Suchergebnisse

This paper describes contests in which private agents bribe local government officials to give them a 'helping hand' through government policy. The model is similar to a rent‐seeking contest but bribes are transfers of income to government officials. The officials differ in ethics regarding their willingness to accept bribes. If the ethics of officials are known, the officials lose income from bribes because of their honesty. Other corrupt officials gain from the presence of honest officials. We show that bribery contests could generate long‐run equilibria where corruption is persistent. There are multiple long‐run equilibria and the specific one where the economy converges depends on the initial level of corruption. Furthermore, the equilibria that exist in the model can be Pareto ranked from the perspective of the bribers: the equilibrium without corruption is always Pareto efficient. We also show that for the government services/goods with the same value, a larger number of applicants leads to a higher equilibrium level of corruption.

AbstractWell-functioning factor markets play an important role in improving the performance of the agricultural sector. Our paper examines both technical and allocative efficiencies at the household level, with an application to a cross-section sample of rural households in three provinces of China in 2009. In a first step, we use nonparametric methods to estimate household efficiency. In a second step, we examine econometrically the role of land rental market and its linkages with household-level efficiencies. We find that participation in the land rental market does not affect technical efficiency but has large positive effects on allocative efficiency. This stresses the need to distinguish between technical efficiency and allocative efficiency in the analysis of land tenure issues. The improvements in allocative efficiency from land-leasing contribute to significant increases in household income in rural China.

Abstract
References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by incorporation. This leads to the concept of hidden citation, representing a clear textual credit to a discovery without a reference to the publication embodying it. Here, we rely on unsupervised interpretable machine learning applied to the full text of each paper to systematically identify hidden citations. We find that for influential discoveries hidden citations outnumber citation counts, emerging regardless of publishing venue and discipline. We show that the prevalence of hidden citations is not driven by citation counts, but rather by the degree of the discourse on the topic within the text of the manuscripts, indicating that the more discussed is a discovery, the less visible it is to standard bibliometric analysis. Hidden citations indicate that bibliometric measures offer a limited perspective on quantifying the true impact of a discovery, raising the need to extract knowledge from the full text of the scientific corpus.

A new strategy for designing ternary solar cells is reported in this paper. A low-bandgap polymer named PTB7-Th and a high-bandgap polymer named PBDTTS-FTAZ sharing the same bulk ionization potential and interface positive integer charge transfer energy while featuring complementary absorption spectra are selected. They are used to fabricate efficient ternary solar cells, where the hole can be transported freely between the two donor polymers and collected by the electrode as in one broadband low bandgap polymer. Furthermore, the fullerene acceptor is chosen so that the energy of the positive integer charge transfer state of the two donor polymers is equal to the energy of negative integer charge transfer state of the fullerene, enabling enhanced dissociation of all polymer donor and fullerene acceptor excitons and suppressed bimolecular and trap assistant recombination. The two donor polymers feature good miscibility and energy transfer from high-bandgap polymer of PBDTTS-FTAZ to low-bandgap polymer of PTB7-Th, which contribute to enhanced performance of the ternary solar cell. ; Funding agencies: Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation; Swedish Research Council [2016-05498]; Swedish Government Strategic Research Area in Materials Science on Functional Materials at Linkoping University (Faculty Grant SFO Mat LiU) [2009 00971]; Goran Gustafsson Foundat