Economic Growth and Judicial Independence: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Set of Indicators

Rational politicians are interested in judicial independence (JI) in order to make their promises credible. But if politicians’ preferences deviate from the dicta of the judiciary, they also have incentives to renege on judicial independence. These two conflicting aspects are measured by two indicators: (i) de iure JI focusing on its legal foundations and (ii) a de facto JI focusing on countries’ actually experience. Whether JI affects economic growth is tested for a cross section of 57 countries. While de iure JI does not have an impact on real GDP growth per capita growth, de facto JI positively influences it.economic growth, rule of law, judicial independence

Making Judges Independent – Some Proposals Regarding the Judiciary+

It is argued that an independent judiciary is a necessary condition for both individual liberty and economic prosperity. After having surveyed the literature dealing with how to arrange for an independent judiciary, the authors derive some additional policy implications by drawing on two indicators of judicial independence (JI) recently introduced by them. De facto JI has a robust and highly significant impact on economic growth. Individual components of both de jure and de facto JI on economic growth are estimated for their impact on economic growth. Additionally, the effects of other institutional arrangements such as presidential vs. parliamentary systems are inquired into.Judicial Independence, Constitutional design, Positive Constitutional Economics, Economic Growth

Making Judges Independent – Some Proposals Regarding the Judiciary

It is argued that an independent judiciary is a necessary condition for both individual liberty and economic prosperity. After having surveyed the literature dealing with how to arrange for an independent judiciary, the authors derive some additional policy implications by drawing on two indicators of judicial independence (JI) recently introduced by them. De facto JI has a robust and highly significant impact on economic growth. Individual components of both de jure and de facto JI on economic growth are estimated for their impact on economic growth. Additionally, the effects of other institutional arrangements such as presidential vs. parliamentary systems are inquired into.judicial independence, constitutional design, positive constitutional economics, economic growth

PriPeARL: A Framework for Privacy-Preserving Analytics and Reporting at LinkedIn

Preserving privacy of users is a key requirement of web-scale analytics and reporting applications, and has witnessed a renewed focus in light of recent data breaches and new regulations such as GDPR. We focus on the problem of computing robust, reliable analytics in a privacy-preserving manner, while satisfying product requirements. We present PriPeARL, a framework for privacy-preserving analytics and reporting, inspired by differential privacy. We describe the overall design and architecture, and the key modeling components, focusing on the unique challenges associated with privacy, coverage, utility, and consistency. We perform an experimental study in the context of ads analytics and reporting at LinkedIn, thereby demonstrating the tradeoffs between privacy and utility needs, and the applicability of privacy-preserving mechanisms to real-world data. We also highlight the lessons learned from the production deployment of our system at LinkedIn.Comment: Conference information: ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2018

Maximally Entangled Mixed-State Generation via Local Operations

We present a general theoretical method to generate maximally entangled mixed states of a pair of photons initially prepared in the singlet polarization state. This method requires only local operations upon a single photon of the pair and exploits spatial degrees of freedom to induce decoherence. We report also experimental confirmation of these theoretical results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Physical Review

Power over Prosecutors Corrupts Politicians: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Indicator

It is hypothesized that prosecution agencies that are dependent on the executive have less incentives to prosecute crimes committed by government members which, in turn, increases their incentives to commit such crimes. Here, this hypothesis is put to an empirical test focusing on a particular kind of crime, namely corruption. In order to test it, it was necessary to create an indicator measuring de jure as well as de facto independence of the prosecution agencies. The regressions show that de facto independence of prosecution agencies robustly reduces corruption of officials.Corruption, Prosecution Agencies, Judicial Independence and Positive Constitutional Economics

Power over Prosecutors Corrupts Politicians: Cross Country Evidence Using a New Indicator

It is hypothesized that prosecution agencies that are dependent on the executive have less incentives to prosecute crimes committed by government members which, in turn, increases their incentives to commit such crimes. Here, this hypothesis is put to an empirical test focusing on a particular kind of crime, namely corruption. In order to test it, it was necessary to create an indicator measuring de jure as well as de facto independence of the prosecution agencies. The regressions show that de facto independence of prosecution agencies robustly reduces corruption of officials.corruption, prosecution agencies, judicial independence and positive constitutional economics

List precoloring extension in planar graphs

A celebrated result of Thomassen states that not only can every planar graph be colored properly with five colors, but no matter how arbitrary palettes of five colors are assigned to vertices, one can choose a color from the corresponding palette for each vertex so that the resulting coloring is proper. This result is referred to as 5-choosability of planar graphs. Albertson asked whether Thomassen's theorem can be extended by precoloring some vertices which are at a large enough distance apart in a graph. Here, among others, we answer the question in the case when the graph does not contain short cycles separating precolored vertices and when there is a "wide" Steiner tree containing all the precolored vertices.Comment: v2: 15 pages, 11 figres, corrected typos and new proof of Theorem 3(2