Elections, Ideology, and Turnover in the U.S. Federal Government

A defining feature of public sector employment is the regular change in elected leadership. Yet, we know little about how elections influence public sector careers. We describe how elections alter policy outputs and disrupt the influence of civil servants over agency decisions. These changes shape the career choices of employees motivated by policy, influence, and wages. Using new Office of Personnel Management data on the careers of millions of federal employees between 1988 and 2011, we evaluate how elections influence employee turnover decisions. We find that presidential elections increase departure rates of career senior employees, particularly in agencies with divergent views relative to the new president and at the start of presidential terms. We also find suggestive evidence that vacancies in high-level positions after elections may induce lower-level executives to stay longer in hopes of advancing. We conclude with implications of our findings for public policy, presidential politics, and public management

Public Sector Personnel Economics: Wages, Promotions, and the Competence-Control Trade-off

We model personnel policies in public agencies, examining how wages and promotion standards can partially offset a fundamental contracting problem: the inability of public sector workers to contract on performance, and the inability of political masters to contract on forbearance from meddling. Despite the dual contracting problem, properly constructed personnel policies can encourage intrinsically motivated public sector employees to invest in expertise, seek promotion, remain in the public sector, and develop policy projects. However, doing so requires internal personnel policies that sort slackers from zealots. Personnel policies that accomplish this task are quite different in agencies where acquired expertise has little value in the private sector, and agencies where acquired expertise commands a premium in the private sector. Finally, even with well-designed personnel policies, there remains an inescapable trade-off between political control and expertise acquisition

Quitting in Protest: A Theory of Presidential Policy Making and Agency Response

This paper examines the effects of centralized presidential policy-making, implemented through unilateral executive action, on the willingness of bureaucrats to exert effort and stay in the government. Extending models in organizational economics, we show that policy initiative by the president is a substitute for initiative by civil servants. Yet, total effort is enhanced when both work. Presidential centralization of policy often impels policy-oriented bureaucrats ( zealots ) to quit rather than implement presidential policies they dislike. Those most likely to quit are a range of moderate bureaucrats. More extreme bureaucrats may be willing to wait out an opposition president in the hope of tempering future policy when an allied president is elected. As control of the White House alternates between ideologically opposed extreme presidents, policy-minded moderates are stripped from bureaucratic agencies leaving only policy extremists or poorly performing slackers. These departures degrade policy initiative in moderate agencies

Equity Research - Adidas AG

Mestrado em FinançasEste relatório contém a avaliação da Adidas AG. Elaborado de acordo com a Dissertação de Trabalho Final do Programa de Mestrado em Finanças do ISEG, este estudo de avaliação segue as recomendações do CFA Institute. As informações aqui contidas foram compiladas a partir de fontes públicas sobre Adidas AG em 10 de abril de 2015. Dito isto, o relatório não leva em consideração quaisquer eventos ou circunstâncias que tenham surgido após esta data. O preço-alvo foi obtido combinando o "Discounted Cash Flow" (DCF) e o "Comparable Company Multiple Pricing" com pesos iguais. As premissas consideradas para este estudo foram formuladas usando tanto os dados históricos divulgados publicamente pela empresa, bem como de bases de dados, como a Bloomberg L.P. e a Thomson Reuters DataStream. Com um preço alvo de €142 e um potencial de valorização de 83,9% face ao atual preço, a recomendação para a Adidas AG é de "COMPRA".This report contains the valuation of Adidas AG. Elaborated in accordance with ISEG's Finance Final Work Thesis, this Equity Research follows the format of a research report recommended by the CFA Institute. The information contained herein has been compiled from public sources on Adidas AG on April 10th, 2015. Hence, the report does not take into consideration any events or circumstances which have arisen after this date. The target price was obtained by combining the Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) and the Comparable Company Multiple Pricing with equal weights. The assumptions considered for this study were formulated using both the historical data publicly disclosed by the company, as well as data from several sources, such as Bloomberg L.P. and Thomson Reuters DataStream. With a target price of €142 and an upside potential of 83.9% from current stock price, I issue a BUY recommendation for Adidas AG.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Summarization of Films and Documentaries Based on Subtitles and Scripts

We assess the performance of generic text summarization algorithms applied to films and documentaries, using the well-known behavior of summarization of news articles as reference. We use three datasets: (i) news articles, (ii) film scripts and subtitles, and (iii) documentary subtitles. Standard ROUGE metrics are used for comparing generated summaries against news abstracts, plot summaries, and synopses. We show that the best performing algorithms are LSA, for news articles and documentaries, and LexRank and Support Sets, for films. Despite the different nature of films and documentaries, their relative behavior is in accordance with that obtained for news articles.Comment: 7 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, submitted to Pattern Recognition Letters (Elsevier