Zlatko Topčić has built the identity of a novelist who openly tackles new techniques and literary procedures in the wake of postmodern ways of writing. This is supported by the novels created during ...and after the last war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the shadows and traumas of the war are deep in the elements of the text, and the characters are caught in its whirlwind in different ways, prisoners of traumatic conditions even in the time when the storm of events subsides, but remains a long sediment of painful experiences. This text aims to show how a great historical event - the Sarajevo assassination - is artistically transposed in the novel 6/28/1914 (novel, revision), and how the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war in the period 1992-1995 can be traced through its outlines. With a collection of characters, historical and fictional, narrative organization of space and time, intertextuality, and an ironic relationship with metanarratives, Topčić creates a text as a product of personal stories from which a novelistic mosaic of historical events is created.
The area of Sarajevo at the beginning of April 1992 was violently divided. Units of the 4th Corps of the 2nd Military District of the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), the armed forces that were gathered ...and supported the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) as well as many local and foreign volunteers and mercenaries occupied strategic positions in and around Sarajevo. Open armed aggression began after Bosnia and Herzegovina was recognized as an international independent state. After that, Sarajevo was blocked and put under siege for almost four years. After the partial withdrawal of the JNA from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the 2nd Military District of the JNA was transformed into a part of the Army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (VSr RBiH), from August 1992 under the name of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS). Through the transformation, the 4th Corps of the JNA became the Sarajevo-Romanian Corps (SRK) VSr RBiH. In the period of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, in order to control Sarajevo, the said forces carried out a “coordinated systematic and long-term campaign of shelling and sniping” in order to “kill, maim, injure and terrorize the civilian population of Sarajevo”. In addition to artillery attacks, which were the most widespread way in which the inhabitants of Sarajevo were killed, another frequent way of killing was sniper attacks. The sniper clearly sees his victim and kills him with intent. Residents of Sarajevo were intentional victims of sniper attacks and were not safe anywhere. Without water, electricity, gas and other necessities of life, the residents fought a daily struggle for bare survival. It was a day and night fight for survival. Cruel individual and mass murders of civilians, including those of the youngest residents, followed by daily wounding, terrorizing, violations of psychological integrity, illegal actions and others, are part of the crimes committed against the inhabitants of Sarajevo in the period 1992-1995. years. Guided primarily by the verdicts and documents of the International Tribunal for War Crimes in The Hague, as well as other relevant archival documents and the statements and expertise of experts, the author shows in her work what the sniping campaign meant. A very important part is the display and description of the types of weapons that were used in such operations, as well as the description of localities and parts of the city from which snipers were most often used. Based on these data, it is very clear to see what the daily life of the inhabitants of the city under siege looked like. The organization of sniper training as well as the places where the training was conducted and in what way are also important parts of the work. The demand and delivery of sniper weapons and ammunition to the Sarajevo-Romania Corps, as well as the identities of the snipers, as well as hired mercenaries and volunteers from other countries, are parts of the work presented by the author. Based on the examples of the victims of sniping, primarily the killing of children, it is clear that the enemy's goal was to kill civilians with intent, directly and in a targeted manner. In this section, the investigated and identified minor victims of sniper attacks as well as the circumstances of the murder are presented in chronological order. As a clear indication that the sniper's intention was to kill them or seriously injure them with permanent consequences, the parts of the body that were hit, which are very often the head, the area around the heart, the stomach, and the lungs, are also shown. In the final part of the paper, the emphasis is on the prosecution and non-prosecution of persons responsible for crimes committed by snipers, before domestic and international courts. Although there is irrefutable evidence of sniper killings of Sarajevo residents, very few or no indictments are filed against those responsible. The direct perpetrators - snipers, who killed the inhabitants of Sarajevo with intent, have not yet been brought to justice and convicted of the crime.
What ties together the traditional commercial banking activities of deposit-taking and lending? We argue that since banks often lend via commitments, their lending and deposit-taking may be two ...manifestations of one primitive function: the provision of liquidity on demand. There will be synergies between the two activities to the extent that both require banks to hold large balances of liquid assets: If deposit withdrawals and commitment takedowns are imperfectly correlated, the two activities can share the costs of the liquid-asset stockpile. We develop this idea with a simple model, and use a variety of data to test the model empirically.
Incorporating debt in a dynamic real options framework, we show that underinvestment stems from truncation of equity's horizon at default. Debt overhang distorts both the level and composition of ...investment, with underinvestment being more severe for long-lived assets. An empirical proxy for the shadow price of capital to equity is derived. Use of this proxy yields a structural test for debt overhang and its mitigation through issuance of additional secured debt. Using measurement error-consistent GMM estimators, we find a statistically significant debt overhang effect regardless of firms' ability to issue additional secured debt.
Many recent empirical investment studies have found that the investment of financially
constrained firms responds strongly to cash flow. Paralleling these findings is the
disappointing performance of ...the q theory of investment: even though marginal
q should summarize the effects of all factors relevant to the investment
decision, cash flow still matters. We examine whether this failure is due to error in measuring
marginal q. Using measurement error-consistent generalized method of
moments estimators, we find that most of the stylized facts produced by
investment-q cash flow regressions are artifacts of measurement error.
Cash flow does not matter, even for financially constrained firms, and despite its simple
structure, q theory has good explanatory power once purged of measurement
error.
Among the numerous open questions of contemporary historiography regarding the breakdown of Yugoslavia and its consequences, the issues connected to the post-Yugoslav wars still cause the most ...disputes. Even in the case of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, waged from 1992 to 1995, all of the important questions concerning its causes, character and consequences, are still considered open, whereby the dubious interpretative discourses are often constructed on the basis of an approach which is founded on the narrowing of the jointly observed historical phenomena. The attempts to construct and legitimize the corresponding particular interpretations of the character of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina through a narrow and selective approach applied in the identifications of the warring sides and their mutual relations are not rare. In such situations the most reliable methodological approach in the framework of historical science is to return the focus from the level of interpretation to the historical sources, their analysis, determining the authenticity and relevance for the collection of issues in question. In this work we will dedicate our attention to the directives of the Main Headquarters and the High Command of the Army of Republic of Srpska issued during 1992-1995 in those parts in which these documents perform the identification and determination of the enemy.
We examine compensation contracts for managers in imperfectly competitive product markets. We show that strategic interactions among firms can explain the lack of relative performance-based ...incentives in which compensation decreases with rival firm performance. The need to soften product market competition generates an optimal compensation contract that places a positive weight on both own and rival performance. Firms in more competitive industries place greater weight on rival firm performance relative to own firm performance. We find empirical evidence of a positive sensitivity of compensation to rival firm performance that is increasing in the degree of competition in the industry.
We document evidence of a persistent “early entry” advantage for brands in 34 consumer packaged goods industries across the 50 largest U.S. cities. Current market shares are higher in markets closest ...to a brand’s historic city of origin than in those farthest. For six industries, we know the order of entry among the top brands in each of the markets. We find an early entry effect on a brand’s current market share and perceived quality across U.S. cities. The magnitude of this effect typically drives the rank order of market shares and perceived quality levels across cities.