Data from the 1999 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey is used to examine state capture and influence in transition economies. We find that a capture economy has emerged in many ...transition countries, where rent-generating advantages are sold by public officials and politicians to private firms. While influence is a legacy of the past inherited by large, incumbent firms with existing ties to the state, state capture is a strategic choice made primarily by large de novo firms competing against influential incumbents. Captor firms, in high-capture economies, enjoy private advantages in terms of more protection of their own property rights and superior firm performance. Despite the private gains to captor firms, state capture is associated at the aggregate level with social costs in the form of weaker economy-wide firm performance.
Journal of Comparative Economics
31 (4) (2003) 751–773.
Conventional models of the politics of economic reform tend to be based on an assumption about the costs and benefits of reform, known informally as the J-curve. Reforms are expected to make things ...worse before they get better. This presents a classic time inconsistency dilemma for reformist governments forced to demand severe sacrifices from the public in the short term for the mere promise of future gains. In response, political economy models of the reform process have tended to stress the importance of insulating governments from the pressures of the short-term losers until a sufficient constituency of winners has been created with a stake in supporting and enhancing the reforms. Based on evidence from the postcommunist transitions, this article suggests that the most serious political obstacles to the process of economic reform have come not from the short-term losers but from the shortterm winners. Groups that gain substantial rents from the early distortions of a partially reformed economy have a stake in maintaining a partial reform equilibrium that generates high private gains, but at a considerable social cost. In these countries, the main political challenge has been, not to marginalize the losers, but to restrain the winners. This explains the paradoxical outcome of the postcommunist transitions: that political systems which are more inclusive of the losers have been able to adopt and sustain more comprehensive economic reforms than states insulated from popular pressures.
This work investigates the possibility of a long-lived stop squark in supersymmetric models with the neutralino as the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). We study the implications of meta-stable ...stops on the sparticle mass spectra and the dark matter density. We find that in order to obtain a sufficiently long stop lifetime so as to be observable as a stable
R
-hadron at an LHC experiment, we need to fine tune the mass degeneracy between the stop and the LSP considerably. This increases the stop-neutralino co-anihilation cross section, leaving the neutralino relic density lower than what is expected from the WMAP results for stop masses ≲1.5 TeV/
c
2
. However, if such scenarios are realised in nature we demonstrate that the long-lived stops will be produced at the LHC and that stop-based
R
-hadrons with masses up to 1 TeV/c
2
can be detected after one year of running at design luminosity.
The performance and safety of the rear wing and spoiler employed on the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) COT (car of tomorrow) racecar are experimentally studied using 10 % ...scale models in a water channel. Particle image velocimetry is used to qualitatively examine the differences in flow structures between the two downforce-generating devices under 0 and 180-degree yaw cases. The latter is important due to an issue with the COT flipping into the air when at extreme yaw (i.e. during a crash). At zero yaw, it is observed that smaller length scales of the flow structures in the wake of the wing compared to those in the wake of the spoiler, provide more predictable handling for racecars in close proximity and may allow more safe and competitive racing. At 180-degree yaw, it is observed that wake-structure interactions may not allow proper operation of anti-flipping devices (roof flaps) on the winged car. In the extreme yaw case, local flow scales are examined and show much stronger Reynolds number (Re) dependence for the wing than the spoiler.
Oligometastases revisited Weichselbaum, Ralph R; Hellman, Samuel
Nature reviews. Clinical oncology,
06/2011, Letnik:
8, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We previously proposed a clinical state of metastasis termed 'oligometastases' that refers to restricted tumor metastatic capacity. The implication of this concept is that local cancer treatments are ...curative in a proportion of patients with metastases. Here we review clinical and laboratory data that support the hypothesis that oligometastasis is a distinct clinical entity. Investigations of the prevalence, mechanism of occurrence, and position in the metastatic cascade, as well as the determination of molecular markers to distinguish oligometastatic from polymetastatic disease, are ongoing.
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