This paper argues that for rapid technological catch-up of latecomer economies industrial policy, active control, and guidance of the market by the state are required. In this framework, the paper ...compares science and technology, as well as industrial policymaking mechanisms of China and Iran. The similarity of recent histories of the countries, which may have led to similar institutional transformations, makes such a comparative analysis meaningful. The study describes S&T and industrial policy-making systems of the countries, uses a case study for each to assess the degree of effectiveness of the states in assisting the technological learning of the enterprises in their respective countries, and delineates differences and similarities between the two policy-making systems.
The study concludes that Chinese government is actively involved in assisting the state-owned and other enterprises in gaining technological capabilities, and thus is acting as a developmental state. On the other hand, I find that the state's efforts in Iran in technological learning are mostly in the realm of S&T policy making. The role of the state in Iran in this regard can best be characterized as market-friendly since it has no centralized, active, and direct involvement in the techno-economic development of the enterprises.
•Technological catch-up and industrial policy.•Comparative S&T policy-making systems in China and Iran.•China government as a developmental state.•Iranian government as a market-friendly state.
The signing of the "Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012" by President Barak Obama on August 17, 2012 resulted in a massive depreciation of the Iranian currency, the rial, by ...December 2012. The news of new sanctions on the petroleum and financial sectors of the Iranian economy was taken as a "Sudden Stop" in capital inflow into the country and was a "displacement," which led to the currency crisis.
In this article #within the framework of the Minsky's theory of financial fragility of the market economies #we discuss the details of the currency crisis after the imposition of economic sanctions against Iranian petroleum and banking sectors #and the Iranian government's anti-speculative and stabilization policies. The article adds to our stock of knowledge of the occurrence currency crisis despite substantial foreign reserves holding of the Iranian banking system.
Preserving confidentiality of individuals in data disclosure is a prime concern for public and private organizations. The main challenge in the data disclosure problem is to release data such that ...misuse by intruders is avoided while providing useful information to legitimate users for analysis. We propose an information theoretic architecture for the data disclosure problem. The proposed framework consists of developing a maximum entropy (ME) model based on statistical information of the actual data, testing the adequacy of the ME model, producing disclosure data from the ME model and quantifying the discrepancy between the actual and the disclosure data. The architecture can be used both for univariate and multivariate data disclosure. We illustrate the implementation of our approach using financial data.
This book primarily deals with corporate restructuring through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). It critically examines all functions that must be performed in completing an M&A transaction. Domestic ...and cross-border M&A’s are very similar in many respects even though differences between them also exist. The book includes discussions of international finance and multinational financial management, the topics that arise in cross-border M&A transactions. Given the increasing importance of China as the second largest economy in the world and Chinese companies’ growing merger and acquisition (M&A) activities globally, we devote the last two chapters of the book to China’s outward foreign direct investment and cross-border M&A activities. Moreover, the second volume includes the case studies regarding Chinese foreign direct investment both in Greenfield and acquisition forms give additional insights into challenging tasks of due diligence and post-merger cultural integration that foreign investors face. The M&A literature is a fragmented field of inquiry. The book brings together important, practical insights from this vast literature in a short, but cohesive form that has high managerial relevance.
Research summary: Shareholder activism has become more widespread, yet the role of corporate governance as antecedent to shareholder activism remains equivocal. We propose a new conceptual model that ...characterizes the stochastic of observable shareholder activism as a compound product of two latent components representing (1) shareholder activists' propensity to target a company and (2) executives' propensity to settle activists' demands privately. Our model explicitly decouples corporate governance expectations for the two latent components embedded in activism process, and thus allows us to relax assumptions of homogenous shareholder interests and constrained managerial discretion where corporate managers are expected to negotiate privately and settle only value-creating activist demands. Bayesian analysis of zero-inflated Poisson regression reveals that corporate governance relationships with activism vary across shareholder demands and private settlements. Managerial summary: Increasing shareholder activism has generated debates as to whether activism promotes managerial accountability and responsibility or instead encourages managerial short-termism. Our research model allows for heterogeneous interests among a company's shareholders. We theorize and empirically investigate a broader role of corporate governance: governance mechanisms need to ensure that executives are not (1) ignoring activists' value-increasing demands or (2) accommodating activists' value-decreasing demands in a private, opaque manner that disenfranchises other shareholders. Our results indicate that corporate governance implications differ for visible shareholder demands in contrast with private activism. A plausible application of our model is that it provides estimates of the probability of the numbers of shareholder demands to be received by a firm and the probability of privately settling a demand.
In this research, we use the concepts of “national technology policy” as well as the “firm technology strategy” in defining a new definition for “national technology strategy”. Then, by examining ...several national technology strategies in a variety of fields in different countries the national nanotechnology strategy for Iran is developed. Furthermore, using capability-effectiveness matrix and SWOT analysis we identify strategies of nanotechnology development in Iran. Finally, considering other countries' strategies and the results of PROMETHEE Method, we prioritize different areas of nanotechnology for Iranian economy, and test for the validity of the extracted strategies.
This is a quantitative study of Iranian techno-economic system at the disaggregated industry level. We measure interindustry technology diffusion in the manufacturing sector of Iranian economy in the ...framework of the Iranian interindustry transaction table and R&D-embodied product flows among the industries. Moreover, we used network analysis to gain a better understanding of the technological network of the manufacturing sector of the economy.
Based on several indices that describe the aggregate technological network, we classify Iranian manufacturing sector as a dispersed, hierarchic system.
We identified Chemicals and Chemical Products and Rubber and Plastics as the sectors with most powerful contacts in the network, and hence with the highest capability to diffuse technology in the network.
We discovered that a large number of sectors in the Iranian innovation network do not diffuse or receive innovation from the other sectors of the economy, and present potential opportunities for widespread diffusion of innovations.
► Iranian manufacturing sector is a dispersed, hierarchic system. ► Chemicals & Chemical products and Rubber & Plastics as the sectors with most powerful contacts in the network. ► A large number of sectors in the Iranian innovation network do not diffuse or receive innovation from the other sectors of the economy. ► These isolated sectors present potential opportunities for widespread diffusion of innovations. ► Chemical industry in Iran appears to be playing an important role in Iranian industrialization, a role the industry played in the Second and Third Industrial Revolution.
Improving understanding of the pathogen-specific seasonality of enteric infections is critical to informing policy on the timing of preventive measures and to forecast trends in the burden of ...diarrhoeal disease. Data obtained from active surveillance of cohorts can capture the underlying infection status as transmission occurs in the community. The purpose of this study was to characterise rotavirus seasonality in eight different locations while adjusting for age, calendar time and within-subject clustering of episodes by applying an adapted Serfling model approach to data from a multi-site cohort study. In the Bangladesh and Peru sites, within-subject clustering was high, with more than half of infants who experienced one rotavirus infection going on to experience a second and more than 20% experiencing a third. In the five sites that are in countries that had not introduced the rotavirus vaccine, the model predicted a primary peak in prevalence during the dry season and, in three of these, a secondary peak during the rainy season. The patterns predicted by this approach are broadly congruent with several emerging hypotheses about rotavirus transmission and are consistent for both symptomatic and asymptomatic rotavirus episodes. These findings have practical implications for programme design, but caution should be exercised in deriving inferences about the underlying pathways driving these trends, particularly when extending the approach to other pathogens.
This paper presents the Bayes Fisher information measures, defined by the expected Fisher information under a distribution for the parameter, for the arithmetic, geometric, and generalized mixtures ...of two probability density functions. The Fisher information of the arithmetic mixture about the mixing parameter is related to chi-square divergence, Shannon entropy, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence. The Bayes Fisher measures of the three mixture models are related to the Kullback-Leibler, Jeffreys, Jensen-Shannon, Rényi, and Tsallis divergences. These measures indicate that the farther away are the components from each other, the more informative are data about the mixing parameter. We also unify three different relative entropy derivations of the geometric mixture scattered in statistics and physics literatures. Extensions of two of the formulations to the minimization of Tsallis divergence give the generalized mixture as the solution.
HighLights•Explore maximum entropy minimum elaborations of simpler maximum entropy models.•Compare maximum entropy priors with parametric models fitted to elicited quantiles.•Measure uncertainty and ...disagreement of forecasters based on their probability forecasts.•Include the maximizing profit quantile in the newsvendor’s demand distribution.
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Quantiles are available in various problems for developing probability distributions. In some problems quantiles are elicited from experts and used for fitting parametric models, which induce non-elicited information. In some other problems comparisons are made with a quantile of an assumed model which is noncommittal to the quantile information. The maximum entropy (ME) principle provides models that avoid these issues. However, the information theory literature has been mainly concerned about models based on moment information. This paper explores the ME models that are the minimum elaborations of the uniform and moment-based ME models by quantiles. This property provides diagnostics for the utility of elaboration in terms of the information value of each type of information over the other. The ME model with quantiles and moments is represented as the mixture of truncated distributions on consecutive intervals whose shapes and existence are determined by the moments. Elaborations of several ME distributions by quantiles are presented. The ME model based only on quantiles elicited by the fixed interval method possesses a useful property for pooling information elicited from multiple experts. The elaboration of Laplace distribution is an extension of the information theory connection with minimum risk under symmetric loss functions to the asymmetric linear loss. This extension produces a new Asymmetric Laplace distribution. Application examples compare ME priors with a parametric model fitted to elicited quantiles, illustrate measuring uncertainty and disagreement of economic forecasters based on elicited probabilities, and adjust ME models for a fundamental quantile in an inventory management problem.
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