Corruption is costly for developing nations’ economies, but scholars and policy makers do not fully understand who bears the cost of corruption. We conduct a field experiment in Malawi to determine the impacts of political connections, socioeconomic status, and shared ethnicity on the degree of corruption a citizen encounters across two contexts – police roadblocks and electricity service offic...

We analyze and improve low rank representation (LRR), the state-of-the-art algorithm for subspace segmentation of data. We prove that for the noiseless case, the optimization model of LRR has a unique solution, which is the shape interaction matrix (SIM) of the data matrix. So in essence LRR is equivalent to factorization methods. We also prove that the minimum value of the optimization model o...

The thesis contributes to the understanding of the influence of corruption on paths of sustainable development. At different stages, the study shows how corruption hinders economic growth and diminishes the stringency of environmental protection – two fundamental components of sustainable development. Furthermore, the study includes the related issue of the determinants of corruption levels. Ch...

Background: There are several factors that lead to the growth or decline of the nonperforming loans, such as macroeconomic variables and bank specific variables, banks ownership structure, corruption and information sharing. Among them one of the main factors that affect the non-performing loans are the corruption. In developing countries corruption plays very important role in the growth of no...

a n wa r s h a h 7 A lthough statistics on corruption are often questionable, the data suggest that corruption accounts for a significant proportion of economic activity. In Kenya " questionable " public expenditures noted by the controller and auditor general in 1997 amounted to 7.6 percent of GDP. In Latvia a recent World Bank survey found that more than 40 percent of households and enterpris...

In this research, a video delivery system is proposed by integrating the layered codec and the proposed corruption model. In the system, it is assumed that the base layer packets are delivered without loss since they are assigned the most reliable service level. Then, packets in the enhancement layer are analyzed with the corruption model and categorized for differentiated delivery services. Th...

A probability model is introduced which helps describing the eeects that data corruption has on information retrieval. This leads us to the deenition of a measure which analyses the eeects of data corruption on retrieval ranking. The behaviour of this measure is analysed theoretically. We give an explanation of some results found empirically by others. Our main results explain how retrieval ran...

.............................................................................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ..................................