Blockchain Papers

Semra Altingoz

Central governments canalize to decentralized organization for compensate public demands faster, high quality and efficiency in globalization process. Local governments take effectively charge in distribution of income, education, health, housing on local basis which are parts of public policy and increasing the welfare level of the citizens of their municipality with their own facilities. The most important mission is incumbent to municipalities which is local governments’ type, in decentralized organization. Municipalities have two types incoming source; one of them from central governments sources the other one is internal revenue. This study aims to give information about municipalities which are at the forefront among local governments and property tax which is one of income sources municipalities. In this sense, law no. 5393 which was accepted on the 3rd of July, 2007 was studied in the frame of property tax and information about the phases of municipalities from the foundation up to now and their financial structure was given. Keywords: property tax, local government, decentralization, budget.  

Fu Hou, Xinjun Mao

Summary With the rapid development and application of cloud computing, there exist plenty of clouds that are distributed on the open Internet, decentralized in the management, evolving with various services providing diverse functionalities and QoS. Moreover, because of the potential correlativity of cloud services and the dynamic of tenants' requirements, these services in multiple clouds are expected to be effectively managed in an autonomic and transparent way so that tenants can obtain continuous and efficient services. To this end, this paper proposes an approach based on self‐organizing multi‐agent system to achieving cross‐clouds services management, including the service provision at the tenant‐end and services aggregation at the cloud‐end. In this approach, the clouds services are managed by a series of autonomous agents that are capable of autonomously accessing managed services. They can interact with each other to obtain macro‐level services aggregation in terms of self‐organization to adapt to the changes of both tenants' requirements and cloud services. The paper details the architecture, mechanisms, and algorithms to implement the aggregation and provision of services in cross‐clouds. We also develop relevant cross‐clouds services management platform called as CCloudMan, with which several experiments based on the public data sets have been conducted and the experimental results show the efficiency and usability of our proposed approach. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Mark E. Sobel

Key points The year 2014 witnessed the advent of new and strengthened collective action clauses (CACs) in foreign law sovereign bonds. These new clauses hold the promise to significantly strengthen the orderliness and predictability of the contractual market-based framework for the sovereign debt-restructuring process. This article looks at how these new CACs came about. The new CACs were borne from a process undertaken by an informal ‘Sovereign Debt Roundtable’ grouping that was convened, chaired and strategically led by US Treasury staff over more than one-and-a-half years. The inclusiveness of the Roundtable, the deliberative process, which was followed and the leadership and backing of the official community were integral to bringing about the private sector and success. The Roundtable’s deliberations built heavily upon earlier Treasury work to advance CACs, in particular during the 2002–2004 period. But the new clauses go further than the bond-by-bond clauses that were the focus from 2002 to 2004, as they allow in certain defined conditions the votes of different bond issues to be aggregated into a single up or down vote on the issuers’ restructuring proposal. In this regard, the new clauses reflect the continuity in the US approach under the Bush and Obama Administrations to promoting an orderly and predictable sovereign debt-restructuring process based upon the contractual framework, in addition to US opposition to statutory approaches. But they also represent innovation under the Obama Administration in advancing and buttressing the US approach. … in order to strengthen the orderliness and predictability of the sovereign debt restructuring process, we welcome the international work on strengthened collective action and pari passu clauses. We call for their inclusion in international sovereign bonds and encourage the international community and private sector to actively promote their use. G20 Leaders’ Communique; Brisbane, Australia; 16 November 2014 We welcome Mexico’s leadership with its successful issuance of a bond with new and innovative collective actions clauses under New York law. These new clauses will strengthen the sovereign debt restructuring process, and we encourage other nations to follow suit. Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, 19 November 2014 We look forward to upcoming discussions around the International Capital Market Association’s (ICMA) proposal on possible means to reinforce collective action clauses in sovereign bonds… G20 Finance Ministers; Cairns, Australia; 21 September 2014 … ICMA recently published revised collective action clauses for sovereign debt that permit more orderly workouts and lower the chance of spillovers. These clauses … now allow for aggregation across many different debt issues, avoiding the need to vote on each loan one by one. John B. Taylor, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2015 The late autumn of 2014 witnessed the advent of new and strengthened collective action clauses (CACs) in foreign law sovereign bonds. These new clauses hold the promise to significantly strengthen the orderliness and predictability of the contractual market-based framework for the sovereign debt-restructuring process. They were born from a process that was convened, chaired and strategically led by Treasury staff over more than one to one-and-a-half years. 1 The group working on the new clauses included issuing country representatives, inter alia from Mexico, Uruguay, Brazil and Turkey; leading UK and US sovereign debt legal experts; an array of market participants and academics; other official actors, including from France, the UK and Germany; and the IMF. In particular, this informal ‘Sovereign Debt Roundtable’ grouping also included Mexico’s debt manager and representatives from the London-based International Capital Markets Association (ICMA), an association representing some 500 firms from the international financial community, among others. The inclusiveness of the Roundtable, the deliberative process, which was followed and the leadership and backing of the official community were integral to bringing along the private sector and success. The Roundtable’s deliberations built heavily upon earlier Treasury work to advance CACs, in particular during the 2002–2004 period. But the new clauses go further than the bond-by-bond clauses that were the focus from 2002 to 2004, as they allow, in certain defined conditions, the votes of different bond issuers to be aggregated into a single up or down vote on the issuers’ restructuring proposal. In this regard, the new clauses reflect the continuity in the US approach under the Bush and Obama Administrations to promoting an orderly and predictable sovereign debt-restructuring process based upon the contractual framework, in addition to US opposition to statutory approaches. But they also represent innovation under the Obama Administration in advancing and buttressing the US approach. The US Treasury, in a speech by the then Under Secretary John B Taylor, outlined its support for the decentralized, market-oriented contractual approach to sovereign debt restructuring in 2002. 2 Around that time, a G-10 working group, chaired by Randal K Quarles, then Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, and including leading sovereign debt lawyers, began work on developing CACs for inclusion in foreign law sovereign bonds. 3 In 2003, building on the ‘Quarles Report’, Mexico launched the first CACs pursuant to New York law. Mexico’s issuance solved the first mover problem, there was no observable pricing impact, and CACs overnight became the norm in the New York market. 4 Importantly, though, the CACs applied only to each individual bond. During this period, the IMF advocated a statutory approach to sovereign debt restructuring. The Fund in essence reasoned that in a domestic setting, all unsecured creditors were bound into the restructuring deal through the bankruptcy process. Since there was no analogous international mechanism to bind similarly placed creditors into the restructuring through a single vote, there was a gap in the global financial architecture that should be filled through the creation of a ‘Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism’ (SDRM). 5 Treasury was sceptical that the SDRM could be made to work in practice. There were concerns about politicization of the mechanism. There were questions about the possible impact on official debt. There was no appetite for pursuing an international agreement that could result in a supranational body having the authority to supplant core US sovereign decision making or judicial authority. There was the basic judgement that there would be little Congressional support for any amendment to the IMF Articles needed to implement SDRM. In contrast, the advent of CACs offered the promise that the contractual framework could be used to better mimic domestic bankruptcy proceedings and bind creditors. In 2012, two important developments occurred, raising questions about the continued viability of the contractual framework to promote the orderliness and predictability of the sovereign debt-restructuring process and giving rise in some quarters to renewed calls for re-consideration of SDRM or statutory approaches more generally. These developments, left unaddressed, also had important implications for New York’s continued role as a major financial centre for the issuance of foreign law bonds. Long-standing debates about the meaning of the ‘ pari passu ’ clause in sovereign law bonds were underscored in judicial rulings. Many sovereign debt lawyers had long felt that the pari passu clause simply meant that the legal ranking of an instrument was equal (and not subordinate) to a borrower’s other debt instruments. Others, for over a decade through a novel interpretation of the clause, contended borrowers could be compelled to pay all of their obligations on a ratable basis. With US federal court rulings in New York supporting the latter interpretation, clearly the meaning of the ‘ pari passu ’ clause could no longer be considered settled. 6 Importantly, these legal challenges were not arising in the context of just one country; rather, there had been a substantial increase in creditor litigation over the past two decades impacting countries across the globe. 7 While bond-by-bond CACs had become the market practice in New York since 2003, the limits of this ‘per series’ approach became clear in the case of the Greek debt exchange. Of the 36 bond issuances governed by English law that included CACs and could partake in the debt exchange, only 17 were successfully restructured using CACs, accounting for 30 of the total value of Greek debt governed by foreign law. 8 In early 2013, against the background of these emerging questions about the ability of the contractual framework to continue delivering orderly and predictable outcomes, as well as renewed interest in statutory approaches, especially in the United Nations, Treasury staff convened a roundtable of governmental and private sector experts and interested parties to discuss potential changes to clauses in sovereign bond contracts. The effort was premised on the US retaining its long-standing reservations about statutory approaches, and instead examining what changes in the ‘ pari passu clause’ and in ‘bond aggregation’ could strengthen and impart renewed vigour to the contractual framework. Equally, the effort was premised on seeking pragmatic, targeted and concrete results, but not engaging in a meta-debate about broad strategic or conceptual approaches. At the outset, Treasury staff made clear that the USA did not support work on statutory approaches. For their part, the IMF representatives also made clear that the Fund had no intention of pursuing work on statutory approaches and it would be regardless infeasible to do so without the full support of the institution’s Executive Board, including major shareholders. At a kick-off meeting in April 2013, on the margins of the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings, the Roundtable launched into a discussion of the evolution of the sovereign debt-restructuring process over the prior decade, recent ‘ pari passu ’ litigation and its implications and how ‘aggregation clauses’ could be used to help overcome some of the problems posed by bond-by-bond voting and increased creditor litigation. Private sector participants discussed how recent court ‘ pari passu ’ rulings could complicate the sovereign debt-restructuring process and how ‘ pari passu ’ language had taken on many disparate forms in contracts over the years. They were concerned about the consequences of the ‘ratable payments’ interpretation of the pari passu clause for the majority of creditors. With respect to aggregation features, there was a lengthy discussion of the Greek restructuring, and a view that the Greek foreign law bond restructuring was far less successful, because of the bond-by-bond collective action feature, than the Greek domestic law-governed bond restructuring. Some participants advocated developing ideas on aggregation across foreign law sovereign bonds so that there could be one vote to modify an entire series of bonds. However, it was also underscored that developing aggregation features could have important implications for inter-creditor equity considerations. Against this background, a number of key points were agreed at the meeting, in turn charting the path forward for the Roundtable: Modifications to contractual clauses should be developed to address the emerging issues that had complicated the sovereign debt-restructuring process. Clarity was needed on pari passu clauses to dispel confusion and provide legal certainty. The clause should be seen as an ‘equal ranking’ clause; the ‘ratable payments’ interpretation of the clause was not the intended meaning. Aggregation features in bonds, especially aimed at allowing one vote to modify a series of foreign law bonds, could represent a useful innovation to enhance the restructuring process, provided that strong safeguards were also incorporated to protect the rights of all creditors. At a second meeting in October 2013, again on the margins of the semi-annual IMF/World Bank meetings, the Roundtable reconvened to continue its discussions on pari passu clauses and aggregation. The group reviewed an options paper on the ‘ pari passu clause’. 9 In the end, the Roundtable reached several conclusions on the pari passu clause and narrowed down consideration to two of the options, both of which were seen as offering a plausible path forward: There was concern that the clause had resulted in significant litigation over the past decade, complicating the sovereign debt-restructuring process, and that the likelihood was for continued increases in creditor litigation in coming years. Several lawyers in the Roundtable in particular felt that given the confusion raised by the clause over the years and its uncertain meaning, the pari passu clause should be simply eliminated from bond contracts. However, others questioned whether market participants would readily accept elimination of the clause, and thus proposed retaining a rewritten version that disavowed the ratable payments interpretation of the clause. They pointed to market inertia as well as noted that retaining such a modified version of the clause would still protect against the risk of involuntary legal subordination. Participants agreed that the Roundtable needed to come to a consensus on pari passu to provide a basis for market acceptability for a first mover. The discussions on aggregation, in contrast, entered more of an exploratory realm. The Roundtable agreed that a key policy goal of constructing an aggregation framework was to reduce the scope for obtaining blocking positions, provide the sovereign with greater flexibility and at the same time protect against possible abuse or oppression of the minority by sovereigns. While there was wide acceptance of the concept of aggregation in principle, it was also recognized that to achieve these goals, there were numerous design details to be worked out with consequential legal ramifications and an enormous bearing on market acceptability. In wrapping up the second meeting, the Roundtable agreed to further pursue the one-limb option and its requisite features and come to a conclusion on the future of the pari passu clause. The IMF also expressed interest in pursuing further work on the contractual framework, using the Roundtable’s work as a foundation to inform its activities. An initial discussion focused on whether to use a ‘one limb’ aggregated voting structure, or a ‘two limb’ structure with an aggregated and a per series vote. Several European officials supported a ‘two limb’ structure as this approach had already been enshrined in the ESM treaty, developed and adopted within the euro-area. The rest of the Roundtable wished to explore whether a suitable ‘one limb’ framework could be developed, and felt an appropriate aggregation clause could further reduce incentives for creditor litigation. 10 One participant offered the insight that an important feature of a one-limb aggregation structure was that it would lessen the chances that a creditor—that might wish to vote against the proposal, but be willing to accept it should the requisite majority decide to do so—would ‘accidentally’ be kept out of the restructuring. The Roundtable began to delve into the kinds of protections that would be essential to protect against abuse of the minority. Most significantly, the Roundtable agreed that there should be a high voting threshold for one-limb aggregation, and that all participants in an aggregated vote should be treated the same. Participants also agreed that the scope of aggregated debt should be confined to foreign law sovereign bonds, and thus differ from the European CAC framework, which did not differentiate between foreign and domestic law bonds. In discussions in early 2014, including conference calls, and at a third meeting in April, the Roundtable reviewed a model aggregation clause 11 and bore down on achieving concrete results. In wrapping up this meeting, the Roundtable also welcomed ICMA’s proposal to develop model pari passu and aggregation language and conduct a public consultation. 12 To address the question of which pari passu option to pursue and given the view that eliminating the clause might not be seen as acceptable by all market participants, the Roundtable agreed to back model pari passu language that disavowed the ratable payments interpretation. The Roundtable further agreed that aggregation, allowing for a single cross-series vote with strong safeguards, along with a bond-by-bond restructuring option, would help promote the orderliness and predictability of the sovereign debt-restructuring process. With respect to safeguards, it was agreed that: ‘voting thresholds’ should be set at a level which an aggregated cross-series modification vote could only succeed with the support of a large super-majority (ultimately 75 per cent of the eligible outstanding principal); single-limb aggregation would be limited to ‘bonds governed by foreign law’ (outside of the euro-area, which retained its two-limb structure for foreign and domestic bonds); ‘uniform applicability’ would provide for an identical offer requirement for any cross-series vote; ‘robust disenfranchisement provisions’ would exclude bonds controlled by the issuer from the vote; and ‘enhanced transparency and information disclosure’ would be required such that the issuer would need to disclose its overall restructuring plan, including its proposed treatment of other groups of creditors and claims, as part of its offer. In subsequent months, ICMA’s model clauses became the new market standard. The IMF staff proposed to prepare a staff paper for the IMF Executive Board to endorse the key features of the model pari passu and aggregation language. 13 The third and last meeting of the Roundtable was by no means the end of the process. It was critical to develop a strong legal and market consensus behind the new clauses in order for a ‘first mover’ to move without facing market turbulence. Roundtable participants dedicated themselves to this task over the course of the remainder of the an initial and ICMA of proposed model clauses was provided to Roundtable participants for to market participants and their While the of the ICMA model clauses were the same for both the New York and were required to to the of each market. In the of information about the new clauses and their were with leading sovereign debt legal in both New York and Treasury staff also with market In particular, staff with representatives in a series of with of the New emerging market and and also reached out to several London-based Roundtable participants also with debt in potential emerging market sovereign bond issuing especially that had not in the working The IMF an role as The were by IMF staff in a series of and discussions with public debt the basis of a paper in large part by the of the the IMF Board also in the of 2014 the use of modified pari passu clauses in new international sovereign bonds so as to enhance legal and across The Board noted the broad support of for CACs with aggregation features, and in particular considered the limb’ clause with appropriate safeguards along the of forward in the model ICMA clauses as a significant to the sovereign debt-restructuring process. In addition to the IMF the of the market-based contractual framework also the strong of the official The of the G20 Finance and Bank meeting in Cairns, in as well as the G20 Leaders’ in in both the strengthened 16 Most significantly, countries began to sovereign bonds with the new clauses. In particular, Mexico in around the time of the the first public offering with the strengthened CACs under New York in bonds strong and in the in the same leadership as in 2003, the issuance with new CACs the first mover and no pricing impact Mexico’s issuance was by the of its Finance debt in the Around this time, many other countries from of the followed in was the first mover at the global leading the in the market. While the advent of the new CACs a major it not a and work to be to strengthen the contractual framework. The inclusion of new CACs in bonds will address the future of sovereign but it will not address the large outstanding noted by the that and it will 10 years for per cent to This process could be by Some market participants to be possible The of the new CACs so far been strong in the New York which a in which have more of an and been strong but not as but especially for the market. 17 Several issuers have it to thus over or raising in several than the more work and of a new global But in time, such countries will use new the new clauses. already this continue in some quarters about whether the of a restructuring should be through the required use of a structure, including one in which the to a and pay its This was not by the Roundtable, which was focused from the on in two pari passu and Some country representatives, especially at the United Nations, continue to for of a statutory the statutory approach little support in the IMF and and been by the USA and the key in which over of foreign law bond issuance of the new CACs the of the contractual framework and again work on statutory approaches to be needed or in financial policy The recent of CACs through the of the meaning of the pari passu clause and the advent of single-limb aggregation with strong creditor protections a of the of the international financial time and work needed for the new CACs to their full potential in the orderliness and predictability of the sovereign debt-restructuring process. in a of time, the strengthened CACs already a part of the international financial and have the of the contractual framework, the foundation for which was in the early US Treasury staff and a international in which all up their to of new

Henry M. Healey, Rafik Hanna, Hany Attalla

Over the period 2007–2013, a series of undertakings were made to introduce fundamental elements of decentralized education finance to Egypt. In 2009, 8.4M Egyptian pounds (EGP) of the Government of Egypt’s (GOE) budget was decentralized to every primary school in three pilot governorates. By 2013, EGP 1.2B of the GOE’s money had been decentralized nationwide. This paper describes what these undertakings strived to achieve, what specifically was done to achieve these objectives, the degree to which these objectives were achieved, the reasons why they were achieved to the degree they were with particular attention paid to the institutional and political context within which these undertakings unfolded. The account of the technical work that was undertaken to decentralize these funds is important, but more important is the account of the interplay between the technical work, the fact that this work supported a GOE-led initiative, and the volatile political environment—pre-revolution, revolution, and post-revolution Egypt—in which the work was done for it is here where important lessons about reform emerge.

N Egorova, K Torzhevskiy

International audience

Jing Chu, Jian Guo, Eberhard Gill

No abstract is available for this record.

Charles Noyes

I present the design and implementation of a novel anti-malware environment called BitAV. BitAV allows for the decentralization of the update and maintenance mechanisms of the software, traditionally performed by a central host, and uses a staggered scanning mechanism in order to improve performance. The peer-to-peer network maintenance mechanism lowered the average update propagation speed by 500% and is far less susceptible to targeted denial-of-service attacks. The feedforward scanning mechanism significantly improved end-to-end performance of the malware matching system, to a degree of an average 14x increase, by decomposing the file matching process into efficient queries that operate in verifiably constant time.

Francisco Martín-Fernández, Pino Caballero‐Gil, Cándido Caballero‐Gil

This paper describes the design and analysis of a new scheme for the authenticated exchange of confidential information in insecure environments within the Internet of Things, which allows a receiver of a message to authenticate the sender and compute a secret key shared with it. The proposal is based on the concept of a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof, so that in a single communication, relevant data may be inferred to verify the legitimacy of the sender. Besides, the new scheme uses the idea under the Diffie-Hellman protocol for the establishment of a shared secret key. The proposal has been fully developed for platforms built on the Android Open Source Project, so it can be used in any device or sensor with this operating system. This work provides a performance study of the implementation and a comparison between its promising results and others obtained with similar schemes.

Iana Vassileva, Javier Campillo

Large-scale deployment of reliable smart electricity metering networks has been considered as the first step towards a smart, integrated and efficient grid. On the consumer’s side, however, the real impact is still uncertain and limited. This paper evaluates the consumer’s perspective in the city of Västerås, Sweden, where full implementation of smart meters has been reached. New services, such as consumption feedback and the possibility to choose dynamic electricity pricing contracts, have been available from the adoption of this infrastructure. A web-based survey evaluating customers’ perception of these new services was carried out. The survey included consumers’ personal information, preferences about the type of information and the frequency of delivery and the preference for electricity pricing contracts. The results showed that the electricity consumption information offered by distribution system operators (DSOs) today is not detailed enough for customers to react accordingly. Additionally, while variable pricing contracts are becoming more popular, the available pricing schemes do not encourage customers to increase their consumption flexibility. Therefore, more detailed information from the smart meters should be made available, including disaggregated electricity consumption per appliance that would allow consumers to have more control over their energy consumption activities.

Mark Coeckelbergh, Wessel Reijers

Transitions in monetary technologies raise novel ethical and philosophical questions. One prominent transition concerns the introduction of cryptocurrencies, which are digital currencies based on blockchain technology. Bitcoin is an example of a cryptocurrency. In this paper we discuss ethical issues raised by cryptocurrencies by conceptualising them as what we call "narrative technologies". Drawing on the work of Ricoeur and responding to the work of Searle, we elaborate on the social and linguistic dimension of money and cryptocurrencies, and explore the implications of our proposed theoretical framework for the ethics of cryptocurrencies. In particular, taking a social-narrative turn, we argue that technologies have a temporal and narrative character: that they are made sense of by means of individual and collective narratives but also themselves co-constitute those narratives and inter-human and social relations; configuring events in a meaningful temporal whole. We show how cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin dynamically re-configure social relations and explore the consequent ethical implications.

Binanda Sengupta, Samiran Bag, Sushmita Ruj, Kouichi Sakurai

Bitcoin [24] is a fully decentralized electronic cash system. The generation of the proof-of-work in Bitcoin requires large amount of computing resources. However, this huge amount of energy is wasted as one cannot make something useful out of it. In this paper, we propose a scheme called Retricoin which replaces the heavy computational proof-of-work of Bitcoin by proofs of retrievability that have practical benefits. To guarantee the availability of an important but large file, we distribute the segments of the file among the users in the Bitcoin network. Every user who wants to mine Bitcoins must store a considerable portion of this file and prove her storage to other peers in the network using proofs of retrievability. The file can be constructed at any point of time from the users storing their respective segments untampered. Retricoin is more efficient than the existing Permacoin scheme [23] in terms of storage overhead and network bandwidth required to broadcast the proof to the Bitcoin network. The verification time in our scheme is comparable to that of Permacoin and reasonable for all practical purposes. We also design an algorithm to let the miners in a group (or pool) mine collectively.

Alexander Chepurnoy

The paper examines decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that are based on the use of internal tokens as identity tools. An analysis of security problems with popular Proof-of-stake consensus protocols is provided. A new protocol, Interactive Proof-of-stake, is proposed. The main ideas of the protocol are to reduce a number of variables a miner can iterate over to a minimum and also to bring a communication into block generation. The protocol is checked against known attacks. It is shown that Interactive Proof-of-stake is more secure than current pure Proof-of-stake protocols.

Coralie Lessard, Pierre-Olaf Schut

In France, the local planning of sports facilities originates from successive public policies carried out at various territorial levels, from national to local. Changes in the stock of sports facilities in four towns, including low-income areas, are analyzed based on the different national facilities plans of the 1960s, the effects of decentralization since the 1980s, and the evolution of urban policies since the 1990s. The uneven impact of these various periods of public policies can be observed at a local level. In addition, the authors study the different approaches to financing adopted by municipalities with distinct profiles but with characteristics which can be transposed to medium-sized towns. While it is usually assumed that national policies in this field have a homogeneous impact nationwide, a cartographic study that accounts for the local context clearly shows the opposite. This study evidences the fact that national policies can have meaningful results only when there is considerable financial assistance provided and when the local authorities are involved. Municipalities remain key actors in the development of infrastructures, which is why there are so many discrepancies between them.

Jani Kurki

In this thesis, I explore how blockchain technology can improve pharmaceutical supply chain operations and discuss how the technology should be implemented. Furthermore, I study how the life science company Bayer's pharmaceutical division can utilize blockchain technology in its supply chain operations. I begin by defining the concepts of blockchain technology, smart contracts and pharmaceutical supply chain. Then I discuss the benefits and implementation in different sections: participating entities and information flow, contracts and payments, logistics, transparency and product security and blockchain infrastructure and governance. Both Bayer and the industry as a whole can benefit from blockchain technology. Blockchain enables for example efficient, safe and private transactions, product transparency and security and open information sharing without exposing trade secrets. For the first time a platform for all stakeholders can be developed that enables transacting information and value simultaneously.

Eva Micheler, Luke von der Heyde

No abstract is available for this record.

Guy Zyskind

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016.

Eric M. Wall, Gustaf Malm

In the existing securities market structure, a securities trade between two parties requires the involvement of several financial intermediaries ensuring the safety of the transaction. However, the complexity of today’s market structure in conjunction with the lack of interoperability between financial data infrastructures and the disalignment of business practices, are causing costs, risks and friction—resulting in settlement often taking several days. Blockchain technology is the innovation powering the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, which is a network in which digital tokens can be traded peer-to-peer by the means of cryptography and decentralized consensus. The lack of intermediaries and short settlement period of cryptocurrencies make blockchain technology an inspiring database structure for the securities market. In this paper, we examine the potential of using blockchain technology to create a distributed securities depository. The decentralized consensus algorithm of blockchain technologies allows several entities to maintain a shared record of information without having to trust each other individually, since consensus is formed on a per-network basis. Such a technology could nurture the realignment of the securities market—or, reinvent it altogether. Furthermore, the possibility of leveraging consensus-oriented execution of computer code creates larger opportunities than that of a mere depository; it allows for the creation of new, trustless markets where securities and their contractual clauses are no longer merely legal obligations, rather, they are self-enforcing, autonomous programs. Here, we propose the overarching design choices suitable for a second-generation blockchain platform for securities trading, devised to pursue interoperability within the larger context of the effervescently evolving distributed ledger ecosystem, while attempting to pay the necessary regard to the demands of regulatory compliance within the securities industry.

Bernhard Friedrich

No abstract is available for this record.

Pierluigi Minari

No abstract is available for this record.

Malvern Chinaka

Thesis: S.M. in Management Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2016.

Remo Manuel Frey, Denis Vuckovac, Alexander Ilic

No abstract is available for this record.

Muneeb Ali, Jude Nelson, Ryan Shea, Michael J. Freedman

No abstract is available for this record.

Giancarlo Salton, Robert Ross, John Kelleher

No abstract is available for this record.

Benjamin Bittschi, Sarah Borgloh, Marc-Daniel Moessinger

We estimate the effects of income from various sources on charitable giving using administrative German income tax data. We demonstrate that charitable contributions are not uniformly affected by different income types. While business and capital income exhibit a positive effect, the remaining income sources do not influence charity on statistically significant levels. This exercise is not new and has been conducted for (at least) three different purposes: 1) Relying on the described results, a public finance researcher would state that business and capital income are more prone to tax evasion than the remaining income sources. 2) An entrepreneurship researcher would conclude that business owners are more generous than employees, and 3) a researcher testing the validity of the life cycle theory (or its behavioral counterpart) would refute the fungibility of income. In contrast, we argue that none of these approaches can answer the intended question if solicitation effects of fundraising or measurement error of the income sources are not taken into account. Applying a fixed effect poisson model, we demonstrate that under certain assumptions the results can have a meaningful interpretation.