Bitcoin is a virtual currency that has risen from virtual anonymity in 2009 to occupy a high profile position following extensive media coverage during the last twelve months. This media coverage has been partly the reason for the meteoric rise in the value of the currency to over $1,000 dollars. However, despite all the speculative trading of Bitcoins on the global exchanges, there appears to be a robust technology platform emerging in the form of a payment network offering cheaper and faster money transfer than any other options currently in existence. By combining Bitcoins with NFC (near field communication) – enabled smart phones, it is possible to create a new low-cost financial system that will eliminate the need for credit cards and bank accounts.
The practical deployment of vehicular networks is still a pending issue. In this paper we describe a new self-organized method of authentication for VANETs, which allows their widespread, fast and secure implementation. Our proposal does not involve any central certification authority because the nodes themselves certify the validity of public keys of the other nodes. On the one hand we propose an algorithm that each node must use to choose the public key certificates for its local store. On the other hand, we also describe a new node authentication method based on a cryptographic protocol including a zero-knowledge proof that each node must use to convince another node on the possession of certain secret without revealing anything about it, which allows non-encrypted communication during authentication. Thanks to the combination of the aforementioned tools, the cooperation among vehicles can be used for developing several practical applications of VANETs, such as detection and warning about abnormal traffic conditions. One of the most interesting aspects of our proposal is that it only requires existing devices such as smartphones, because the designed schemes are fully distributed and self-organized. In this work we include an analysis of both an NS-2 simulation and a real device implementation of the proposed algorithms, which enables us to extract promising conclusions and several possible improvements and open questions for further research.
In Turkey, important decentralization measures were taken after the 1980s. The new administrative model gave local governments the role of dealing with social exclusion while financing social welfare expenditures through entrepreneurial investment of their non-material resources. This study is an attempt to discuss how such a challenge for local governments has been resolved through the analysis of gendering impacts of three decentralization reform programs.
The new, decentralized, anonymous digital currency Bitcoin has in less than three years gone from a proof-of-concept to being traded for about €78 million on a daily basis. Its ascendancy offers up a puzzle for financial regulators and other law-enforcers worldwide, while also promising to fulfill the political visions of a group of market-anarchist cryptographers. While it is still a very small economy in absolute terms, Bitcoin also poses some interesting challenges to traditional economic institutions, and is thus an interesting case for economic sociology. Using the notion of material embeddedness, this paper examines the possible implications of a further propagation of Bitcoin. If the currency proves a success, this will have ramifications for a large number of economic institutions, such as the possibility of taxation of untraceable money, the credit economy and interest rates, and international currency control.
India’s Finance Minister (FM), Arun Jaitley kick started the public sector disinvestment with 5 per cent stake sale in Steel Authority of India (SAIL) on 5.12.2014. 200 million shares were sold to the investors. The offer generated a lot of interest among the retail investors and was over subscribed by one-and-a-half times. It fetched Rs 1700 crore for the Government of India (GOI) to go one step closer in meeting disinvestment target for the year 2014-15. Other companies like Coal India, Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC), and National Hydro-power Corporation (NHPC) are on the agenda. The FM also targets to sale residual shares in Hindustan Zinc Ltd and Bharat Aluminum Company (BALCO) to the present majority stake-holder, Anil Agrawal. The money fetched from disinvestment would be used for keeping the fiscal deficit within 4.1 per cent of GDP. Although it is important to keep fiscal deficit in tight control, it should have been done by reducing non-plan expenditure. This paper aims to show the actual value of these units for the self-reliance of India and the meager amount for which these jewels are going to be doled out to private operators. It gives a few suggestions to protect the interest of retail investors in the stock market. The paper also tries to find research gaps how the retail investors’ interest can be protected comprehensively from stock market fluctuations in future.
An algorithm for computing Dynamic Nash Equilibria (DNE) in an extended version of Kiyotaki and Wright (1989) (hereafter KW) is proposed. The algorithm computes the equilibrium profile of (pure) strategies and the evolution of the distribution of three types of assets across three types of individuals. It has two features that together make it applicable in a wide range of macroeconomic experiments: (i) it works for any feasible initial distribution of assets; (ii) it allows for multiple switches of trading strategies along the transitional dynamics. The algorithm is used to study the relationship between liquidity, production, and inequality in income and in welfare, in economies where assets fetch different returns and agents have heterogeneous skills and preferences. One experiment shows a case of reversal of fortune. An economy endowed with a low-return asset takes over a similar economy endowed with a high-return asset because, in the former economy, a group of agents abandon a rent-seeking trading behavior and increase their income by trading and producing more intensively. A second experiment shows that a reduction of market frictions leads both to higher income and lower inequality. Other experiments evaluate the propagation mechanism of shocks that hit the assets' returns. A key result is that trade and liquidity tend to squeeze income inequality.
The relationship of cities to other subnational governments (e.g., states, provinces, and counties) and to other cities is complex and seemingly in flux. Traditionally, most cities in decentralized nations have occupied a third-tier status - below the national and state/provincial tiers - and have been more or less on an equal footing with other cities. More recently decentralized nations, especially in East Asia, have begun changing that status quo by adopting more complex, nuanced, and flexible approaches to cities’ political power. Perhaps this approach signals a trend in which nation states are repositioning their larger cities in response to those cities’ rising importance in the global political economy. If such a trend exists, it may also suggest that the nation-state is weakening relative to urban areas and supranational regional governing entities. This article compares how several developing, emerging market, and former socialist countries’ laws position cities both in relation to other tiers of subnational government and to other cities. It primarily focuses on the laws of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, China, Vietnam, Philippines, Russia, Poland, and Kazakhstan.
I am doing this project on research of the instability of decentralized assignments. This thesis is intended to summarize the theory of stable marriages and stable assignments; by the study of decentralized search in the marriage game, to find out an analogous method for search in the assignment game. The background of this thesis is the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for the theory of stable allocations. In this thesis, there are two main sections: marriage game and assignment game. In the marriage game, I am trying to analyze the measure of instability of matchings by introducing some important concepts and a representative heuristic. To address this question in the assignment game, I will propose an analogous heuristic to investigate the existence of stable outcomes.
We examine the strategy-proof allocation of multiple divisible and indivisible resources; an application is the assignment of packages of tasks, workloads, and compensations among the members of an organization. We find that any allocation mechanism obtained by maximizing a separably concave function over a polyhedral extension of the set of Pareto-efficient allocations is strategy-proof. Moreover, these are the only strategy-proof and unanimous mechanisms satisfying a coherence property and responding well to changes in the availability of resources. These mechanisms generalize the parametric rationing mechanisms (Young, 1987), some of which date back to the Babylonian Talmud.
Consider a market for a resource under disequilibrium prices where suppliers and demanders are privately informed about their optimal supply and consumption levels. Strategy-proof market clearing mechanisms give suppliers and demanders dominant strategy incentives to truthfully reveal this information. We describe the class of strategy-proof and efficient mechanisms responding well to changes in supplies and demands, as formalized by the “replacement principle" (Thomson, 2007). Since no symmetry or anonymity conditions are imposed, these mechanisms can implement a wide array of distributional objectives in both indivisible and divisible resource allocation situations. These mechanisms apply to allocation problems involving network constraints modeling necessary conditions for a transfer of the resource from a supplier to a demander.
In the wake of the financial crisis a new wave of litigation looms. This paper presents an “aloof” analysis of legal arguments involved in securitisation cases. First, it identifies the relevant facts. Second, it focuses on key legal liability elements for fraudulent/negligent statements in securitisation litigation. In so doing, it identifies the aspects where public debate and legal argument differ, and where they concur; and it takes a broad view on the implications of tipping the balance oneway or the other. It is concluded that the currentwave of litigation has consequences for the long-term future of the financial industry.
This paper analyzes the ‘strategic action field’ (Fligstein and McAdam 2013) evolving in five European countries (and the U.S.) around the inclusion of Muslims into military chaplaincy. The paper shows that cross-national institutional differences in particular with regard to the state-religion relationship have an influence on the accommodation of Muslims in military chaplaincy: countries with a strong focus on equality in their state-religion relationship are more advanced in setting up a Muslim military chaplaincy, whereas countries whose state-religion relationship explicitly allows for the differential treatment of religious groups lag behind, in particular if Muslims are among the groups for whom official cooperation with the state is impossible since they have not acquired the requested legal status. At the same time, the paper shows that organization-specific arguments that push for religious accommodation and equal treatment in the military lead to a convergence of practices across the different European countries. Similar things are ‘at stake’ in the strategic action field that evolves around the inclusion of Muslims into military chaplaincy: the distribution of scarce chaplaincy positions, training and education of chaplains, security and control of religion, attracting new recruits and assuring social cohesion as well as being in line with principles of equality and religious liberty. France stands out in this comparison because it reached a high level of Muslim accommodation in military chaplaincy that stands in stark contrast with the limited accommodation of religion reached in public schools. All European countries in the study differ fundamentally from the U.S. where the distribution of chaplaincy positions is organized along a relatively easy market-based system that does not depend on the European institutionalization of faith-specific military chaplaincies.
Boris Hirsch, Christian Merkl, Steffen Mueller, Claus Schnabel
This paper is the first to show theoretically and empirically how firms' production technology affects the choice of their preferred wage formation regime. Our theoretical framework predicts, first, that the larger the total factor productivity of a firm, the more likely it is to opt for centralized wage formation where it can hide behind less productive firms. Second, the larger a firm's scale elasticity, the higher its incentive to choose centralized rather than decentralized wage setting due to labor cost and straitjacket effects. As firms in Germany are allowed to choose their wage formation regime, we test these two hypotheses with representative establishment data for West Germany. We find that establishments with centralized bargaining agreements indeed have economically and statistically significantly larger total factor productivities and scale elasticities than comparable establishments outside the centralized bargaining regime.
Optional regulation of standard contract terms gives rise to several functional pecularities and to a number of difficult systematic questions. More specifically, the present chapter deals with the draft rules on standard contract terms in the proposed Common European Sales Law (CESL). Rather than commenting these rules in sub-stance, however, its focus is precisely on these functional questions. We proceed in three steps, starting with an overview of the existing European rules on standard con-tract terms, including the draft provisions of the CESL. In a second step, we examine whether the CESL rules themselves could potentially become subject of control under (national) standard contract terms legislation, given that these rules are provided in a standard format, and that they are adopted by the contracting parties’ opt-in. Thirdly and finally, we briefly analyse the mode of function of the CESL’s own rules on standard contract terms. These three steps will show that according to the European legislator’s design of the opt-in mechanism, two different optional contract law regimes operate within the very same national legal system. This two-foldedness implies ambiguities, namely because the control of standard terms strongly interacts with substantial rules of contract law. This interaction is a necessary, unavoidable consequence of the embeddedness of the optional regime in national contract law.
Ronald J. Gilson, Charles Frederick Sabel, Robert E. Scott
Contract interpretation remains the most important source of commercial litigation and the most contentious area of contemporary contract doctrine and scholarship. Two polar positions have competed for dominance in contract interpretation. In a textualist regime, generalist courts cannot consider context; in a contextualist regime, they must. Underlying this dispute are contrary assumptions about the prototypical contract each interpretive style addresses. For modern textualists, contracts are bespoke, between legally sophisticated parties who embed as much or as little of the contractual context as they wish in an integrated writing, and prefer to protect their choices against judicial interference by an interpretive regime including parole evidence and plain meaning rules. For contextualists in contrast, contracts are between legally unsophisticated parties in two prototypical settings. The first is the mass market, standardized contract between sophisticated sellers and unsophisticated consumers, who cannot bargain over contractual terms; the second involves commercial parties doing business in a deeply nuanced world where formal and informal understandings mix and the meaning of a particular contract can be illuminated by the parties' course of dealings. For the contextualist, willfully restricting a court's access to information bearing on the parties' real relationship in both cases degrades judicial interpretation. We argue that the narrow focus on which prototype should apply universally has erroneously framed discussion of the parties’ choices and led to an inconclusive and limited debate about the role of courts in contract interpretation. The range of options for parties and generalist courts is much more diverse and variegated than the choice between ex ante party autonomy and ex post adjudication. We present a typology of transactional settings — the design space for contract — sufficiently rich to capture the breath of current contractual experience but sufficiently parsimonious to clarify the central relationship between the factors that shape the design of any given contract and the role of courts in interpreting it. We show that design and judicial response depends, first, on the level of uncertainty and, second, on the thickness of the market — whether there are many traders or few engaged in a similar class of transactions. The higher the level of uncertainty, the less workable complete, state-contingent contracts become, and the more parties develop interpretive mechanisms based on rich and regular exchange of information on a project’s progress that allows each to gauge the other’s capacity to define and produce a product. The greater the number of traders engaged in a transaction, the more likely that the interpretive regime — terms adapted to current need — will be provided by a trade association or, given collective action problems, a public regulator. The interplay of uncertainty and scale illuminates new forms of contracting among legally sophisticated parties unanticipated in discussions of textualist prototypes, and recasts the contextualist prototypes as special cases that demand novel institutional responses, including generalist courts sufficiently versed in the parties’ practices that they resemble early courts of equity. More generally, our analysis reveals a surprising complementarity between public regulation and common law adjudication in a variety of settings. Contractual interpretation today should attend to today’s contracts and courts: Our aim is to escape the stalemate between textualists and contextualists and open the way for doctrine and debate to support the novelty of contemporary contracting practices.
Scientists and policy-makers in many fields struggle to synthesize the quickly evolving state of empirical work. We create an online tool for collecting, analyzing, combining, and communicating a wide range of empirical results, and supporting their integration into computational models. Scientists engaged in empirical research or in the review of others' work can input rich numerical and analytical descriptions of empirically estimated relationships. The tool incorporates them into a new database of statistical results, which researchers can expand both in depth (by providing additional results that describing existing relationships) and breadth (by adding new relationships).
In this study, we propose a uniformly distributed random portfolio as an alternative benchmark for the portfolio performance evaluation. The uniformly distributed random portfolio is analogous to the enumeration of all feasible portfolios without any prior on the market. Therefore, the relative ranking of a portfolio can be evaluated without peer group information. We derive the closed form expression of the probability distribution of the Sharpe ratio of a uniformly distributed random portfolio, and conduct comparisons analysis with the U.S. equity mutual funds. We find that the uniformly distributed random portfolio properly captures the historical performance distribution of the equity mutual funds.
in english The purpose of this theses is to analyse the Bitcoin electronic peer-to-peer payment system, from the view of the legal, regulatory and also purely practical issues surrounding its use as a modern means of payment processing. The reason for choosing this topic is that I find the subject to be very interesting and possibly promising for the future of payments. Also, as the use of Bitcoin payment system spreads across the global population, we can see many of legal questions arising: Is the use of Bitcoin network legal? How is it regulated under existing legal system? Can it be subsumed under any existing legal categories? What are the risks of its misuse for criminal activities? Should new legal rules be enacted to regulate its use, and if so, what should these rules be like? My goal in this paper is to find these relevant questions, elaborate on them and provide as many answers as will be possible. We have to bear in mind the fact, that the technology, underlying the Bitcoin payment systém is very new and many ways path-breaking. As usual, the legal theory lags behing technology here, so many questions still have to be settled before we can give any straight answers. The work is divided into seven chapters, each dealing with different legal or practical aspects connected to the Bitcoin...
Fiscal decentralization is one of the fundamental paths to promote efficiency for governmental management,and the System Reform of Tax Distribution is an important portion of fiscal decentralization.Since the implication of the reform two decades ago,some problems have arisen,such as the mismatch between local governments'financial power and routine power,lack of or insufficient public services provided by local governments.As one of the basic public services,rural compulsory education relies to a large extent on tax system reform,especially on finance.For now,it is the county-level finance that supports rural compulsory education,which has posed many challenges related to accessibility,the efficiency and equality of the rural compulsory education.An optimized supplying system of rural compulsory education needs a continuously developed and guaranteed fiscal providing regime.
This research is a descriptive study describing and analyzing the data
obtained. The object of this research is the Government of Bandung with the title
Performance Evaluation of Local Government Finance Anggran Bandung Year
2010-2014. Analyzer used to measure the performance of the financial
management of the area the city is the area of financial independence ratio, the
ratio of the area of financial dependency, the ratio of the degree of fiscal
decentralization and effectiveness ratio and for mapping regional financial indices
using Growth, Share and elasticity.
The results of the analysis of the calculation of the ratio during the period
of 2010-2014 diperleh hasi. The level of financial independence Bandung city
area showed an average sebear 63.29%, so the city of Bandung sign kalam
category sanggat less. The level of financial dependence region showed an
average of 46.86%, sehinggan entered the high level of dependency. The degree
of fiscal decentralization gained an average of 28.15%, so the city government
into the category of being. The level of effectiveness of local revenue earned an
average of 113.21% in the category very effective.
From the calculation of the financial performance of the index (CCI) and
the quadrant method mmenunjukan financial capability index calculation results
Bandung fiscal year 2010 through 2014, the scale index indicates the number
62.736. This means that the financial capacity of the city of Bandung is high.
From the calculation of the share and the growth of the budget summary income
and expenditure Bandung fiscal year 2010 through 2014, the obtained data is a
share of 59.926% and a growth of 58.983%. Further mapping of regional financial
capability based on the quadrant method. The position of the city of Bandung is in
quadrant II. These conditions have not been ideal, but the region has the potential
pegembangan.
Keywords: self-sufficiency ratio, the dependency ratio area, the ratio of
decentralization
The aim of the thesis is to analyze the issues related to virtual currencies. The first chapter is devoted to the definition of the concept of money, their evolution and function. The end of this chapter reviews, or rather balances contemporary monetary system. Second chapter analyzes the virtual currencies with a primary focus on bitcoin. It investigates the evolution of the exchange rate, security, anonymity and production of bitcoins. The end of the chapter consists of analysis of the responses to questionnaire. Third chapter brings an interview about virtual currencies with three economic experts. The rest of the third chapter discusses the suggestions and changes to the issue of virtual currencies.