Evaluation of Mass Privatization in Bulgaria

The mass privatization program in Bulgaria was implemented in 1996-97. Following programs in countries like the Czech Republic, more sophisticated regulatory bodies were put into place to prevent the kind of abuses observed elsewhere. This study finds that Bulgaria avoided some of the extreme problems that manifested themselves in these other countries, but there were still serious problems of dilution. Dilution is similar in both mass privatization firms and nonmass privatization firms. Dilution is associated with positive performance, suggesting that more concentrated ownership has had some benefits. Even after a number of years have passed, mass privatization firms have performed less well than firms privatized by other means.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40200/3/wp814.pd

Plain Meaning, Precedent, and Metaphysics: Interpreting the “Point Source” Element of the Clean Water Act Offense

This Article, the fourth in a series of five, examines the continuing struggles to define “point source” and “nonpoint source” under the Clean Water Act. State regulation of nonpoint sources is neither pervasive nor robust, and most continuing water pollution problems can be traced primarily to nonpoint sources. EPA should define nonpoint sources by regulation and begin to expand the definition of point source by incorporating established case law and Agency practice to bring more nonpoint sources into the point source definition

Plain Meaning, Precedent, and Metaphysics: Interpreting the “Pollutant” Element of the Federal Water Pollution Offense

This Article, the second in a series of five, examines the meaning of “pollutant” under the Clean Water Act. Congress and EPA have defined “pollutant” to mean a list of specific substances and broad categories of materials and wastes discharged into water, e.g., “biological materials” and “chemical wastes.” The definition is broad enough to encompass virtually all substances associated with human activity that are discharged to water, regardless of whether the substances cause pollution or are produced through human endeavor. Therefore, “pollutant” is rarely a limiting element. Instead, the issues with the definition of “pollutant” primarily address whether it includes material used in common and productive activities, such as adding hatchery-raised fish (“biological material”) to trout streams or spraying pesticides to suppress disease-bearing mosquitoes (“biological material” or “chemical wastes”). EPA can easily fix these and other problems by a better regulatory definition

Evaluation of Mass Privatization in Bulgaria

The mass privatization program in Bulgaria was implemented in 1996-97. Following programs in countries like the Czech Republic, more sophisticated regulatory bodies were put into place to prevent the kind of abuses observed elsewhere. This study finds that Bulgaria avoided some of the extreme problems that manifested themselves in these other countries, but there were still serious problems of dilution. Dilution is similar in both mass privatization firms and nonmass privatization firms. Dilution is associated with positive performance, suggesting that more concentrated ownership has had some benefits. Even after a number of years have passed, mass privatization firms have performed less well than firms privatized by other means.Bulgaria, mass privatization, dilution

Randomly Branched Polymers and Conformal Invariance

We argue that the field theory that descibes randomly branched polymers is not generally conformally invariant in two dimensions at its critical point. In particular, we show (i) that the most natural formulation of conformal invariance for randomly branched polymers leads to inconsistencies; (ii) that the free field theory obtained by setting the potential equal to zero in the branched polymer field theory is not even classically conformally invariant; and (iii) that numerical enumerations of the exponent $\theta (\alpha )$, defined by $T_N(\alpha )\sim \lambda^NN^{-\theta (\alpha ) +1}$, where $T_N(\alpha )$ is number of distinct configuratations of a branched polymer rooted near the apex of a cone with apex angel $\alpha$, indicate that $\theta (\alpha )$ is not linear in $1/\alpha$ contrary to what conformal invariance leads one to expect.Comment: 1 graph not included, SPhT /92/145, The Tex Macros have been changed. In the present version only jnl.tex is needed. It can be obtained directly from the bulletin boar

"The Organization of s National System of Higher Education: Some Preliminary Thoughts on a Decentralized System"

The purpose of this paper is to address a fundamental question about higher education. If a country wanted to design a system of higher education, what would the optimal institutional structure of the system look like? This question is very broad so we limit our initial approach by analyzing one aspect of this question and ask how well a decentralized higher education system will perform. This paper is preliminary and does not provide an answer to this question; rather it attempts to lay out a framework for thinking about this question using existing systems, principally the US, as a model for how such a system would work.higher education, rankings, organization of higher education

Inconsistency of Pitman-Yor process mixtures for the number of components

In many applications, a finite mixture is a natural model, but it can be difficult to choose an appropriate number of components. To circumvent this choice, investigators are increasingly turning to Dirichlet process mixtures (DPMs), and Pitman-Yor process mixtures (PYMs), more generally. While these models may be well-suited for Bayesian density estimation, many investigators are using them for inferences about the number of components, by considering the posterior on the number of components represented in the observed data. We show that this posterior is not consistent --- that is, on data from a finite mixture, it does not concentrate at the true number of components. This result applies to a large class of nonparametric mixtures, including DPMs and PYMs, over a wide variety of families of component distributions, including essentially all discrete families, as well as continuous exponential families satisfying mild regularity conditions (such as multivariate Gaussians).Comment: This is a general treatment of the problem discussed in our related article, "A simple example of Dirichlet process mixture inconsistency for the number of components", Miller and Harrison (2013) arXiv:1301.270

"The Educational Value of the College Fed Challenge"

The College Fed Challenge, a competition between undergraduate students from different colleges and universities, is designed to enhance the development of research, critical thinking, and presentation skills. This paper analyzes the value of the competition as an instrument for improving undergraduate economics education. We present results from surveys of (a) students who participated in one district in November 2010 and (b) graduates from the University of Delaware who participated in past years. The results reflect the impressive effect on student learning outcomes. We conclude that the visibility of the College Fed Challenge can be an important factor in determining its impact and that the competition could conceivably have a significant and positive impact on economics education in the United States.economic education, undergraduate economics, education environment, experienced based education