1,720,957 research outputs found
Restructuring and taxation in transition economies
Full text linkOne challenge in transition economies has been to avoid being caught between overrapid restructuring (harmful to the private sector) and gradual change (can undermine robust private sector emergence). Empirical evidence suggests thatin most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, insiders, by exerting decision making control, have materially affected the restructuring rate. Still, shocks to firms have generally led to sharp rises in unemployment. Unemployment benefits, initially generous, combined with lost payroll taxes substantially increased fiscal costs. In the former Soviet Union, both restructuring and unemployment have remained limited and firm subsidies remained high. The private sector expanded, but chiefly in the gray (untaxed) part of the economy. The authors examine the implications of various restructuring speeds, explicitly introducing probabilities of closure and restructuring. They find that when the probability of closure is small, unemployment will peak at a lower level than when the probability of closure is high, although the transition speed will be much slower. They also find that widespread private sector tax avoidance can stimulate that sector's growth and result in a speedier transition. Thus, while a private sector low tax burden can drive unemployment up rapidly by increasing the state sector closure probability, it can also help speed up the transition by provoking a quicker private sector response. The authors show that while the state sector restructuring speed is sensitive to the tax burden, (dependent on unemployment and the ability to tax the private sector) it is also true that the private sectors growth depends on the tax burden it faces. In particular, capturing the private sector in the tax net early in the transition can lead to collapse and hence to the failure of restructuring.Trade Finance and Investment,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies
Why is unemployment low in the former Soviet Union? : enterprises restructuring and the structure of compensation
Full text linkThe authors explain why in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) - especially Russia - unemployment has remained low and employment in state and privatized firms has remained high, while at the same time the informal or unofficial economy has grown swiftly. They trace this development to a combination of factors, including the control regime of state and privatized firms, the nature of worker compensation, and privatized firms, and the nature of subsidies or financial supports that firms continue to receive. Firms have remained the primary site for social protection. Subsidies for social benefits have effectively been a subsidy to employment and have promoted the workers'continuing attachment to these firms. Partly because the subsidies still flow and partly because of the firms'internal control structure, firms have held back on shedding labor. Firms typically work at low capacity. Instead of laying workers off, they significantly cut hours and wages, sometimes through wage arrears. The share of worker compensation that is nonmonetary had grown during the transition, and is significant. So workers search for additional sources of income, either moonlight or get involved in the informal economy. Why has this happened? Privatization has so far failed to keep firms from behaving as if they have important social responsibilities. Managers may have more discretion in decisionmaking, but seem tobe reluctant to fire workers. This reluctance reflects various pressures, including insider coalitions and pressure from local and federal governments to limit the flow to unemployment. One factor may be the need to keep workers cooperative and possibly repel outsider interest. And in the FSU, many firms continue to operate under soft budget constraints, so they are under less pressure to reduce employment levels than firms in Eastern and Central Europe. The authors show that under certain conditions if the subsidy to insider-dominated firms disappears, those firms will scale down employment and the provision of benefits. In a firm with two divisions - one that produces and one that provides benefits - the dominant (producing ) division will tend to close down the benefits-providing division if the firm assumes a simple majority decision rule.Economic Theory&Research,Municipal Financial Management,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A model of the Informal Economy in Transition Economies
Full text linkThe informal economy has burgeoned in many transition economies but particularly in those of the Former Soviet Union. While this variation has commonly been related to the prevalent tax regimes and the degree of transparency in the legal and commercial system, the causality is far from obvious and other factors -- such as the importance of non-monetary compensation or social benefits -- seem to be important. This paper sets up a model of a formal and informal sector where multiple job-holding is feasible. The informal sector can choose to employ part time labour or full time workers; the latter will be subject to payroll taxation. The informal sector in this model makes its decisions contingent on the behavior of the formal sector and parameters, such as tax rates and the probability of being caught evading taxes. The model allows us to retrieve the ratio of the types of employment in each sector and their associated levels. With the closed form, a set of simulations are run that indicate the effect of shocks to demand and/or financing of social benefits on labour allocation. The distribution of employment across full and part time employment is very sensitive to the scale of subsidy given to benefits, as well as the tax regime and incidence.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39512/3/wp122.pd
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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