variable concurrency bugs as memory-access patterns. Falcon uses dynamic pattern detection and statistical fault localization to report a ranked list of memory-access patterns for root causes of concurrency bugs. The overall Falcon approach is effective: in an empirical evaluation, we show that Falcon ranks program fragments corresponding to the root-cause of the concurrency bug as "most suspicious" almost always. In principle, such a ranking can save a developer's time by allowing him or her to quickly hone in on the problematic code, rather than having to sort through many reports. Others have shown that single- and multi-variable bugs cover a high fraction of all concurrency bugs that have been documented in a variety of major open-source packages; thus, being able to detect both is important. Because Falcon is limited to detecting single-variable bugs, we extend the Falcon technique to handle both single-variable and multi-variable bugs, using a unified technique, called Unicorn. Unicorn uses online memory monitoring and offline memory pattern combination to handle multi-variable concurrency bugs. The overall Unicorn approach is effective in ranking memory-access patterns for single- and multi-variable concurrency bugs. To further assist developers in understanding concurrency bugs, this thesis presents a fault-explanation technique, called Griffin, that provides more context of the root cause than Unicorn. Griffin reconstructs the root cause of the concurrency bugs by grouping suspicious memory accesses, finding suspicious method locations, and presenting calling stacks along with the buggy interleavings. By providing additional context, the overall Griffin approach can provide more information at a higher-level to the developer, allowing him or her to more readily diagnose complex bugs that may cross file or module boundaries. Finally, this thesis presents a set of empirical user studies that investigates the effectiveness of the presented techniques. In particular, the studies compare the effectiveness between a state-of-the-art debugging technique and our debugging techniques, Unicorn and Griffin. Among our findings, the user study shows that while the techniques are indistinguishable when the fault is relatively simple, Griffin is most effective for more complex faults. This observation further suggests that there may be a need for a spectrum of tools or interfaces that depend on the complexity of the underlying fault or even the background of the user.Ph.D