Political Divide, Weak Property Rights, and Infrastructure Provision: An Empirical Examination of Takings Decisions in Jerusalem

In this article I use a unique hand-coded dataset of all expropriation exercises in Jerusalem over a twenty-five-year period to test the distribution of the expropriation burden across political communities. I identify the ethnoreligious group to which the impacted landowner belongs and the community that would benefit from the decision. I find that Palestinian property constitutes 38 percent of all land taken over the years, while only 10 percent of all land taken has been repurposed for their local community needs. Conversely, Jewish owners have contributed only 4 percent of all land taken while benefiting from 33 percent of the land taken for their community needs. I also find that land not owned by Jews has a higher propensity to be taken for citywide purposes by ten to twenty-three times than Jewish land, depending on the purpose and the type of property rights involved. This sharp gap can be attributed to the political power relations in the city. The case study enables me to test the relationship between weak property rights and infrastructure provision. As property rights are formally recorded and recognized selectively in some but not in all parts of the city, the article provides the first empirical evidence to the effect of weak property rights on the risk of expropriation. I find that the propensity for noncommunity purpose takings of nonformalized land for which Palestinians claim ownership but have no official records to is significantly higher when compared to formalized Palestinian land. This outcome contradicts the conventional wisdom in the literature that weak property rights help explain limited infrastructure development.

Riemann intergability versus continuity for vector-valued functions

The interplay between Riemann integrability and continuity is an interesting topic of modern analysis. In this paper, Riemann integrability of vector-valued continuous functions, property of Lebesgue and weak property of Lebesgue are surveyed and discussed. We also prove that `1(N, X) has the property of Lebesgue.

7. Prospects for the future of the Russian economy

When looking at data on the Russian population and its demographics, averages conceal huge regional variations, not least in economic development and life expectancies. ‘Prospects for the future of the Russian economy’ compares the prospects of ‘first’ urban and developed Russia with a less powerful ‘second’ Russia and rural areas ranked third and fourth. Russia has the ingredients needed for innovation, not least an educated population. However, its historical problems persist—weak property rights, low levels of competition, overdependence on energy and defence, and lack of supporting infrastructure. With access to resources still determined by historical and current state connections, will the state ever be tamed?

Land Market Distortions in India

Land remains one of the most sought-after collateral for credit in India despite being afflicted by deep structural, regulatory, and information-driven distortions. These distortions stem from years of fragmented policymaking, poor governance and a lack of political will that cuts across most States in our Union. Rational lenders, in the presence of weak property rights and high information asymmetry, have responded through conservative credit policies. This has constrained significantly the ability to unlock the full value of land, something that is necessary for continued economic growth. We provide an overview of these distortions and how they impact land markets as well as credit creation in this article. We enumerate the various types of distortions and explore interventions—regulatory, structural and technological—that have been used to mitigate them in the past. We examine newer solutions, such as block chains for land registries and paralegal titling that are promising but require selective implementation to be successful.

Multiple Scattering Theory for Heterogeneous Elastic Continua with Strong Property Fluctuation: Theoretical Fundamentals and Applications

Scattering of elastic waves in heterogeneous media has become one of the most important problems in the field of wave propagation due to its broad applications in seismology, natural resource exploration, ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation and biomedical ultrasound. Nevertheless, it is one of the most challenging problems because of the complicated medium inhomogeneity and the complexity of the elastodynamic equations. A widely accepted model for the propagation and scattering of elastic waves, which properly incorporates the multiple scattering phenomenon and the statistical information of the inhomogeneities is still missing. In this work, the author developed a multiple scattering model for heterogeneous elastic continua with strong property fluctuation and obtained the exact solution to the dispersion equation under the first-order smoothing approximation. The model establishes an accurate quantitative relation between the microstructural properties and the coherent wave propagation parameters and can be used for characterization or inversion of microstructures. Starting from the elastodynamic differential equations, a system of integral equation for the Green functions of the heterogeneous medium was developed by using Green’s functions of a homogeneous reference medium. After properly eliminating the singularity of the Green tensor and introducing a new set of renormalized field variables, the original integral equation is reformulated into a system of renormalized integral equations. Dyson’s equation and its first-order smoothing approximation, describing the ensemble averaged response of the heterogeneous system, are then derived with the aid of Feynman’s diagram technique. The dispersion equations for the longitudinal and transverse coherent waves are then obtained by applying Fourier transform to the Dyson equation. The exact solution to the dispersion equations are obtained numerically. To validate the new model, the results for weak-property-fluctuation materials are compared to the predictions given by an improved weak-fluctuation multiple scattering theory. It is shown that the new model is capable of giving a more robust and accurate prediction of the dispersion behavior of weak-property-fluctuation materials. Numerical results further show that the new model is still able to provide accurate results for strong-property-fluctuation materials while the weak-fluctuation model is completely failed. As applications of the new model, dispersion and attenuation curves for coherent waves in the Earth’s lithosphere, the porous and two-phase alloys, and human cortical bone are calculated. Detailed analysis shows the model can capture the major dispersion and attenuation characteristics, such as the longitudinal and transverse wave Q-factors and their ratios, existence of two propagation modes, anomalous negative dispersion, nonlinear attenuation-frequency relation, and even the disappearance of coherent waves. Additionally, it helps gain new insights into a series of longstanding problems, such as the dominant mechanism of seismic attenuation and the existence of the Mohorovičić discontinuity. This work provides a general and accurate theoretical framework for quantitative characterization of microstructures in a broad spectrum of heterogeneous materials and it is anticipated to have vital applications in seismology, ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation and biomedical ultrasound.

Neutral Difference System and its Nonoscillatory Solutions

The paper deals with a system of four nonlinear difference equations where the first equation is of a neutral type. We study nonoscillatory solutions of the system and we present sufficient conditions for the system to have weak property B.

Islam and Economic Performance: Historical and Contemporary Links

This essay critically evaluates the analytic literature concerned with causal connections between Islam and economic performance. It focuses on works since 1997, when this literature was last surveyed comprehensively. Among the findings are the following: Ramadan fasting by pregnant women harms prenatal development; Islamic charities mainly benefit the middle class; Islam affects educational outcomes less through Islamic schooling than through structural factors that handicap learning as a whole; Islamic finance has a negligible effect on Muslim financial behavior; and low generalized trust depresses Muslim trade. The last feature reflects the Muslim world’s delay in transitioning from personal to impersonal exchange. The delay resulted from the persistent simplicity of the private enterprises formed under Islamic law. Weak property rights reinforced the private sector’s stagnation by driving capital from commerce to rigid waqfs. Waqfs limited economic development through their inflexibility and democratization by keeping civil society embryonic. Parts of the Muslim world conquered by Arab armies are especially undemocratic, which suggests that early Islamic institutions were particularly critical to the persistence of authoritarian patterns of governance. States have contributed to the persistence of authoritarianism by treating Islam as an instrument of governance. As the world started to industrialize, non-Muslim subjects of Muslim-governed states pulled ahead of their Muslim neighbors, partly by exercising the choice of law they enjoyed under Islamic law in favor of a Western legal system.( JEL N25, N45, O43, O53, P51, Z12)

International Mobility of the Wealthy in an Age of Growing Inequality

The global economy and society are affected by the rising inequality in income and wealth along with an increasing frequency and severity of financial crises, tendencies for protectionism, and fragmented globalization. A largely unexplored topic in migration analysis is the international mobility of the wealthy and their assets, looking for countries that offer financial security, lower taxation, good educational facilities, safe cities, and other amenities. This mobility is largely motivated by [an] increasing concentration of wealth and incomes toward the top 1 or 0.1 percent in several economies and the search for diversification of newly created wealth. Some economies that are home of the wealthy are affected by political instability insecurity and weak property rights, prompting them to leave. Outflows of the wealthy and their assets have various consequences on both home and receiving nations such as a reduction of reduce tax revenues in the home country, an increase in property prices in the receiving nations, and is creating as well as the creation of a whole (legal) industry granting passports, residence, and citizenship oriented to the wealthy. This paper provides an overview of these trends backed by available empirical information. Main substantive topics include (a) identifying the main motivations of for the international mobility of the wealthy including “pulling” and “pushing” factors; (b) similarities and differences between the migration of wealthy individuals and the mobility of their assets (offshore wealth) towards low-tax jurisdictions and fiscal paradises; (d) the emergence of a “market” for passports, residence permits, and citizenship rights catered to the very wealthy.

Argumentation-Based Recommendations: Fantastic Explanations and How to Find Them

A significant problem of recommender systems is their inability to explain recommendations, resulting in turn in ineffective feedback from users and the inability to adapt to users’ preferences. We propose a hybrid method for calculating predicted ratings, built upon an item/aspect-based graph with users’ partially given ratings, that can be naturally used to provide explanations for recommendations, extracted from user-tailored Tripolar Argumentation Frameworks (TFs). We show that our method can be understood as a gradual semantics for TFs, exhibiting a desirable, albeit weak, property of balance. We also show experimentally that our method is competitive in generating correct predictions, compared with state-of-the-art methods, and illustrate how users can interact with the generated explanations to improve quality of recommendations.