The Internal Job Market of the IMF's Economist Program

This paper shows how the internal job market for participants in the IMF's Economist Program (EPs) could be redesigned to eliminate most of the shortcomings of the current system. The new design is based on Gale and Shapley's (1962) deferred acceptance algorithm and generates an efficient and stable outcome. An Excel-based computer program, EP-Match, implements the algorithm and applies it to the internal job market for EPs. The program can be downloaded from http://www.people.hbs.edu/gbarron/EP-Match_for_Excel.htm. Copyright 2005, International Monetary Fund

The Value of Commitment in Contests and Tournaments when Observation is Costly

We study the value of commitment in contests and tournaments when there are costs for the follower to observe the leader's behavior. In a contest, the follower can pay to observe the leader's effort but cannot observe the effectiveness of that effort. In a tournament, the follower can pay to observe the effectiveness of the leader's effort but not the effort itself. We show that this distinction matters significantly: When observation is costly, the value of commitment vanishes entirely in sequential and endogenous move contests, regardless of the size of the observation cost. By contrast, in tournaments, the value of commitment is preserved completely, provided that the observation costs are sufficiently small.Contests, Tournaments, Rent-Seeking, Commitment, Costly Leader Games

Demand for Slant: How Abstention Shapes Voters? Choice of News Media

Political commentators warn that the fragmentation of the modern media landscape induces voters to withdraw into ?information cocoons? and segregate along ideological lines. We show that the option to abstain breaks ideological segregation and generates ?cross-over? in news consumption: voters with considerable leanings toward a candidate demand information that is less biased toward that candidate than voters who are more centrist. This non-monotonicity in the demand for slant makes voters? ideologies non-recoverable from their choice of news media and generates disproportionate demand for media outlets that are centrist or only moderately biased. It also implies that polarization of the electorate may lead to ideological moderation in news consumption. Thus, our results cast doubt on the oft-prophesied, imminent demise of mainstream media and may help to explain recent empirical findings showing less ideological segregation in news consumption than predicted by extant theories

Status of Gulag research in the United States, with specific attention to the Hungarians

The twentieth century was undoubtedly the bloodiest hundred years in the history of humanity. In this final century of the second millennium more humans suffered from various state-sponsored programs and institutions of mass murder than during the whole stretch of written century. In the twentieth century tens of millions of humans fell victim to these so-called “redeeming” religious and political ideologies. The bloodiest of these ideologies included: (1) an extreme form of nationalism that culminated in racism; (2) applied Marxism that hid under the mantle of Bolshevism and Stalinism; (3) national socialism that manifested itself in Fascism and Nazism; and finally (4) the recently emerging Fundamentalist Islam that attempted to tear down the structure and achievements of Western Christian Civilization. These “redeeming ideologies” competed against each other in their efforts to torture, torment, and annihilate tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of human beings. The best known among these mass exterminations is undoubtedly the Holocaust, which resulted in the torturous death of six million Jews or alleged Jews, among them several hundred-thousand Hungarians. This centrally planned and meticulously executed extermination process is so well known that nowadays it is part of general human consciousness everywhere in the world. Sadly, this does not apply to the other 20th-century mass extermination known as the Gulag, which is not part of that consciousness. In point of fact, one still encounters scholars who don’t even believe that the Gulag had ever existed. While Holocaust-research is pursued in the United States at several dozen universities, museums, libraries and various other research centers, this does not apply to the Gulag, which is hardly known to the general public. This is also true for American university students, of whom — based on my own experiences — less than five percent is aware of this modern form of slavery and mass extermination. The goal of this paper is to summarize briefly the type of Gulag-research pursued in the United States, which — in absence of specialized research institutes — is pursued mostly by individual scholars. Toward the end of this study, reference is also made to the “Gulag-consciousness” and “Gulag-research” in Hungary — which also leaves much to be desired

Radical Right Populist Politics in Hungary: Reinventing the Magyars through Sport

Given the contemporary growth of ‘populist’ political parties and movements in a number of highly-developed democratic states in Europe and North America, there has been a resurgence in academic interest around the various causes for the groundswell of support for political populism. Given this broader political context, this paper explores the interconnection between sport and populist politics in Hungary, with a particular emphasis on the appropriation of sport by ‘right-wing’ populist political actors. In particular, this paper will examine the politics – sport interconnection by discussing Victor Orbán’s, Hungary’s Prime Minister, use of football, and sport more broadly, and the ways in which the Hungarian government have attempted to reinvent a strong nation and national identity through sport and related political populism. These attempts have been influenced by the interaction between forces of Westernisation and the country’s continuing post-communist transition, with the view to (re)inventing the Hungarian nation