A comparison of the policy effectiveness of parliamentary and presidential systems in reducing budget deficits

Ankara : The Institute of Economics and Social Sciences of Bilkent Univ., 1997.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1997.Includes bibliographical references leaves 65-67Political institutions, affect the policymaking capabilities o f the government. These capabilities influence the governments’ ability to make strategic policy choices that will help them in reaching their policy objectives. One o f the most important choice o f political institutions is the system o f government, that is, whether it is parliamentary or presidential. This thesis discusses how the choice of system o f government affects the ability o f reaching the policy objective of reducing budget deficit. It examines the decisionmaking attributes of the two systems and the impact o f these attributes on specific capabilities required to reduce budget deficits, namely, “ability to set and maintain priorities among many conflicting demands”, “ability to impose losses on powerful groups”, and “ability to allocate resources effectively”.Sağlam, Hüseyin ÇağrıM.S

Sperner Lemma, Fixed Point Theorems, and the Existence of Equilibrium

In characterizing the existence of general equilibrium, existing studies mainly draw on Brouwer and Kakutani fixed point theorems and, to some extent, Gale-Nikaido-Debreu lemma. In this paper, we show that Sperner lemma can play a role as an alternative powerful tool for the same purpose. Specifically, Sperner lemma can be used to prove those theorems as well as the lemma. Additionally, Kakutani theorem is shown as a corollary of Gale-Nikaido-Debreu lemma. For a demonstration of the use of Sperner lemma to prove general equilibrium existence, we consider two competitive economies marked either by production goods or financial assets. In each case, we successfully provide another proof on the existence of a general equilibrium using only Sperner lemma and without a need to call on the fixed point theorems or the lemma

A Data-Driven Analysis of Blockchain Systems' Public Online Communications on GDPR

After the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became applicable in May 2018,concerns about the legal compliance of public blockchain systems with rights guaranteed by GDPR have emerged, e.g., on the "right to be forgotten". In order to better understand how the blockchain sector sees the challenges raised by GDPR and how such their communications could influence their users, this paper reports our data-driven analysis of GDPR-related public online communications of blockchain developers and service providers.Our analysis covers 314 public blockchain systems, and two different online communication channels: legal documents including privacy policies, T&C (Terms and Conditions) documents and other similar legal documents published on systems’ official websites and public tweets of their official Twitter accounts.Our analysis revealed that only a minority (86/314≈27.5%)of the investigated blockchain systems had covered GDPR at least once using one or both communication channels. Among the 86systems, only 27 systems (8.6%) had at least one legal document that actually talks about GDPR for the corresponding blockchain system. We noticed a systematic lack of detail about why and how the GDPR compliance issue was addressed, and most systems made questionable statements about GDPR compliance. There sults are surprising considering that the GDPR was enacted in 2016 and has been in effect since May 2018

Automatic Detection of Cyber Security Related Accounts on Online Social Networks: Twitter as an example

Recent studies have revealed that cyber criminals tend to exchange knowledge about cyber attacks in online social networks (OSNs). Cyber security experts are another set of information providers on OSNs who frequently share information about cyber security incidents and their personal opinions and analyses. Therefore, in order to improve our knowledge about evolving cyber attacks and the underlying human behavior for different purposes (e.g., crime investigation, understanding career development and business models of cyber criminals and cyber security professionals, prediction and prevention of impeding cyber attacks), it will be very useful to detect cyber security related accounts on OSNs automatically, and monitor their activities. This paper reports our preliminary work on automatic detection of cyber security related accounts on OSNs using Twitter as an example, which may allow us to discover unknown cyber security experts and cyber criminals for monitoring purposes. Three machine learning based classification algorithms were applied and compared: decision trees, random forests, and SVM (support vector machines). Experimental results showed that both decision trees and random forests had performed well with an overall accuracy over 95%, and when random forests were used with behavioral features the accuracy had reached as high as 97.877%

Complementarities and the existence of strong Berge equilibrium

This paper studies the existence and the order structure of strong Berge equilibrium, a refinement of Nash equilibrium, for games with strategic complementarities à la strong Berge. It is shown that the equilibrium set is a nonempty complete lattice. Moreover, we provide a monotone comparative statics result such that the greatest and the lowest equilibria are increasing

Optimal Growth Strategy under Dynamic Threshold

International audienceWe consider an economy in which the technology exhibits nonconvexities due to fixed costs associated with production. Taking into account the incentives for investment to decrease fixed costs, we characterize the circumstances under which an underdeveloped economy can catch up with the developing ones. We show that it is optimal to get rid of the fixed costs inherent in production in finite time provided that the initial level of fixed costs are not too high and the technology for reducing fixed costs is sufficiently efficient. Indeed, we obtain that even though the income disparities may be very persistent and can be perceived as poverty traps, economies with not very high initial fixed costs and sufficiently efficient technology for reducing fixed costs would ultimately converge to the same steady state level of per capita income

Energy and Physical Capital: A Case of Non-classical Dynamics

We study the importance of considering different energy requirements for physical capital and final good production in an overlapping generations (OLG) resource economy. In contrast to the standard OLG framework, but consistently with the empirical evidence, we assume that the accumulation of physical capital requires more energy than the production of consumption goods. Focusing on exhaustible energy resources, we find that OLG equilibria can exhibit non-classical dynamics: the economy generates complex dynamics where, differing from the response predicted by the standard approach, resource prices may not increase monotonically. This result illustrates that the technological assumptions behind the energy inputs should be taken with caution, in particular on dynamic analyses involving exhaustible energy resources.Chaire Developpement Durable (Ecole Polytechnique - EDF); Labex MME-DI

Direct Proofs of the Existence of Equilibrium, the Gale-Nikaido-Debreu Lemma and the Fixed Point Theorems using Sperner’s Lemma

In this paper, we use Sperner’s lemma to prove the existence of general equilibrium for a competitive economy with production or with uncertainty and financial assets. We then show that the direct use of Sperner’s lemma together with Carathéodory’s convexity theorem and basic properties of topology such as partition of unit, finite covering of a compact set allow us to bypass the Kakutani fixed point theorem even in establishing the Gale-Nikaido-Debreu Lemma. We also provide a new proof of the Kakutani fixed point theorem based on Sperner’s lemma