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"CENTRALIZATION"
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Race, economics, and the politics of educational change : the dynamics of school consolidation in Shelby County, Tennessee
\"This edited volume will examine the implications of the largest school consolidation in the history of the United States, the Memphis school system. In the wake of the 2010 mid-term elections, the Republican Party gained control of both houses of the Tennessee State Legislature and the governorship. In Memphis, the immediate aftermath was that leaders of the Shelby County Schools (SCS) school district began to work on legislation that would give the district special status that would make it permanently separated from the other school district in the city, Memphis City Schools (MCS). Long a goal of the predominately white, suburban SCS, this objective was thwarted when the MCS revoked its own charter, which, under Tennessee law, forced SCS to take over the running of MCS--in effect, consolidating all Memphis area schools. This work will examine the history of the Memphis school system, the economic factors that arise in consolidations, the socioeconomic inequalities borne of long-term racism that lie in the background of the system's recent history, and the political situation that promises to complicate the consolidation process\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
THE EVOLUTION OF CULTURE AND INSTITUTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM THE KUBA KINGDOM
We use variation in historical state centralization to examine the long-term impact of institutions on cultural norms. The Kuba Kingdom, established in Central Africa in the early 17th century by King Shyaam, had more developed state institutions than the other independent villages and chieftaincies in the region. It had an unwritten constitution, separation of political powers, a judicial system with courts and juries, a police force, a military, taxation, and significant public goods provision. Comparing individuals from the Kuba Kingdom to those from just outside the Kingdom, we find that centralized formal institutions are associated with weaker norms of rule following and a greater propensity to cheat for material gain. This finding is consistent with recent models where endogenous investments to inculcate values in children decline when there is an increase in the effectiveness of formal institutions that enforce socially desirable behavior. Consistent with such a mechanism, we find that Kuba parents believe it is less important to teach children values related to rule-following behaviors.
Journal Article
CENTRALIZATION OF INTRAGROUP EQUITY TIES AND PERFORMANCE OF BUSINESS GROUP AFFILIATES
Research summary: Although prior research has suggested that equity ties are important for business groups, less attention has been paid to the specific mechanisms through which equity ties create value. We develop a framework that specifies how centralization of intragroup equity ties affects the performance of group affiliates. We use the exogenous shock of the 2008 financial crisis and a difference-in-differences analysis of 51,730 observations of business group affiliates in Taiwan to show that centralization of equity ties enhances affiliate performance, but such effects weaken when the environment becomes turbulent. Moreover, we find that listed affiliates obtain fewer benefits from centralization than unlisted affiliates. Overall, our study deepens scholarly understanding of not only how groups create value, but also how value is differentially appropriated among affiliates. Managerial summary: Our research speaks directly to owner-managers of business groups with respect to creating an optimal equity network structure that binds the affiliated firms of the group. Our findings suggest to managers that the overall structure of equity ties in a business group has major implications for the performance of the affiliate firms of the group, and the network structure within the group should be designed deliberately and thoughtfully on an on-going basis. In particular, control through centralized equity ties is performance-enhancing in normal periods, but such control may be counterproductive as turbulence increases in business environments, or as the number of listed group firms increases. Hence, owner-managers may consider optimizing the network structure by lowering the degree of centralized equity ties under such circumstances, or at a minimum, lowering centralized control.
Journal Article
Lightning network: a second path towards centralisation of the Bitcoin economy
The Bitcoin lightning network (BLN), a so-called ‘second layer’ payment protocol, was launched in 2018 to scale up the number of transactions between Bitcoin owners. In this paper, we analyse the structure of the BLN over a period of 18 months, ranging from 12th January 2018 to 17th July 2019, at the end of which the network has reached 8.216 users, 122.517 active channels and 2.732,5 transacted Bitcoins. Here, we consider three representations of the BLN: the daily snapshot one, the weekly snapshot one and the daily-block snapshot one. By studying the topological properties of the binary and weighted versions of the three representations above, we find that the total volume of transacted Bitcoins approximately grows as the square of the network size; however, despite the huge activity characterising the BLN, the Bitcoins distribution is very unequal: the average Gini coefficient of the node strengths (computed across the entire history of the Bitcoin lightning network) is, in fact, ≃0.88 causing the 10% (50%) of the nodes to hold the 80% (99%) of the Bitcoins at stake in the BLN (on average, across the entire period). This concentration brings up the question of which minimalist network model allows us to explain the network topological structure. Like for other economic systems, we hypothesise that local properties of nodes, like the degree, ultimately determine part of its characteristics. Therefore, we have tested the goodness of the undirected binary configuration model (UBCM) in reproducing the structural features of the BLN: the UBCM recovers the disassortative and the hierarchical character of the BLN but underestimates the centrality of nodes; this suggests that the BLN is becoming an increasingly centralised network, more and more compatible with a core-periphery structure. Further inspection of the resilience of the BLN shows that removing hubs leads to the collapse of the network into many components, an evidence suggesting that this network may be a target for the so-called split attacks .
Journal Article
ECONOMIC RETROSPECTIVES. ROMANIA: 1945-1948
The history of communism in Romania represents, even 35 years after the Revolution of December 1989, a challenging topic to be addressed, fact due both to the controversial developments recorded, but also to the predominantly negative image associated with the period. The 45 years of communism left an overwhelming mark on Romanian society, dramatically shaping its evolution, including from the economic point of view. From capitalist, market economy, Romania switched to a totally different economic system, the administration of its resources, the production process, the consumption, in fact all economic domains being subordinated to other requirements than until that moment. The role of the private initiative, of institutions and of the state was also submitted to reformation. In this respect, between 1945-1989 our country experienced the system of the centralized economy, its development taking place in 3 distinct stages: 1945-1948, 1948-1965, 1965-1989. The present study proposes an analysis of the economic changes produced once with the end of the Second World War. We will focus our attention on a complex and distinct development stage, the one between 1945-1948, a key period for the set-up of the infrastructure specific to the newly created economic system, respectively of the framework required for the subsequent implementation of socialist-type economic transformations.
Journal Article
Changing perspectives on the internationalization of R&D and innovation by multinational enterprises
Internationalization of R&D and innovation by multinational enterprises (MNEs) has undergone a gradual and comprehensive change in perspective over the past 50 years. From sporadic works in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, it became a systematically analyzed topic in the 1970s, starting with pioneering reports and “foundation texts”. Our review unfolds the theoretical and empirical evolution of the literature from dyadic interpretations of centralization versus decentralization of R&D by MNEs to more comprehensive frameworks, wherein established MNEs from advanced economies still play a pivotal role, but new players and places also emerge in the global generation and diffusion of knowledge. Hence, views of R&D internationalization increasingly rely on concepts, ideas, and methods from IB and other related disciplines such as industrial organization, international economics, and economic geography. Two main findings are highlighted. First, scholarly research pays increasing attention to the network-like characteristics of international R&D activities. Second, different streams of literature have emphasized the role of location-specific factors in R&D internationalization. The increasing emphasis on these aspects has created new research opportunities in some key areas, including inter alia: cross-border knowledge-sourcing strategies, changes in the geography of R&D and innovation, and the international fragmentation of production and R&D activities.
Journal Article
Deep multiagent reinforcement learning: challenges and directions
This paper surveys the field of deep multiagent reinforcement learning (RL). The combination of deep neural networks with RL has gained increased traction in recent years and is slowly shifting the focus from single-agent to multiagent environments. Dealing with multiple agents is inherently more complex as (a) the future rewards depend on multiple players’ joint actions and (b) the computational complexity increases. We present the most common multiagent problem representations and their main challenges, and identify five research areas that address one or more of these challenges: centralised training and decentralised execution, opponent modelling, communication, efficient coordination, and reward shaping. We find that many computational studies rely on unrealistic assumptions or are not generalisable to other settings; they struggle to overcome the curse of dimensionality or nonstationarity. Approaches from psychology and sociology capture promising relevant behaviours, such as communication and coordination, to help agents achieve better performance in multiagent settings. We suggest that, for multiagent RL to be successful, future research should address these challenges with an interdisciplinary approach to open up new possibilities in multiagent RL.
Journal Article
Decentralized Mining in Centralized Pools
The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for blockchains: because of miners’ cross-pool diversification and pool managers’endogenous fee setting, larger pools better internalize their externality on global hash rates, charge higher fees, attract disproportionately fewer miners, and grow more slowly. Instead, mining pools as a financial innovation escalate miners’ arms race and significantly increase the energy consumption of proof-of-work-based blockchains. Empirical evidence from Bitcoin mining supports our model’s predictions. The economic insights inform other consensus protocols and the industrial organization of mainstream sectors with similar characteristics but ambiguous prior findings.
Journal Article
Securing federated learning with blockchain: a systematic literature review
Federated learning (FL) is a promising framework for distributed machine learning that trains models without sharing local data while protecting privacy. FL exploits the concept of collaborative learning and builds privacy-preserving models. Nevertheless, the integral features of FL are fraught with problems, such as the disclosure of private information, the unreliability of uploading model parameters to the server, the communication cost, etc. Blockchain, as a decentralized technology, is able to improve the performance of FL without requiring a centralized server and also solves the above problems. In this paper, a systematic literature review on the integration of Blockchain in federated learning was considered with the analysis of the existing FL problems that can be compensated. Through carefully screening, most relevant studies are included and research questions cover the potential security and privacy attacks in traditional federated learning that can be solved by blockchain as well as the characteristics of Blockchain-based FL. In addition, the latest Blockchain-based approaches to federated learning have been studied in-depth in terms of security and privacy, records and rewards, and verification and accountability. Furthermore, open issues related to the combination of Blockchain and FL are discussed. Finally, future research directions for the robust development of Blockchain-based FL systems are proposed.
Journal Article