CRITIQUE DE LA THEORIE LIBERALE DU DEVELOPPEMENT

To this day, the development programs proposed for underdeveloped countries have met with little success because the economic analysis which encompasses them takes into account only the technique and data of macro-economics and ignores social relations. It is this weakness of the analysis that caused Western experts to be unaware of the effects of imperialism on the Third World, the evolution particular to underdeveloped countries that A.G. Frank called "development of underdevelopment." This evolution, characterized by the exploitation of Third World resources in the interests of the West, must be thwarted by a firmer, more independent stand on the part of the underdeveloped countries.
Les programmes de développement proposés aux pays sous-développés ont connu peu de succès jusqu'à ce jour. C'est que l'analyse économiste qui les sous-tend ne tient compte que de la technique et des données macro-économiques, ignorant ainsi les rapports sociaux. C'est la faiblesse de l'analyse qui a mené les experts occidentaux à ignorer les effets de l'impérialisme sur le Tiers-Monde, cette évolution spécifique des pays sous-développés que A.G. Frank a appelée « développement du sous-développement >>. Cette évolution, caractérisée par l'exploitation des ressources du Tiers-Monde selon les intérêts de l'Occident, doit être contrecarrée par une prise de position plus ferme et plus indépendante de la part des pays sous-développés.     

WHY CORPORATIONS INSURE

Corporations insure to reduce the shirking-information problem of joint production. Insurance encourages specialization in ownership, increasing the returns to monitoring and lowering shareholders' demand for a more diversified portfolio; it enhances the credibility of specific capital as a performance bond; and it lowers the cost to shareholders of compensating other members of the team for investing in firm-specific assets. Tax and other factors may further encourage individual corporations to insure.     

PEER EFFECTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: DOES THE FIELD OF STUDY MATTER?

Does the peer effect vary with the field of study? Using data from a middle‐sized public university located in southern Italy and exploiting the random assignment of first‐year students to college accommodation, we find that roommate peer effects for freshmen enrolled in the hard sciences are positive and significantly larger than for freshmen enrolled in the humanities and social sciences. We present a simple theoretical model which suggests that the uncovered differences between fields in the size of the peer effect could plausibly be generated by between‐field variation in labor market returns, which affect optimal student effort. (JEL I21, Z13, J24)     

Application of TOC/OPT rules in a medium sized shop

Abstract

Abstract. Theory of constraints (TOC) and optimized production technology (OPT) are frequently presented as the better options for production control systems. Despite this enthusiasm, there is very little literature on how these principles can be implemented in practice without having to resort to the expensive proprietary software. In this paper we present a case study in which the OPT/TOC ideas were implemented without using the software. Management's major concern was reduction of work in process and increased delivery performance. It was decided to test whether the ideas of OPT/TOC were applicable in this environment and more importantly to which extent these two performance measures could be improved. The paper reports on the methodology used to test the OPT/TOC ideas in this shop and presents some early results of improvement, as well as some new problems which arose due to the new approach.     

Why Care about Scientific Controversies?

Since Kuhn claimed that scientific controversies are not always settled by means of rational evaluations of the intrinsic merits of competing theories, the view that the history of science should be recounted by examining the background of scientific controversies and how these controversies came to be settled has become a real heuristic maxim for the historian of science. We take issue with this view by arguing that controversies are not relevant by themselves but only insofar as one can make something out of them. Two important questions then arise: what did one come to learn from a given controversy and what came out of this apprenticeships. We compare Pauline Mazumdar's and Alfred Tauber's approaches to the history of immunology and argue that only the latter addressed these questions. In so doing, he was able to show the extension in which modern immunology is an outcome of Metchnikoff's success in correcting Haeckel's “fundamental biogenetic law”.     

Estimation for High‐Dimensional Linear Mixed‐Effects Models Using ℓ1‐Penalization

Abstract. We propose an ?₁‐penalized estimation procedure for high‐dimensional linear mixed‐effects models. The models are useful whenever there is a grouping structure among high‐dimensional observations, that is, for clustered data. We prove a consistency and an oracle optimality result and we develop an algorithm with provable numerical convergence. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of the method on simulated and a real high‐dimensional data set.