La mobilité intersectorielle des élites technocratiques du public et du privé

One of the important social phenomena of the last 30 years is without doubt the accelerated creation in enterprises and state apparatuses of hundreds of thousands of executive and managerial positions integrated into increasingly complex and widespread managerial hierarchies. This paper deals with the movement of executives between state bureaucracies and large private enterprises and its impact on the interpenetration of the executive circles. Through a comparative approach, we begin by showing the diversity that exists among national models of circulation of senior officers between the two sectors. Based on data on senior civil servants and executives of large enterprises in Quebec, we then show the patterns of mobility of management personnel between the public and the private sectors. This analysis enables us to describe the extent and the orientation of inter sectorial mobility. We attempt to highlight and to explain the essential characteristics of the movement of technocratic elites in Quebec and in Canada. More specifically, we will show that, for the Canadian institutional context, we cannot retain the thesis of interchangeability of technocratic elites which states that the movement of personnel between state apparatuses and large private enterprises is high. L'un des phénomènes sociaux importants des 30 dernières années est certainement la création accélérée dans les entreprises et dans les appareils d'État de centaines de milliers de postes de gestionnaires intégrés à des hiérarchies de direction et d'encadrement de plus en plus complexes et étendues. Nous abordons dans cet article, la question de la circulation du personnel de direction entre les bureaucraties d'État et les grandes entreprises du secteur privé et sea effets sur l'interpénétration des milieux dirigeants. Nous montrerons d'abord dans une perspective comparative la diversité des modèles nationaux de circulation de haute direction entre les deux secteurs. Utilisant des données sur les hauts fonctionnaires et les dirigeants des grandes entreprises au Québec, nous montrerons ensuite comment s'organisent les flux de personnel dirigeant entre les postes du secteur public et du secteur privé. Cette analyse permettra de décrire l'étendue et l'orientation des mouvements intersectoriels. Sur cette base, nous chercherons à mettre en évidence et à expliquer les caractéristiques originales de la circulation des élites technocratiques au Québec et plus largement au Canada. Nous démontrerons en particulier, que l'on ne peut pas, dans le contexte institutionnel canadien, retenir la thèse de l'interchangeabilité des élites technocratiques qui affirme que la circulation du personnel entre les appareils d'État et les grandes entreprises du secteur privé est caractéristique des sociétés contemporaines et de leur structure sociale au sommet.     

Parameter Estimation for a Discretely Observed Integrated Diffusion Process

Abstract.  We consider the estimation of unknown parameters in the drift and diffusion coefficients of a one-dimensional ergodic diffusion X when the observation is a discrete sampling of the integral of X at times i Δ , i  =  1 ,…, n . Assuming that the sampling interval tends to 0 while the total length time interval tends to infinity, we first prove limit theorems for functionals associated with our observations. We apply these results to obtain a contrast function. The associated minimum contrast estimators are shown to be consistent and asymptotically Gaussian with different rates for drift and diffusion coefficient parameters.     

Inference for Lévy‐Driven Stochastic Volatility Models via Adaptive Sequential Monte Carlo

Abstract. We investigate simulation methodology for Bayesian inference in Lévy‐driven stochastic volatility (SV) models. Typically, Bayesian inference from such models is performed using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC); this is often a challenging task. Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers are methods that can improve over MCMC; however, there are many user‐set parameters to specify. We develop a fully automated SMC algorithm, which substantially improves over the standard MCMC methods in the literature. To illustrate our methodology, we look at a model comprised of a Heston model with an independent, additive, variance gamma process in the returns equation. The driving gamma process can capture the stylized behaviour of many financial time series and a discretized version, fit in a Bayesian manner, has been found to be very useful for modelling equity data. We demonstrate that it is possible to draw exact inference, in the sense of no time‐discretization error, from the Bayesian SV model.