It is widely believed that fiscal transparency has large and positive effects on fiscal performance. According to the IMF, “transparency in government operations is widely regarded as an important precondition for macroeconomic fiscal sustainability, good governance, and overall fiscal rectitude” (Kopits & Craig (1998, p. 1)). Indeed, both the IMF and the OECD are currently developing Codes of ...

Recent scholarship on transparency has been voluminous, and transparency policies continue to garner international adherents through global initiatives such as the Open Government Partnership. Yet extant scholarship has failed to address the empirical parameters for what constitutes ‘transparency’ and what does not. This lacuna gives way to misuses and abuses, jeopardizing the analytical utilit...

Foliage transparency in trees is an important indicator for forest health assessment. This paper helps advance transparency measurement research by presenting methods of automatic tree boundary extraction and foliage transparency estimation from digital images taken from the ground of open grown trees. Extraction of proper boundaries of tree crowns is the initial step in the determination of cr...

The absorption of a resonant coupling laser driving a closed degenerate two-level system in an atomic cesium beam was investigated as a function of the detuning of a second laser probing the same transition. The measurements were performed for four different polarization combinations of the two laser beams. Except for the beams of counterrotating polarizations all coupling-laser absorption prof...

We consider whether a career-minded expert would make better decisions if the principal could observe the consequences of the expert’s action. The previous literature has found that this “transparency of consequence” can only improve the efficacy of the expert’s decision making. We show, however, that this conclusion is very sensitive to the specified cost structure. While learning the conseque...

We use unique panel data on the evolution of transparent budget procedures in the American states over the past three decades to explore the political and economic determinants of fiscal transparency. Our preliminary results suggest that more equal political competition and power sharing are associated with both greater levels of fiscal transparency and increases in fiscal transparency during t...

The aims of this study are to examine how liquidity in the Government of Canada securities market has evolved over the 1990s and to determine what factors influence the level of liquidity in this market, with some comparisons to the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find empirical support for the hypothesis that an increase in effective supply of the securities enhances market liquidity. Empi...

Abstract Dialetical Frameworks (ADFs) are a recent development in computational argumentation which are, it has been suggested, a fruitful way of implementing factor based reasoning with legal cases. In this paper we evaluate this proposal, by reconstructing CATO using ADFs. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program, transpa...