Honorary papers

Level comparisons among countries are essential for assessing competitive advantage. The depreciation of the ruble has made non-petroleum Russian exports more competitive, as pointed out by Elvira Nabiullina, Chair of the Central Bank of Russia. International comparisons require data on relative prices for the outputs of the various industries in different countries. These purchasing power parities are developed, for example, by the World Input-Output Data Base at Groningen University and the World. Bank's International Comparison Project (ICP), which has just reported its 2011 round of price comparisons at the aggregate level. International comparisons will make it possible to identify the industries that will benefit from the lower price of the ruble. These industries will require increased investments and development of appropriate infrastructure. Russia has achieved relatively high levels of educational attainment, partially offsetting the slow growth of the labor force. These trends in demography must be combined with the revival of growth in productivity in a substantial number of Russia's industries in designing a growth strategy for Russia.
The World KLEMS Initiative provides a connection between the micro-economic research at the industry level that will be reported at this conference and macro-economic policy on economic growth and competitive advantage. The challenge for micro-economic research is to exploit the advances in measurement at the aggregate and industry level that have taken place over the past decade.

Dale W. Jorgenson is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor at Harvard University. Jorgenson has been honored with membership in the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1989), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1978), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1969). He was elected to Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982), the American Statistical Association (1965), and the Econometric Society (1964). He was awarded honorary doctorates by Uppsala University (1991), the University of Oslo (1991), Keio University (2003), the University of Mannheim (2004), the University of Rome (2006), the Stockholm School of Economics (2007), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2007), and Kansai University (2009).
Jorgenson served as President of the American Economic Association in 2000 and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the Association in 2001. He was a Founding Member of the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy of the National Research Council in 1991 and served as Chairman of the Board from 1998 to 2006. He also served as Chairman of Section 54, Economic Sciences, of the National Academy of Sciences from 2000 to 2003 and was President of the Econometric Society in 1987.

Computing spanning trees, clique partitions, cliques, and independent sets have a clear practical interpretation and their analysis can be a complementary tool in financial decision making. In this talk we are going to discuss results of network optimization approaches to analyze the dynamics of the USA  the BRIC stock markets.

Panos M. Pardalos is Distinguished Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida. He is also affiliated faculty member of the Computer Science Department,  the Hellenic Studies Center, and the Biomedical Engineering Program.  He is the Co-Director of the Center for Applied Optimization.  He obtained a Ph.D. degree (1985) from the University of Minnesota in  Computer and Information Sciences. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton University, DIMACS Center, Institute of Mathematics and Applications, FIELDS Institute, AT&T Labs Research, Trier University, Linköping Institute of Technology, and universities in Greece.  He has received numerous awards including, University of Florida Research Foundation Professor, Foreign Member of the Royal Academy of Doctors (Spain), Foreign Member of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine,  and Foreign Member of the Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and Arts (Russia).  He is a Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and in 2001 he was honored with the Greek National Award and Gold Medal for Operations Research.  He is a world leading expert in global and combinatorial optimization. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Optimization, managing editor of several book series, and a member of the editorial board of twenty international journals.  He is the author of seven books and the editor of more than 50 books. He has written numerous articles and developed several well known software packages. His research is supported by National Science Foundation, NIH, and other government organizations.  His recent research interests include network design problems, biomedical applications, datamining, optimization in telecommunications, e-commerce, and massive computing.  He has been an invited lecturer at many universities and research institutes around the world. He has also organized several international conferences.

Indeed, Europe is now facing the risk of a “Japanese” syndrome of prolonged stagnation and deflation. Markets condemn such situation by pricing government bonds in the euro area at highly different real spreads. Positive expectations are lacking across Europe, leaving private internal demand timid or regressing. The European Central Bank’s and European Commission’s support for ailing economies on the condition of further fiscal consolidation and long-term reforms explains why neither unconventional monetary policy announcements nor the declaration of pan-European investment programs really weaken the grip of pessimism on expectations.

It is therefore time for a new symbolic political announcement, one that will indicate a major shift in European economic policy: we suggest “wherever it aches”. Wherever, that is, a country of the euro-area is in pain as it faces harsh conditions for its employment and business conditions, European policy-makers will intervene. But more must also be done while waiting for our European leaders to show some sense of direction and daring. A full debate on what is Europe and what is its purpose for the next generations needs to surround our daily lives.

Gustavo Piga, Ph. D. in Economics at Columbia University, is Full Professor of Economics and Vice Rector for International Affairs at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
He has chaired the Italian Procurement Agency for Goods and Services, Consip Ltd., between 2002 and 2005.
A macroeconomist and a blogger, besides several scientific papers he is the author of the renowned Derivatives in Public Debt Management and co-editor of a number of books, among which of the Handbook of Procurement, Cambridge University Press, with Nicola Dimitri and Giancarlo Spagnolo and Revisiting Keynes, MIT Press, with Lorenzo Pecchi.

Based on new information about the factor content of imported intermediates we find declining global prices for low-skilled workers and capital relative to medium- and high-skilled workers. We document also increasing income shares for capital and high-skilled workers in the final output value of 12 manufacturing product groups from 21 advanced countries during 1995-2007. Based on this information we estimate substitution elasticities and factor-biased technical change in a flexible (translog) cost function framework. We find strong evidence of technical change being biased against low- and medium-skilled workers, and in favour of high-skilled workers and capital. The advance of information technology appears to be an important channel and is particularly biased against medium-skilled workers. These findings are found to be robust in various alternative empirical settings.   

Marcel Timmer is director of the Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) and professor at the University of Groningen. He participates in various international programs funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Commission in the areas of international comparisons of productivity, technological and structural change and economic growth. He led major international research projects including the EU KLEMS project, comparing patterns of growth in the European Union, Japan and the U.S. (2003-2008) and more recently the World Input-output Database (WIOD) project (2009-2012). The WIOD has developed new databases, accounting frameworks and models to increase our understanding of the socio-economic and environmental consequences of increasing global integration. He has been a consultant and advisor for various organisations including the OECD, the World Bank, Japanese Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry (METI), Asian Development Bank and Statistics Netherlands.  He has been associate managing editor of the Review of Income and Wealth and extensively published in national and international journals, including the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Development Economics, Economic Policy, Journal of Regional Science and the Journal of Economic History. He is the lead author of the book Economic Growth in Europe.

Using an original dataset which assesses conformity to six different norms (resource transference, multilateralism, economic liberalism, democratic governance, respect for human rights, and peaceful dispute resolution), we find that status attribution is influenced by norm-consistent behavior but only when these norms are uncontested at the global level.

Thomas J. Volgy is Professor of Political Science in the School of Government and Public Policy at the University of Arizona, and is Executive Director of the International Studies Association, the leading global association of international relations scholars.

Volgy’s publications include over sixty articles in international prestigious journals of political science and international politics, including publications in World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of International Relations and Development, Public Opinion Quarterly, International Interactions, Journal of Peace Research, European Journal of International Relations, and Harvard Business Review, among others. He is also the editor and/or author of numerous books, the latest of which include: Major Powers and the Quest for Status in International Politics, Palgrave/MacMillan (2011); Intergovernmental Architecture and the Development of the Post-Cold War World Order, Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell (2009); and International Politics and State Strength, Boulder: Lynne Rienner (2003).  He also sits on the editorial boards of nine major journals.

A key finding is that while large firms’ TFP growth since the mid-1990s has outstripped that in the 1980s as a result of research and development (R&D) and internationalization, the TFP of small firms has stagnated. The analysis further shows that the reason why small firms’ TFP growth has lagged behind probably is their sluggish investment in R&D and information and telecommunication technology as well as a decline of technology spillovers from large firms.

Kyoji Fukao is Professor, The Institute of Economic Research, Hitotsubashi University. Until the 1990s, he was largely concerned with theoretical research on international capital flows, macroeconomic dynamics and multiple equilibria under imperfect information, and various other topics, which has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Political Economy, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, etc. Since then, he has concentrated on empirical research in the three fields of historical statistics, productivity, and international economics. Examples of studies in these areas include: (1) Fukao, Ma and Yuan (2006), which directly estimated purchasing power parities for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the 1930s using data for that period and compared the per capita GDP of the three countries; (2) Fukao and Kwon (2006), which conducts a supply-side analysis of Japan’s economic stagnation during the 1990s; and (3) studies such as Fukao, Ishido and Ito (2003), which analyze trade patterns using detailed trade data and show that intra-industry trade accompanying the vertical division of labor has increased rapidly in East Asia during the 1990s as a result of foreign direct investment (FDI), especially in the electrical machinery industry.

Human trafficking, both for sexual and labor exploitation and both internal and across borders, has become a major problem in Russia and other former Soviet countries since the fall of the Soviet Union. Since the law was passed, Russia has started to take the problem of trafficking more seriously, but as with any new law, it takes time for everyone in the system to learn how to use it and how to work together.

Lauren McCarthy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Institutions and Development at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. She received her PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011 and her research focuses on Russian law enforcement institutions.

As an example we consider the case of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era. The empire essentially abandons all of its possessions in Britain, and begins to cede small strips of land to the Germanic tribes on the Rhine-Danube border. Eventually, the Empire falls.
Other empires have recovered at least part of the lost territories. Examples from the Twentieth Century may be considered.

Guillermo Owen was born May 4, 1938, in Bogotá, Colombia, and obtained a B.S. degree from Fordham University in 1958, and a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University under the guidance of Dr. Harold Kuhn, in 1962.
Owen has taught at Fordham University (1961–1969), Rice University (1969–1977) and Los Andes University in Colombia (1978–1982, 2008), apart from having given lectures in many universities in Europe and Latin America. He is currently holding the position of Distinguished Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
Owen is member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences, The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of Barcelona, and the Academy of Sciences of the Developing World. He is associate editor of the International Game Theory Review.
The Escuela Naval Almirante Padilla of Cartagena (Colombia) gave him an honorary degree of Naval Science Professional in June 2004.
Owen was named Honorary President of the XIV Latin Ibero American Congress on Operations Research — CLAIO 2008. Cartagena, Colombia, September 2008.

In my lecture I claim that these «movements of mistrust» do not claim power and do not offer political alternative to the status quo but they do represent an effective strategy of citizen empowerment in the age of globalization when the power of citizens derives mostly from their ability to disrupt. They also present a major challenge for sustaining the post-Cold War international order.

* – Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (New York: Knopf, 2013)

Ivan Krastev is the Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and Permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the advisory board of the ERSTE Foundation, a member of the global advisory board of Open Society Foundations, New York, and a member of the advisory council of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), and the European Cultural Foundation (ECF). He is also associate editor of Europe’s World and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy and Transit — Europäische Revue.
From 2004 to 2006 Mr. Krastev has been the executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans chaired by the former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Bulgarian Edition of Foreign Policy and was a member of the Council of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London (2005-2011).
His books in English are «Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest» (UPenn Press, May 2014); «In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don’t Trust Our Leaders?» (TED Books, 2013); «The Anti-American Century», co-edited with Alan McPherson, (CEU Press, 2007) and «Shifting Obsessions: Three Essays on the Politics of Anticorruption» (CEU Press, 2004). He is a co-author with Stephen Holmes of a forthcoming book on Russian politics.

What is more, many of these newer tools share a common feature: they are indirect, i.e., they rely on a host of «third parties» that stand between the government and the beneficiaries of publicly funded services. Included here are universities, industrial companies, civil society organizations, private hospitals, day care centers, nursing homes, and many more. Drawing on his Oxford University book entitled The Tools of Government, Dr. Salamon will document the emergence of this pattern of indirect government and analyze its implications for the operation of public programs and for the training of public administrators and those who collaborate with them.

Lester M. Salamon — Academic Supervisor: Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector/ Laboratory for Nonprofit Sector Studies at the Center for Studies of Civil Society and the Nonprofit Sector
Director of the Center for Civil Society Studies, Institute for Health and Social Policy, Johns Hopkins University
Founding Director, Institute for Policy Studies, and Professor, School of Arts and Sciences, The Johns Hopkins University, 1987-1997.
Director, Center for Governance and Management Research, The Urban Institute, Washington, D.C., 1980-1986.
Deputy Associate Director, U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Washington, D.C. 1977-December 1979.
Associate Professor of Policy Sciences and Political Science, and Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Development Policy, Duke University, Durham, NC, 1973-1980 (on leave, 1977-1980).
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1970-1973.
Instructor, Department of Political Science, Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Mississippi, 1966-1967.

A number of factors are put forward that may spell the end for one state acquiring a disproportionate share of political, economic and military power as in the past. The factors encompass lead economies, technological innovation and diffusion, energy transition (or its absence) and global war. If the interpretation is accurate, we are in for a long period of limited systemic leadership in which the United States maintains a weak lead on other actors and can only operate as something approximating a «first among equals.» On the other hand, that development could create space for the emergence of alternative political leadership institutions.

William R. Thompson is Rogers Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloom-ington and Managing Editor of International Studies Quarterly. He is a past president of the In-ternational Studies Association (2005–06). Recent edited and co-authored books include Global-ization and Global History (with Barry K. Gills), Globalization as Evolutionary Process: Model-ing Global Change (with George Modelski and Tessaleno Devezas), Systemic Transition: Past, Pre-sent, and Future and Limits to Globalization and North-South Divergence (with Rafael Reuveny).

This radical vision represents the new normal and the basis for the ongoing transformation of management practices. A growing number of online marketplaces for services (e.g. Elance, Odesk and Freelancer.com) broker and enable on-demand contract employment between millions of project initiators (employers) and freelancers (employees) on a global scale.

An analysis of the entire database from one of the largest online platforms from its founding in 2008 reveals a cumulative total of over 14,400,000.00 registered users (originators of work and freelancers) and a total of over 7.0 million executed projects. For the years 2011-2013, this platform posted 561,076 STEM projects of which 560,893 were executed (by 76,000 freelancers) for a total actual contract value of $155 million.

The paper addresses three major themes and related sub-themes: (1) empirically examine the development and actualization of e-lance economy vision, and inform a deeper understanding of the phenomena and the current state of progress; (2) develop a theoretical framework to accommodate a nuanced understanding of the implications and challenges of this phenomenon on innovation at multiple levels of analysis — individual, technological startups, SMEs and large companies; and (3) the evolution and diffusion of a new freelancer lifestyle of on-demand, self-employed individuals.

The authoritarianism of the post-communist Mafia state is a sub-type of autocratic regimes, and the conceptual framework into which it is cached describes not only the techniques of power concentration, but the nature of the elite in power.

The epithet post-communist not merely refers to a historical period, but also to that it came into being from the carcass of communist dictatorship, what was characterized by the state monopoly of ownership. The designation «Mafia state» is by no means emotional or journalistic in nature, but rather refers to the new power elite’s essential trait: to its organisational nature and to its order. Here, in considering the characteristics of the relatively narrow authoritarian new elite, the Mafia state differs greatly from the various analogies referred to elites in authoritarian regimes. Above all that it is made up of — as is usual in the mafia — joint businesses founded principally by the family, as well as by sworn adopted political family members through the family’s network of relationships. The organization’s kinship and loyalty are connected by threads linking ever more families, which radiate from the family patriarch in strongly hierarchical divisions of pyramid-like order of obedience. In the Mafia state, in the organized upperworld the patriarch’s powers of enforcement works at a national level under the disguise of the institutions of democracy by occupying state power and acquiring the tools to achieve it.

Dr. Bálint Magyar — having obtained his University Doctoral degree in Political Economy and MA in History and Sociology at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest — started his career as a researcher (1977-1990) at different research institutes.

Between 1979 and 1990 he was a human right activist of the anti-communist opposition movement. Since its foundation in 1988 until 2009 he was one of the leaders of the Hungarian Liberal Party (Alliance of Free Democrats). Between 1988 and 1990 he took part in architecting the new democracy and negotiating about the peaceful transition.

As a Minister of Education he initiated and carried out public and higher education reform process. Made a definite move towards competency based education, social inclusion, implemented a schoolnet program for spreading digital literacy, directed the introduction of the Bologna process, modernised the management and business structure of higher education institutions, and carried out a nationwide PPP program renewing the infrastructure of HEIs. He developed and passed the Act on Innovation, set up an Innovation Fund.

He was Vice President of the National Development Council under the direction of the Prime Minister (2006-2008) and Secretary of State for Development Policy (2007-2008). As a State Secretary responsible for EU Funds, he launched and carried out huge projects in education and culture.

He wDr. Magyar was a member of the Governing Board of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) (2008-2012). He is one of the founders and board members of the international NGO, Empowering European Universities.as Vice President of the National Development Council under the direction of the Prime Minister (2006-2008) and Secretary of State for Development Policy (2007-2008). As a State Secretary responsible for EU Funds, he launched and carried out huge projects in education and culture.

Since 2010 he has been engaged by Unicef and OSF in different missions as a consultant to enhance education reforms in some countries of East Europe (Republic of Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania).

In the years of 2011-2014 he took part in different missions as an NDI (US) expert in supporting democratic transition and election observer in Libya and Tunisia.

Currently he is Strategic Consultant of the Financial Research Plc. at Budapest.

While precarious work is a global phenomenon, countries differ in the extent to which precarious work has greater or lesser effects on these outcomes, depending on their institutions and cultures. I will focus on differences in six countries that may enhance or alleviate the effects of precarious work: Denmark, Germany, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Arne L. Kalleberg is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published more than 120 articles and chapters and twelve books on topics related to the sociology of work, organizations, occupations and industries, labor markets, and social stratification. His most recent book is Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s-2000s (Russell Sage Foundation, 2011). His major current projects include a cross-national study of the causes and consequences of precarious work in a number of Asian countries and the role of community colleges in workforce preparation. He served as President of the American Sociological Association in 2007-8 and is currently the editor of Social Forces, an International Journal of Social Research. ‬

Early introduction of universal education is linked to levels of economic equality in the late 19th and early 20st centuries and to efforts to increase state capacity. First, societies with more equal education gave citizens more opportunities and power for opposing corruption. Secondly, the need for increased state capacity was a strong motivation for the introduction of universal education in many countries. In addition to the statistical analyses, historical evidence show that strong states provided more education to their publics and that such states were more common where economic disparities were initially smaller.

Eric M. Uslaner is Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland—College Park. He is Senior Research Fellow, Center for American Law and Political Science, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, Chongqing, China and Honorary Professor of Political Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. He the author of eight books, including The Moral Foundations of Trust (Cambridge University Press, 2002; Chinese translation, Chinese Social Sciences Press, 2007; Korean translation, Today;s Books, 2014), Corruption, Inequality, and the Rule of Law: The Bulging Pocket Makes the Easy Life (Cambridge University Press, 2008; paperback, 2010; Chinese translation forthcoming 2015, Chinese Social Sciences Press; Japanese translation, Nippon Hyoron Sha, 2011), and Segregation and Mistrust: Diversity, Isolation, and Social Cohesion (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and approximately 150 articles. He is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Social and Political Trust (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is part of a team with Ase Berit Grodeland and Leslie Templeton Holmes investigating Russian legal culture under a grant from the Research Council of Norway program on Russia and the High North Atlantic. He has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage and C.V. Starr Foundations. He was the Fulbright Distinguished Professor of American Political Science at the Australian National University, Canberra in 2010 and in 1981-82 was Fulbright Professor of American Studies and Political Science at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

However, over the last few years the level of attention seems to have declined, not least because of the major financial and, later, real economy crisis, meanwhile policy-makers have often neglected this area or addressed it with a piecemeal and scattered approach (R&D, innovation, patents, training, skills, brands, culture, social cohesion, etc.).

The speech aims to “rediscover” the centrality of intangibles, their measurement and the information thereon for an equilibrated and long term growth of companies, financial markets and territories, and hence to relaunch at policy level the crucial issues linked to these “special” resources for the management and drive of a knowledge-rooted, digital, and cohesive global economy.

Prof. Stefano Zambon (PhD) is Chair of Accounting and Business Economics at the University of Ferrara, Italy. Visiting appointments in universities of four continents, including Waseda Tokyo, Stern Business School at New York, Christchurch (New Zealand), London Business School, HEC and ESCP Paris, Melbourne, and Passau (Germany). He has more than 100 publications in books and international journals in the areas of management and reporting of intangibles, the representation of intellectual and knowledge capital, international financial reporting, and accounting theory and history. Coordinator of the 2003 Study for the European Commission on the measurement of intangible assets. Member of the expert group that in 2006 has prepared the EC Study «RICARDIS» on Intangibles in research-based SMEs. In 2013 he has been a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on «IP Valuation». Invited key-note speaker at OECD, United Nations, European Parliament, European Commission, and French, Chinese and Japanese Governments’ events on intangibles. From 2005 he is the Coordinator of the series of Annual Workshops on Intangibles and Intellectual Capital run by the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). From April 2014 he is the President of the of the official Expert Group on Intangibles set up by the French Government. Founding member of the Global Network «World Intellectual Capital Initiative» (WICI — www.wici-global.com), of which he is Deputy Chairman from July 2013. He is also Chairman of WICI Europe and Secretary General of WICI Italy.

My analyses trace this transformation and illuminate its consequences for both accountable and effective governance. Surprising as it may seem for advocates of an elite theory of democracy, the emergence of a more assertive culture is beneficial for both accountable and effective governance.

Christian Welzel is the Political Culture Research Professor at Leuphana University in Lueneburg, Germany. He is also President (emer.) and Vice-President of the World Values Survey Association and Foreign Consultant to the Laboratory for Comparative Social Research at the National Research University/Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia. His research focuses on human empowerment, emancipative values, cultural change and democratization. A recipient of various large-scale grants, Welzel is the author of more than a hundred scholarly publications. Besides his just published Freedom Rising (2013 at CUP, winner of the Alexander George Award and the Stein Rokkan Prize, see www.cambridge.org/welzel), the most recent books include: The Civic Culture Transformed (with Russell J. Dalton, at CUP 2014); Democratization (with Christian Haerpfer, Ronald Inglehart and Patrick Bernhagen, at OUP 2009) and Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy (with Ronald Inglehart, 2005 at CUP).

In our research, we argue that the evolution of parenting style is driven by economic incentives. The permissive wave in the 1960s and 1970s was associated with low inequality, low unemployment and low return to education. Conversely, increasing inequality and returns to school since the 1980s has paved the way to the popularity of a change in parenting style whereby mothers and fathers get deeply involved in all dimensions of their children lives (support in homework and exam preparation, extra-curricular activities, sport, etc.). Moreover, there are large differences across countries. Survey data show that parents in more unequal countries (e.g., China and the US) place more emphasis on hard work, and consider imagination and independence to be less important. Conversely, Scandinavian parents emphasize the value of imagination and independence, consistent with the observation that in these countries children enjoy more leeway than their peers in Southern Europe and the US. Helicopter parents and tiger moms have important effects on social mobility, because the heavy involvement of parents increases the importance of the family background, magnifying inequality in opportunities.

Prof. Fabrizio Zilibotti, is the Chair of Macroeconomics and Political Economy at the Department of Economics of the University of Zurich and the Scientific Director of the UBS Center for Economics in Society. He is the co-winner of 2009 edition of the Yrjo Jahnsson Award of the European Economic Association. He is also the co-winner of the 2012 Sun Yefang Prize, the most prestigious economics award in China. He is a designated co-editor of Econometrica (in office as of 01.07.2015), the former chief editor (2009-14) of the Journal of the European Economic Association, a former director and managing editor (2002-06) of the Review of Economic Studies, and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Growth and of China Economic Review. He is the co-director of the NBER-SI program on Income Distribution and Macroeconomics. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, EEA, CEPR and CESifo.His research on growth, technical change, economic development and political economy is published in the most important academic journals in economics, including, among others, the American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and Review of Economic Studies.