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| Issue Date | View | Title | Author(s) | Type of Publication | Series/Report no. | Abstract |
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2012
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Working Paper
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EUI MWP; 2012/01
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View Abstract
What was the recipe for the success of Raiffeisen’s banking model? What made it possible for imitations of this German rural cooperative microfinance institution to work well in some European countries, but fail in others? This paper answers these questions with a comparison of Raiffeisenism in Ireland and the Netherlands. Raiffeisen banks arrived in both places at the same time, but had drastically different fates. In Ireland they were almost wiped out by the early 1920s, whilst in the Netherlands they proved to be a long-lasting institutional transplant. Raiffeisen banks were successful in the Netherlands because they operated in a niche market with few viable competitors. Meanwhile, rural financial markets in Ireland were unsegmented and populated by long-established incumbents, leaving little room for new players, whatever their perceived advantages. Whereas Dutch Raiffeisen banks were largely self-financing, closely integrated into the wider rural economy and took advantage of socioreligious division, their Irish counterparts did not.
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2011
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Working Paper
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EUI MWP; 2011/36
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View Abstract
This paper focuses on the role of intellectual property (IP) in structuring and governing innovative ventures between independent firms. The issue is particularly important given the tendency towards vertical disintegration in business firms whereby once integrated firms focus on core activities, while devolving residual aspects to independent suppliers and collaborators. In a world of fast changing technology, this also means that innovation takes place across firm boundaries and raises issues about the ownership of resulting intellectual property. This paper examines the routes available to firms for allocating such intellectual property to suggest that neither the default rules of US patent law, nor the types of agreements firms have struck as between each other provide adequate protections from appropriation while at the same encouraging seamless cooperation and sharing. This would suggest some caution about the appropriateness of the IP regime for the current innovation environment even in industries such as the pharmaceutical industry where patents are thought to be appropriate to recoup R&D investments and where the risk of standard patent hold up is thought to be low.
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2011
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Working Paper
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EUI MWP; 2011/35
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View Abstract
This paper puts forward the methodological view that certain data produced by financial markets can be used without the need to look into how they were compiled. It argues that when trying to understand the causes of the Austrian Boden-Kredit Anstalt's collapse of September 1929, data from bank balance sheets are not a reliable source, whereas data such as bond yields and interest rate differentials help locate the origin of the financial crisis in the resignation of Austria's Chancellor Ignaz Seipel in April 1929.
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2011
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Working Paper
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EUI MWP; 2011/34
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View Abstract
This paper explores the various images or stereotypes regarding Bengali middle-class refugee women that circulated in post-partition West Bengal. It identifies four main discursive images or constructions of refugee women: as bodies vulnerable to rape and dishonour; as economically and socially marginal members of society who could by definition, not be rehabilitated; as unequal participants in the refugee movement whose contributions were seen as ‘inspirational’ and symbolic, rather than substantive; and last, but not the least, as bread-winners who transgressed the proper role of women as home-makers. Polite society in Calcutta most frequently lamented the fate of refugee women who worked either by highlighting their deprivation of being a spinster, or their ignominy of ‘sinking’ to prostitution. Juxtaposing the ubiquity of these images against census records which show no statistically significant changes in livelihood patterns of middle-class women in Calcutta, this paper argues that these images had little to do with the choices faced and lives negotiated by refugee women. Instead, they reflected the anxiety of Bengali refugees regarding their social status, ideals and traditions in the context of the displacement and social dislocation wrought by partition. This anxiety was inevitably displaced to the bodies of women, whose imagined or real transgressions of ideal social roles were actively lamented, and thus devalued. This paper critiques historical scholarship that reads these images of women earning wages as evidence of reconfiguration of gender roles. It cautions against celebrating partition and its dislocation as a harbinger of women’s emancipation in West Bengal.
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2011
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Working Paper
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EUI MWP; 2011/33
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View Abstract
Decision makers sometimes refer to the tension between transparency and efficiency in decisions. Yet, this argument is not so obvious, partly because the notion of efficiency is unclear. As a first step in the analysis of this argument, this paper attempts to build an operational definition of efficiency. We focus on the Council of the EU because different transparency rules have been implemented in this institution since the beginning of the 1990s. Still, the actors seem to sidestep these rules and often argue that transparency hampers efficiency in decisions. We rely on about 60 interviews with Council members to describe how the actors sidestep the rules and to research their incentives. We list these incentives and investigate their relationship with efficiency in decisions. Such analysis leads us to distinguish 3 types of efficiency: the ability to make compromises; the productivity in decision making; the ability to implement decisions. These distinctions should help us to carry out case studies on the effects of transparency on these different types of efficiency.
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