Benefits Of Specialization Research Articles

Uneven Development, Choice of Technique, and Generalized Worldwide Law of Value

We address the issue of persistent uneven development from a Marxist perspective. First, we show the conceptual problems in applying the unmodified law of value to the international setting. Second, we propose a generalization of the global law of value by introducing an additional level of abstraction into the global valorization process—national abstract labor. Third, we examine broad cases of internationalization caused by deviations in productivity differences across industries from the average productivity differences across countries. We discover an endogenous national and international dynamic push toward specialization that perpetuates uneven development. The benefits of such specialization are skewed in favor of more developed countries, and the potential for technological improvement created by the global division of labor blocks technological progress in less developed countries. JEL Classification: B14, F00, F63, O14

Assessing the long term benefits of early specialization in youth sports on athletic and psychological outcomes

Assessing the long term benefits of early specialization in youth sports on athletic and psychological outcomes

Within or across Auditors? Understanding Knowledge Transfer in Audit Production

SYNOPSIS Knowledge transfer affects audit production: it is an underlying reason for specialization premiums and economies of scale. Using measures of client-level comparability to proxy for the internal (within-auditor) and external (across auditors) knowledge transfers that occur during audit production, our results indicate that internal knowledge transfer subsumes external knowledge transfer. Although this result may seem intuitive, recent research implies external knowledge transfer significantly impacts audit efficiency. Thus, the dominance of internal knowledge transfer is important to document. We also provide evidence that the benefits of auditor specialization are not uniform, as typically modeled in the literature. Specifically, we provide evidence that knowledge transfer enhances the efficiencies from auditor specialization. Finally, we find knowledge transfer is associated with greater audit efficiency, irrespective of auditor specialization or industry homogeneity. Overall, our results reaffirm the importance of within-auditor knowledge transfer and highlight the importance of considering client characteristics when examining knowledge transfer. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources listed in the text. JEL Classifications: M41; M42.

Становлення мікро- та макроекономічного аналізу фінансового посередництва. Стаття перша. Теорії посередницьких функцій банків Д. Даймонда і Ф. Дибвіга та становлення мікроекономічного аналізу фінансових інституцій

The first of two articles which reveal the theoretical and practical significance of the researches awarded 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences. The author shows that the laureates laid the foundations of both the modern microeconomic theory of banks and financial institutions and the analysis of the role of financial intermediation in macroeconomic cycles. It is found that until the 1980s two powerful theoretical traditions dominated in the analysis of financial intermediation. The first tradition was to consider banks primarily as subjects of the money supply. It originates from the controversy between the quantitative theory of money and the real bills doctrine and culminates in the outstanding work by M. Friedman and A. Schwartz. The second tradition was a well-formalized neoclassical approach to the financial system. It was based on the efficient markets hypothesis, the Modigliani-Miller theorem, and the banking theory of E. Fama, where financial institutions are only a veil for real economic activities. It is shown that the growth of interest in the micro- and macroeconomic aspects of the financial sector activities in the late 1970s was due to the growth of its power due to the development of technologies and globalization, and due to the emergence of information economic theory which created a theoretical basis for the endogenous derivation of financial intermediaries that overcome market imperfections in ensuring the flow of funds between savers and borrowers. The article reveals the theoretical and practical importance of D. Diamond and Ph. Dybvig’s works, in which a bank endogenously arises as an optimal contract for solving important socio-economic problems of financing long-term projects with liquid deposits and of delegated monitoring of borrowers. The author emphasizes the importance of the scientists’ analysis and formalization of the incentives that determine the peculiarities of the intermediary role of banks and the nature of their services for financial regulation. It is shown that the model of delegated monitoring by D. Diamond not only demonstrates social benefits of specialization in monitoring, but also solves the problem of depositors' monitoring a bank as a monitor, revealing the incentives for the efficient implementation of borrowers monitoring by the bank: in conditions of diversification of borrowers, when their profits have an independent probability distribution, monitoring helps to avoid liquidation even in the event that part of the borrowers' projects are not successful. It is concluded that the formalization of the banks’ built-in vulnerability in the Diamond-Dybvig model, associated with their function of maturity transformation, and its overcoming by government institutional mechanisms, which, among other things, can distort the banks’ incentives, in effect substantiate the "symbiosis" of a state and banks in ensuring the latter’s stable functioning.

SMART SPECIALIZATION STRATEGY AS AN INNOVATIVE BASIS OF GLOBAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: EUROPEAN EXPERIENCE

The strategy of smart specialization rightly serves as a key reference point for the economic development of individual industries and regions. This study is aimed at analyzing the European experience in applying the strategy of smart specialization as an innovative basis of global economic development. It is becoming increasingly clear that the strategy of smart specialization can fundamentally change the rules for many industries. The research focuses on the fact that by focusing on specific areas of knowledge and developing targeted capabilities, businesses and organizations can find unique niches and gain a competitive advantage. The smart specialization strategy also has drawbacks, as it requires a deep understanding of the industry and a willingness to invest in specialized skills and resources, or may need to move away from broader, more general strategies to achieve smart specialization. However, it is emphasized that the benefits of smart specialization are clear when it comes to standing out in a crowded marketplace, building deeper relationships with customers, and ultimately driving growth. As industries continue to develop and become more complex, the strategy of smart specialization does not lose its relevance, and the European experience of its implementation will be useful for Ukraine.

P-027 REDUCING SURGICAL WAIT TIMES FOR ABDOMINAL WALL HERNIA OPERATIONS POST COVID-19 BY USING DEDICATED CLINICS

Abstract Background Specialization influences the way that surgeons deliver care and has a direct impact on doctors, healthcare systems and patients. Hernias impact around 2% of the population and repairs are among the most common procedures performed globally. The European Hernia Society recognizes a growing need for specialist surgeons as abdominal wall surgery becomes more complex with newer techniques and more challenging cases being encountered. At this trust, a new specialized hernia clinic was implemented in response to COVID backlogs and the growing need and proven benefits of specialization. The project's aim was to review the impact on procedure wait times and outcomes for hernia repairs. Methods A retrospective review of patients undergoing hernia repairs between June 2019 to June 2021 was compared to similar patients who attended the hernia clinic between February 2021 to March 2022. Included operations were inguinal, femoral, and umbilical hernia repairs. Data collected included diagnoses, percentage of day case and wait times. Results 59 patients underwent surgery pre-intervention with average wait times of 191 days. 72 post-intervention patients had an average wait of 59 days. 59 patients were still awaiting surgery post-clinic. Open surgery incidence increased from 66% to 79%. 86% of patients post-intervention were day cases, compared to 78% of pre-intervention patients. Conclusions The new hernia clinic has reduced wait times for surgery and improved day-case rates despite more cases being performed as open procedures. Following these results, the clinic system shows great promise and hernia surgery has the potential to evolve as a sub-specialty.

US Trade Policy With China: Proposing A New Framework for US Economic Competitiveness

Due to the Biden Administration’s decision to uphold a large majority of the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policies, US manufacturing industries are failing to control the market share. This paper explores the proper solutions that need to be taken to restore US competitiveness with China, prioritizing US cooperation with allies and China instead of unwarranted tensions. This paper analyzes the effects of US tariffs on Chinese imported goods on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the US, US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), US manufacturing wages, and overall US manufacturing costs to argue that key US tariffs on Chinese imports should be eliminated. This paper explores the benefits of trade specialization and its effects on the US’s Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) to argue that the US should champion free trade policies such as revitalizing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Finally, this report recommends that the US kickstart wholesale WTO reforms that change the process by which member states identify as “developing” or “developed” nations, and institute stricter litigation statutes against Chinese WTO violations.

A Case for Fine-grain Coherence Specialization in Heterogeneous Systems

Hardware specialization is becoming a key enabler of energy-efficient performance. Future systems will be increasingly heterogeneous, integrating multiple specialized and programmable accelerators, each with different memory demands. Traditionally, communication between accelerators has been inefficient, typically orchestrated through explicit DMA transfers between different address spaces. More recently, industry has proposed unified coherent memory which enables implicit data movement and more data reuse, but often these interfaces limit the coherence flexibility available to heterogeneous systems.This paper demonstrates the benefits of fine-grained coherence specialization for heterogeneous systems. We propose an architecture that enables low-complexity independent specialization of each individual coherence request in heterogeneous workloads by building upon a simple and flexible baseline coherence interface, Spandex. We then describe how to optimize individual memory requests to improve cache reuse and performance-critical memory latency in emerging heterogeneous workloads. Collectively, our techniques enable significant gains, reducing execution time by up to 61% or network traffic by up to 99% while adding minimal complexity to the Spandex protocol.

Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought

Divine Providence in Early Modern Economic Thought

System Configuration Models: Towards a Specialization Approach

Nowadays, system configuration helps to achieve mass customization and manage a wide variety of systems. System configuration is based on a model that gathers all relevant knowledge for a family of systems. This knowledge model can be difficult to formalize and keep up to date; indeed, the knowledge must be made explicit, and can come from different departments and experts within an organization. In addition, it must reflect the different variants and options of a family of systems. Therefore, we try to answer the following question: how to better formalize and structure knowledge for system configuration to define configuration models and use the benefits of specialization in terms of modeling? Thus, in our proposal, we introduce the elements required to formalize the knowledge and define configuration models. This formalization will be done in a structured way using the association of ontology and Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). We use the abilities of ontology to model knowledge of the different artifacts, their characteristics, and composition, and the abilities of CSP to model the relations between artifacts. In our proposal, we also define artifacts at different levels of abstraction using specialization which allows experts to detail or refine the formalized knowledge. We illustrate our proposals on a simplified but realistic example of a bicycle.

State agrarian policy and the efficiency of its implementation at the regional level

Structural and dynamic changes in directions, forms, volumes of state support for agricultural producers in the “post-sanction” period were considered from the standpoint of various scientists. A slight increase in the index of agricultural production, a transition from compensatory to incentive support measures, a significant development of small forms of business are predicted: farming, consumer and industrial cooperation. The author’s method of assessing the effectiveness of new forms of support is proposed based on comparing the amounts and directions of obtained subsidies with changes in the competitiveness of crop and livestock products. The approbation of this technique on agricultural production cooperatives in Udmurtia showed an increase in the state support efficiency, as well as the benefits of further specialization of the republic in the production of dairy products. The technique can be used by the authorities to improve agricultural policy.

DOES GEOGRAPHICAL REGION IMPACT PARENTS’ PERCEPTIONS TOWARDS YOUTH SPORT SPECIALIZATION?

Background:Two billion U.S. healthcare dollars are spent on youth sports injuries each year. This staggering figure is projected to increase as athletes are sustaining more sport-related injuries and are specializing in a single sport at younger ages than ever before. Sport specialization is a modifiable injury risk factor unique to youth athlete populations. Parents are a group of key stakeholders whose knowledge and beliefs likely impact youth sport participation, however a paucity of research exists in this area.Purpose:To assess the differences in perceptions of parents on youth sport participation and specialization based on geographical region.Methods:Parents of children, ages 8-18 years, who participate in organized sports were surveyed for this study. Electronic surveys with a total of 40 questions were circulated via team/organization mailing lists and social media. Geographic regions were described as either South or North based on divisions from the U.S. Census Bureau. Sport specialization was defined as an athlete meeting >2 of the following 3 criteria: participates in one sport to the exclusion of other sports, participates in sport-specific lessons, participates on >2 teams in a single sport. Descriptive statistics and chi-square analyses were used to compare perceptions of parents with specialized and non-specialized athletes across different geographical regions.Results:Three-hundred and seventy-one responses were collected (South=204, North=167). Parents from the South reported a higher number of specialized athletes as compared to parents from the North (54% vs 38%; P=0.003). Regardless of geographical region, most parents did not think specialization had a positive impact on a youth athlete’s development (P=0.307) or their future in that sport (P=0.086) (Figures 1 & 2). Parents from the South did select ‘Potential to earn a college scholarship’ as a motivator for youth sport specialization more often when compared to parents from the North (30% vs 17%; P=0.002).Conclusion:Regional differences exist in the percentage of specialized youth athletes participating in organized sport. Parental knowledge of the risks and benefits of youth sport specialization does not appear to drive these observed differences. Earning a college scholarship was selected more frequently as a reason for specialization in the South, indicating that societal or socioeconomic factors may be present. Further research is needed to determine the underlying factors driving youth sport specialization in the U.S.Figures:Figure 1.Figure 2.

Cardenolides, toxicity, and the costs of sequestration in the coevolutionary interaction between monarchs and milkweeds

For highly specialized insect herbivores, plant chemical defenses are often co-opted as cues for oviposition and sequestration. In such interactions, can plants evolve novel defenses, pushing herbivores to trade off benefits of specialization with costs of coping with toxins? We tested how variation in milkweed toxins (cardenolides) impacted monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) growth, sequestration, and oviposition when consuming tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica), one of two critical host plants worldwide. The most abundant leaf toxin, highly apolar and thiazolidine ring-containing voruscharin, accounted for 40% of leaf cardenolides, negatively predicted caterpillar growth, and was not sequestered. Using whole plants and purified voruscharin, we show that monarch caterpillars convert voruscharin to calotropin and calactin in vivo, imposing a burden on growth. As shown by in vitro experiments, this conversion is facilitated by temperature and alkaline pH. We next employed toxin-target site experiments with isolated cardenolides and the monarch's neural Na+/K+-ATPase, revealing that voruscharin is highly inhibitory compared with several standards and sequestered cardenolides. The monarch's typical >50-fold enhanced resistance to cardenolides compared with sensitive animals was absent for voruscharin, suggesting highly specific plant defense. Finally, oviposition was greatest on intermediate cardenolide plants, supporting the notion of a trade-off between benefits and costs of sequestration for this highly specialized herbivore. There is apparently ample opportunity for continued coevolution between monarchs and milkweeds, although the diffuse nature of the interaction, due to migration and interaction with multiple milkweeds, may limit the ability of monarchs to counteradapt.

Trade or raid: Acadian settlers and native Americans before 1755

Could North America have been settled more peacefully, with fewer property rights violations against Native Americans? To answer this question, we utilize the case of French colonists of Atlantic Canada (the Acadians) and a Native American tribe (the Mi’kmaq) between the 17th and 18th centuries in the areas around the Bay of Fundy in the modern provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Under a relative state of anarchy, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to minimize the relative returns to using violence by adopting rules of collective decision-making that favored consensus-building. By prioritizing consensus, distributional coalitions were faced with higher decision-making costs, making it difficult for concentrated interest groups within each society to capture the gains from fighting and spilling them over as external costs over the rest of the population. As a result, both the Acadians and the Mi’kmaq were able to reap the benefits of productive specialization and social cooperation under the division of labor.

Topological constraints in early multicellularity favor reproductive division of labor.

Reproductive division of labor (e.g. germ-soma specialization) is a hallmark of the evolution of multicellularity, signifying the emergence of a new type of individual and facilitating the evolution of increased organismal complexity. A large body of work from evolutionary biology, economics, and ecology has shown that specialization is beneficial when further division of labor produces an accelerating increase in absolute productivity (i.e. productivity is a convex function of specialization). Here we show that reproductive specialization is qualitatively different from classical models of resource sharing, and can evolve even when the benefits of specialization are saturating (i.e. productivity is a concave function of specialization). Through analytical theory and evolutionary individual-based simulations, we demonstrate that reproductive specialization is strongly favored in sparse networks of cellular interactions that reflect the morphology of early, simple multicellular organisms, highlighting the importance of restricted social interactions in the evolution of reproductive specialization.

Leadership Emergence in OSS Communities: Evidence from the Linux Kernel Development Project

In open-source software (OSS) communities, core developers—e.g., maintainers for a specific subcomponent—play a crucial role in community governance. Previous research has mainly described the characteristics and functional roles of core developers, but few have examined the drivers of progression from peripheral roles to core roles. Our theoretical model deviates from previous research by emphasizing the moderating role of developers’ span of contributions. Specifically, we suggest that the positive effect of code contributions on developers’ progression is weakened, due to productivity losses and higher marginal costs of learning, when their technical span is broader. By contrast, the positive effect of communication with community members on progression is amplified when developers’ communicative span is broader, given the benefits of cross-functional thinking and community integration. Our theory is supported in a longitudinal study of 29,818 developers in the Linux kernel development project. Our paper introduces a novel mechanism for explaining the emergence of lateral governance mechanisms in OSS communities and contributes to the more general debate on the benefits of specialization in the context of organizational governance.

Financial management, division of financial management power and financial literacy in the family context – evidence from relationship partner dyads

PurposeThe article aims to study the relationship between the assignments of financial management responsibilities and the level of financial literacy within married and cohabitating couples.Design/methodology/approachThe link between household financial management and the financial literacy of union partners was examined using dyadic survey data. In the dyadic multilevel regression analysis, the financial management process was scrutinized, and two distinct measures of financial literacy (tested and self-assessed) were used as the outcomes in the analysis.FindingsThe extent to which married and cohabitating individuals engage in household financial management was found to positively correlate with their financial literacy. Self-reports about the division of financial management responsibilities were found to be biased with individuals typically overestimating their share in household financial management. Consequently, the status of household financial manager was not as crucial for financial literacy as was the self-perception of engagement in household financial management. Despite the benefits of intrahousehold labor specialization, delegation of sole responsibility for household financial matters may place the person who waives the responsibility at a serious risk of self-exclusion from lifelong financial learning.Originality/valueThe article uses dyadic data (from married and cohabiting couples), which ensures more rigorous and accurate evidence for the link between the household financial management and financial literacy. A novel approach to the analytical treatment of partners' contradictory reports on the role of couple's financial manager is also proposed. The breadth of household financial management is captured by analyzing three stages of the process: proposing, decision-making and implementation of financial solutions or actions.

SymbiFlow and VPR: An Open-Source Design Flow for Commercial and Novel FPGAs

As the benefits of Moore's Law diminish, computing performance, and efficiency gains are increasingly achieved through specializing hardware to a domain of computation. However, this limits the hardware's generality and flexibility. Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), microchips which can be reprogrammed to implement arbitrary digital circuits, enable the benefits of specialization while remaining flexible. A challenge to using FPGAs is the complex computer-aided design flow required to efficiently map a computation onto an FPGA. Traditionally, these design flows are closed-source and highly specialized to a particular vendor's devices. We propose an alternate data-driven approach, which uses highly adaptable and retargettable open-source tools to target both commercial and research FPGA architectures. While challenges remain, we believe this approach makes the development of novel and commercial FPGA architectures faster and more accessible. Furthermore, it provides a path forward for industry, academia, and the open-source community to collaborate and combine their resources to advance FPGA technology.

Capturing the Benefits of Worker Specialization: Effects of Managerial and Organizational Task Experience

Learning by doing is a fundamental driver of productivity among knowledge workers. As workers accumulate experience working on certain types of tasks (i.e., they become specialized), they also develop proficiency in executing these tasks. However, previous research suggests that organizations may struggle to leverage the knowledge workers accrue through specialization because specialized workers tend to lose interest and reduce effort during task execution. This study investigates how organizations can improve specialized workers’ performance by mitigating the dysfunctional effects of specialization. In particular, we study how other sources of task experiences from the worker's immediate manager as well as the organization itself help manage the relationship between worker specialization and performance. We do so by analyzing a proprietary dataset that comprises of 39,162 software service tasks that 310 employees in a Fortune 100 organization executed under the supervision of 92 managers. Results suggest that the manager role experience (i.e., the manager's experience supervising workers) is instrumental in mitigating the potential negative effect of worker specialization on performance, measured as task execution time. Such influence, however, is contingent on cases in which organizational task experience (i.e., the organization's experience in executing tasks of the same substantive content as the focal task) is limited. Taken together, our research contributes to multiple streams of research and unearths important insights on how multiple sources of experience beyond the workers themselves can help capture the elusive benefits of worker specialization.

Turf wars in government administration: Interdepartmental cooperation in theEuropeanCommission

AbstractOne challenge for government administration is to reap the benefits of specialization while minimizing its negative side effects. In this article, I study the factors that motivate departments to contribute to the joint formulation of public policies. I derive testable hypotheses that discriminate between two competing motivations for interdepartmental cooperation. If department managers are concerned for the quality of public policy, I expect cooperation to be efficient. If, by contrast, departments compete for administrative turf, I expect cooperation to be inefficient and resources to be wasted. I test those hypotheses by studying all policy proposals adopted and published by the European Commission between 2015 and 2017—a total of approximately 4,000 cases. For politically salient proposals, I find that departments are more likely to contribute if they expect competing departments to become active, too. By contrast, the preparation of technical, non‐salient proposals is left to the most specialized departments. Overall, my findings suggest that interdepartmental cooperation in the European Commission is significantly motivated by DGs' competition for administrative turf.