In this social and cultural history of Czechoslovakia's "gentle revolution," James Krapfl shifts the focus away from elites to ordinary citizens who endeavored-from the outbreak of revolution in 1989 ...to the demise of the Czechoslovak federation in 1992-to establish a new, democratic political culture. Unique in its balanced coverage of developments in both Czech and Slovak lands, including the Hungarian minority of southern Slovakia, this book looks beyond Prague and Bratislava to collective action in small towns, provincial factories, and collective farms.
Through his broad and deep analysis of workers' declarations, student bulletins, newspapers, film footage, and the proceedings of local administrative bodies, Krapfl contends that Czechoslovaks rejected Communism not because it was socialist, but because it was arbitrarily bureaucratic and inhumane. The restoration of a basic "humanness"-in politics and in daily relations among citizens-was the central goal of the revolution. In the strikes and demonstrations that began in the last weeks of 1989, Krapfl argues, citizens forged new symbols and a new symbolic system to reflect the humane, democratic, and nonviolent community they sought to create. Tracing the course of the revolution from early, idealistic euphoria through turns to radicalism and ultimately subversive reaction,Revolution with a Human Facefinds in Czechoslovakia's experiences lessons of both inspiration and caution for people in other countries striving to democratize their governments.
An important problem faced by colleges and universities, that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions, is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the ...aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation. This article shows how discontinuities in an East Coast college's aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions. Semiparametric estimates based on a regression-discontinuity (RD) approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students.
Scholarly interpretations of the collapse of communism and developments thereafter have tended to be primarily concerned with people’s need to rid themselves of the communist system, of their past. ...The expectations, dreams, and hopes that ordinary Eastern Europeans had when they took to the streets in 1989, and have had ever since, have therefore been overlooked – and our understanding of the changes in post-communist Europe has remained incomplete. Focusing primarily on five key areas, such as the heritage of 1989 revolutions, ambivalence, disillusionment, individualism, and collective identities, this book explores the expectations and goals that ordinary Eastern Europeans had during the 1989 revolutions and the decade thereafter, and also the problems and disappointments they encountered in the course of the transformation. The analysis is based on extensive interviews with university students and young intellectuals in the Czech Republic, Eastern Germany and Estonia in the 1990s, which in themselves have considerable value as historical documents.
Velvet Revolutions Vanek, Miroslav; M?cke, Pavel
2016, 2016-02-18, 2015-12-19
eBook
This book investigates how values such as freedom, work, family, free time, and politics changed in Czech society in the two decades before and after the November 1989 Velvet Revolution. Miroslav ...Vanek and Pavel M?cke use public opinion polls as well as 300 interviews with Czech citizens to create a multi-layered view of Czech history before 1989 and during the subsequent period of democratic transformation.
I discuss the short-run dynamics of commodity prices, production, and inventories, as well as the sources and effects of market volatility. I explain how prices, rates of production, and inventory ...levels are interrelated, and are determined via equilibrium in two interconnected markets: a cash market f or spot purchases and sales of the commodity, and a market for storage. I show how equilibrium in these markets affects and is affected by changes in the level of price volatility. I also explain the role and behavior of commodity futures markets, and the relationship between spot prices, futures prices, and inventory behavior. I illustrate these ideas with data for the petroleum complex - crude oil, heating oil, and gasoline - over the past two decades.
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We examine the role of the target firm's independent outside directors during takeover attempts by tender offer. We find that when the target's board is independent, the initial tender offer premium, ...the bid premium revision, and the target shareholder gains over the entire tender offer period are higher, and that the presence of a poison pill and takeover resistance lead to greater premiums and shareholder gains. We conclude that independent outside directors enhance target shareholder gains from tender offers, and that boards with a majority of independent directors are more likely to use resistance strategies to enhance shareholder wealth.
This paper develops new econometric methods to infer hospital quality in a model with discrete dependent variables and nonrandom selection. Mortality rates in patient discharge records are widely ...used to infer hospital quality. However, hospital admission is not random and some hospitals may attract patients with greater unobserved severity of illness than others. In this situation the assumption of random admission leads to spurious inference about hospital quality. This study controls for hospital selection using a model in which distance between the patient's residence and alternative hospitals are key exogenous variables. Bayesian inference in this model is feasible using a Markov chain Monte Carlo posterior simulator, and attaches posterior probabilities to quality comparisons between individual hospitals and groups of hospitals. The study uses data on 74,848 Medicare patients admitted to 114 hospitals in Los Angeles County from 1989 through 1992 with a diagnosis of pneumonia. It finds the smallest and largest hospitals to be of the highest quality. There is strong evidence of dependence between the unobserved severity of illness and the assignment of patients to hospitals, whereby patients with a high unobserved severity of illness are disproportionately admitted to high quality hospitals. Consequently a conventional probit model leads to inferences about quality that are markedly different from those in this study's selection model.
Resistance and revolution McRae, Robert Grant
Resistance and revolution,
c1997, 19970615, 1997, 1997-06-01
eBook
Under constant pressure from the regime, and frequently jailed or imprisoned for their efforts, the signatories of Charter 77 went on to lead the resistance and spearhead a revolution: the Velvet ...Revolution of 1989. For a time it seemed as if a philosopher-king had overturned the forces of totalitarianism, with the future of Czechoslovakia there for the making.
Price limit advocates claim that price limits decrease stock price volatility, counter overreaction, and do not interfere with trading activity. Conversely, price limit critics claim that price ...limits cause higher volatility levels on subsequent days (volatility spillover hypothesis), prevent prices from efficiently reaching their equilibrium level (delayed price discovery hypothesis), and interfere with trading due to limitations imposed by price limits (trading interference hypothesis). Empirical research does not provide conclusive support for either positions. We examine the Tokyo Stock Exchange price limit system to test these hypotheses. Our evidence supports all three hypotheses suggesting that price limits may be ineffective.
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