Blockchain Papers

Neal Koblitz

No abstract is available for this record.

Joan Boyar, Katalin Friedl, Carsten Lund

No abstract is available for this record.

Robert J. Barro

One strand of endogenous-growth\tmodels assumes constant returns to a broad concept of capital. I extend these models to include tax- financed government services that affect production or utility. Growth and saving rates fall with an increase in utility-type expenditures; the two rates rise initially with productive government expenditures but subsequently decline. With an income tax, the decentralized choices of growth and saving are "too low," but if the production function is Cobb-Douglas, the optimizing government still satisfies a natural condition for productive efficiency. Empirical evidence across countries supports some of the hypotheses about government and growth.

John M. Quigley

This paper considers the relative centralization or decentralization of public finance, and relates the equity and efficiency issues ot the special features of developing economies. The paper considers the centralization of taxation and service provision in Indonesia in relation to these theoretical prinicples and indicates ways in which we may expect decentralization to proceed in the Indonesian context.

R. Perlack

H.G. (Mike) Jones and I had numerous meetings with EEGSA staff. We discussed rural electrification plans, reviewed documents, and collaborated on collecting information on decentralized energy alternatives. Meetings were also held with USAID/Guatemala, USAID/ROCAP, NRECA, MEM, PVOs, and equipment vendors. A preliminary draft report and spreadsheet for comparing decentralized power alternatives was completed. The report and findings were presented to EEGSA and the methodology transferred to EEGSA staff. A set of recommended followup activities was also presented to EEGSA.

Kazuo Ohta, Tatsuaki Okamoto

No abstract is available for this record.

Jørgen Brandt, Ivan Damgård, Peter Landrock, Torben Pedersen

No abstract is available for this record.

Joan Boyar, Stuart A. Kurtz, Mark W. Krentel

No abstract is available for this record.

Mihir Bellare, Silvio Micali, Rafail Ostrovsky

Quadratic residuosity and graph isomorphism are classic problems and the canonical examples of zero-knowledge languages. However, despite much research effort, all previous zero-knowledge proofs for them required either unproven complexity assumptions or an unbounded number of rounds of message exchange.

Moni Naor, Moti Yung

We show how to construct a public-key cryptosystem (as originally defined by DiNe and Hellman) secure against chosen ciphertezt attacks, given a public-key cryptosystern secure against passive eavesdropping and a noninteractive zero-knowledge proof system in the shared string model. No such secure cryptosystems were known before. A concrete implementation can be based on quadratic residuosity intractability.

Katherine Samolyk

Although the recent performance of the U.S. macroeconomy is being hailed as "the longest modern peacetime expansion s n failures of depository institutions have been closely linked to certain depressed productive sectors in the country. The most stark examples can be found in the depressed farm-belt and oil-producing regions. Observations indicate that financial firms do not or cannot diversify against industry-specific risk when choosing their loan portfolios. Such behavior may be explained by extensive government regulation of the industry's scale and scope or by technological costs of intermediating credit that encourage specialized lending by region or by industry. This paper does not attempt to formally explain why depository institutions engage in specialized lending; rather, it examines some implications of regional and sectoral banking in terms of macroeconomic perf~rmance.~ It considers the short-run implications of bank-capital immobility when banks produce real services in channeling the flow of funds into investments. We illustrate how regional banking conditions can affect the mix of aggregate investment and the level of future aggregate output in the absence of macroeconomic fluctuations. Given the current deregulatory trend in structural policy changes, the nature of the financial services industries has come under intense scrutiny. Recent banking literature has formalized how financial contracts are related to imperfect information. A recurring theme has been that when information is costly, the quantity and nature of external finance has allocative consequences. Diamond (1984) demonstrates how financial intermediaries (hereafter referred to as banks) can improve the efficiency of capital markets by diversifying and thus minimizing information costs; however, perfect diversification makes bank capital and the dispersion of bank asset returns irrelevant to bank portfolio choice. These strong informational assumptions allow the intermediation process to work more smoothly than we observe. If these conditions are not met, bank capital and the risk of bank assets affect bank profitability. Bernanke and Gertler (1987) show how the inability to eliminate variability in portfolio returns implies that "health" of a'bank's balance sheet can affect the flow of funds to risky bank investments. In their model, depositors cannot observe the ex-post returns on bank projects at any cost and bank capital must absorb random asset returns; insufficient bank capital may constrain banks from investing in risky but profitable investments. In a similar framework, Samolyk (1989) examines how the interest-rate risk associated with the maturity transformation in bank portfolios affects bank asset management. This paper will analyze the implications of imperfect information for investment in a decentralized banking ~ystern.~ We present an intertemporal model of banking similar to that of Bernanke and Gertler. Bankers possess a specialized technology that allows them to channel resources to investment projects that would not be funded in direct credit markets. They also have information about their portfolio returns. Unlike Bernanke and Gertler , this analysis attempts to incorporate the notion that there is more than one productive sector in the economy. We assume that in the short run, bank

Andrew Thomason

No abstract is available for this record.

Hirofumi Abe

Regional disparities in terms of income and employment showed marked decline under various regional policies during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth. However, the drastic changes in Japanese industries after the Oil Crises in 1970s have caused structural recessions in some regions which have been dependent on resourceand energy-intensive industries. Furthermore, the economic activities are rapidly concentrating in Tokyo Metropolitan Region under the internationalization of Japanese economy. Regional income disparities began to widen again since the early 1980s under these circumstances.This paper aims to examine the trend of industrial differences in Japanese regions in the postwar period, and to identify its current problems. Three analytical methods, namely the analysis of coefficient of variation, the rate-share analysis, and the shiftshare analysis are applied using employment data for the years 1955 to 1985.Major findings of the study are summarized as follows:(1) Manufacturing sector showed a clear decentralization of employment during the period 1960-1985, whereas the decentralization of tertiary sector was not very clear.(2) Marked decentralization was found in the high-tech machinery industry which have been rapidly concentrating in North and South Tohoku Regions. Despite the recession of manufacturing industries after the Oil Crises, these regions showed remarkable employment growth.(3) The shift-share analysis of manufacturing sector has showed low growth performance in the western part of Japan. These regions had been specialized in the heavy and petoro-chemical industries during the Period of Rapid Economic Growth, and suffered much damage in the Oil Crises.(4) Locational patterns of tertiary sector differ among industries. Finance, retail and wholesale industries have been concentrated in metropolitan regions, whereas local regions have been specialized in the service industry.(5) The shift-share analysis of tertiary sector has identified little difference of growth performance which comes from the industrial structure of each region. However, a marked difference has been found in the differential shift components between metropolitan and local regions, which indicates a clear gap of locational attractiveness among them.

Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Moti Yung

No abstract is available for this record.

Uriel Feige, Amos Fiat, Adi Shamir

No abstract is available for this record.

Ken Driggs, K. Driggs

The prosecution of George Reynolds in the mid-1870s and the United States Supreme Court's 1879 affirmation of that conviction are usually viewed as the key legal events leading to mass prosecution of Mormon polygamists in the late 1880s.While Reynolds v. the United States (1879) seemed to dispose of the crucial first amendment defense relied upon by the Mormons, it did not lead to the prosecutions.Rather, they were triggered by the passage of thé Edmunds Act in 1882 as well as a major Supreme Court decision in 1885 over the cohabitation prosecution of Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon.When Reynolds was first prosecuted in 1875 there was no crime of cohabitation on the federal statute books.Only polygamy was a crime and could not be prosecuted without proof of a marriage ceremony, evidence almost impossible for prosecutors to secure.Enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws in Utah was a "dead letter."At least until 1885 and the Angus Cannon prosecution.When Brigham Young and Orson Pratt delivered the first public sermons on polygamy in August 1852 (Arlington 1985, 226; Van Wagoner 1986, 84), they were making public a principle revealed to Joseph Smith, Jr., in 1843 (D&C 132) but practiced with the greatest secrecy (Van Wagoner 1986, 1-69;Foster 1974).The sermons set in motion events that resulted in forty years of confrontation with the federal government and would threaten the Church's very existence.In spite of later national outrage, it was apparently not a crime in the early Utah Territory for a man to marry more than one woman at a time.

Gustavus J. Simmons

No abstract is available for this record.

David Chaum, Ivan Damgård, Jeroen van de Graaf

No abstract is available for this record.

Joseph Y. Halpern, Yjoram Moses, Mark R. Tuttle

While the intuition underlying a zero knowledge proof system [GMR85] is that no “knowledge” is leaked by the prover to the verifier, researchers are just beginning to analyze such proof systems in terms of formal notions of knowledge. In this paper, we show how interactive proof systems motivate a new notion of practical knowledge, and we capture the definition of an interactive proof system in terms of practical knowledge. Using this notion of knowledge, we formally capture and prove the intuition that the prover does not leak any knowledge of any fact (other than the fact being proven) during a zero knowledge proof. We extend this result to show that the prover does not leak any knowledge of how to compute any information (such as the factorization of a number) during a zero knowledge proof. Finally, we define the notion of a weak interactive proof in which the prover is limited to probabilistic, polynomial-time computations, and we prove analogous security results for such proof systems. We show that, in a precise sense, any nontrivial weak interactive proof must be a proof about the prover's knowledge, and show that, under natural conditions, the notions of interactive proofs of knowledge defined in [TW87] and [FFS87] are instances of weak interactive proofs.

Brotowasisto, Oscar Gish, Ridwan Malik, Paramita Sudharto

This paper describes health care financing and expenditures in Indonesia, a developing country spending around $US 9.40 per capita annually for health care (2.6% of GOP). Per capita health care spending has held constant in real terms over the last five years. The public sector accounts for 36.8% of all health care expenditure, or 43.1% if health care spending by state enterprises is included. About 13% of the population, almost all of them government employees and their families, are covered by some form of health insurance. In 1984, 62% of the population was spending privately – at then current exchange rates – an average of $US 2.70 per capita annually for health care, another 30% averaged $US 8.35 each, and the upper 9% $US 31.90. The Government is reviewing various ‘social financing’ mechanisms with a view to expanding health insurance coverage both for those in formal wage employment and the bulk of the population which remains either on the land or is part of the ‘informal’ sector. Steps are also being taken to increase the efficient use of resources by, among other things, making greater use of evaluation techniques and economic methodologies. Such efforts are coupled with more decentralized authority being given to the provinces and districts. Particularly important to future health efforts is the further expansion of community-based activities, especially in the form of the Posyandu (integrated health post).

Gustavus J. Simmons, George Purdy

No abstract is available for this record.

Manuel Blum, Paul Feldman, Silvio Micali

We show that interaction in any zero-knowledge proof can be replaced by sharing a common, short, random string. We use this result to construct the first public-key cryptosystem secure against chosen ciphertext attack.

Philip J. Grossman

This paper analyzes one method governments employ to circumvent the discipline of a competitive system of fiscal federalism - intergovernmental collusion in the form of intergovernmental grants. Grants, it is argued, serve to encourage the expansion of the public sector by concentrating taxing powers in the hands of the central government and by weakening the fiscal discipline imposed on governments forced to self-finance their expenditures. The results reported suggest that intergovernmental grants do encourage growth in the public sector. The results offer further support for the use of monopoly government assumptions in public sector modeling.

Kenji Mitsuyoshi, Satoshi Hagishima, Akira Ohgai

This paper examines the relation between computer networking by On-line System and the role of branch offices in Fukuoka CBD. There are two impacts of computer networking on multi-locational firms. These impacts are related with the locational trends of head and branch offices. One is changes in the role or the position of a branch office, and the other is the influence of an On-line System as a communication medium on meetings and telephone contacts. The characteristics and trends of computer networking and business tasks managed through an On-line System are discussed. As well, the influence of the introduction of an On-line System on the frequencies of meetings and telephone contacts are also discussed. The results are as follows : 1) Network-type of an On-line System ; This is classified into six types : three types with a decentralized pattern of computer networking and the other three types with a centralized pattern. Centralized types which have a host-computer set up in a head office, are unevenly distributed in finance and insurance sectors, while decentralized types which have sub-computers set up in branch offices are unevenly distributed in wholesale and other sectors. In finance and insurance, there are two trends ; expansion of a centralized network pattern, and a shift to a decentralized type. On the other hand, decentralized types are increasing in wholesale and other sectors. 2) Characteristics of business tasks ; a) Offices with a decentralized pattern perform a greater number of business tasks through an On-line System than ones with a centralized pattern. b) As well, these offices perform a greater number of market planning and management tasks than ones with a centralized pattern. The shift to a decentralized pattern makes such trends concerning business tasks possible. c) Finance and insurance sectors generally declare that business authority within branch offices have remained unchanged. Though the major trend is to maintain this status quo, there is also a lesser trend which gives added authority to branch offices. In wholesale and other sectors, the trend is clear that the role of branch offices are being strengthened. 3) Introduction of an On-line System causes a decrease in the frequency of telephone calls in communication within the same firm. But there is little influence of its introduction on the frequencies of meetings and telephone calls in communicating with other firms. Therefore, an On-line System as a communication medium does not lessen the value of face-to-face meetings in communications between firms.