bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
As the Whorl Turns
Authors: McCafferty Geoffrey , McCafferty Sharisse 
Published: February 2013

AbstractWoven textiles were highly prized commodities in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, to the extent that they were commonly used as tribute items and even as a standard of value in commercial exchange. This article discusses ways that textile production has been approached archaeologically in terms of both its function and cultural meanings. Textile production was important both functionally and symbolically. Major female deities from throughout Mesoamerica were closely associated with this important aspect of domestic production, which was also linked metaphorically with sexual reproduction. Textile symbolism in Mixtec codices were also used to denote architectural and natural spaces, as a metaphor for the acculturation of the landscape.
Households in Ancient Mesoamerica
Authors: Carballo David M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractMesoamerican peoples built for themselves a wide array of domestic units, ranging from modest wattle-and-daub structures in the earliest villages to Teotihuacan's highly planned urban apartment compounds, which were among the most populous residences of the ancient world. This article outlines four broad dimensions of Mesoamerican households: their social organization, their variability related to status, their productive activities, and their ritual practices.
Communities in Ancient Mesoamerica
Authors: Canuto Marcello A. , Yaeger Jason 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article reviews research showing the importance of an archaeology of communities for Mesoamerica. Methodologically, the community is situated between the scales of household and polity, which permits researchers to have new insights into the broader social and political dynamics through which these other social institutions were constituted and changed over time. As a paradigm, this approach treats communities as emergent social institutions in which local identities were constituted as a consequence of shared quotidian and extraordinary practices. Because they often were important nodes within regional political and economic structures, communities also become the key arenas for the negotiation of relationships and affiliations that linked its members with other social groups, institutions, and networks.
Cities and Urbanism in Prehispanic Mesoamerica
Authors: Blanton Richard E. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractCities became an important and endurable characteristic of Mesoamerican civilization after 500 bc. This aspect of the Mesoamerican past was not widely recognized until the 1960s and 1970s when settlement-pattern archaeologists initiated field research at Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, and Dzibilchaltún. Since these pioneering efforts, archaeologists and ethnohistorians not only have amassed an impressive body of data, but they also have turned to other disciplines, principally sociology and geography, for new methods and theories. This article discusses the regal-ritual city concept; cities, towns, and urbanism in society; the problems with urbanism; and city and moral community.
Creation and Cosmology
Authors: Taube Karl A. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses gods and mythic origins in ancient Mesoamerican thought. In ancient Mesoamerican thought, the creation and maintenance of the ordered world was only achieved through a concerted effort by the gods, a weighty responsibility that continued through the sacrificial offerings and rituals of mortals. The myths and behavior of gods not only explained the origins of the world but also served as models for human behavior for commoners and elites alike. Given the time depth and many cultures of Mesoamerica, it is not surprising that there is an extensive and complex array of deities and myths pertaining to this region. Some myths, such as the Aztec (or Mexica) episode of the birth of Huitzilopochtli, are unique to a particular time, place, and people. However, certain cosmogonic episodes and types of deities are particularly salient, making it possible to discuss broad and basic patterns of belief. Among these, the relation of events of creation to calendrical cycles is fundamental, both in terms of ordering the world and, as such, timed moments and in socially replicating and reifying the original acts of deities in the world of mortals.
Mesoamerican Religious Beliefs
Authors: Reilly F. Kent 
Published: February 2013

AbstractMesoamerica was unified by a commonly held, if not unified, system of religious practice. Mesoamerican religion possessed a cosmology that saw the visible world as multitiered, consisting of the Above Realm of the heavens; the middle Earthly Realm, the home of living humanity; and the watery Beneath Realm of the dead and thus of the ancestors. Within this layered cosmic model, directionality and coloration played pivotal roles. Each cosmic layer possessed its own deities, and they were linked by an axis-mundi that could take the form of a world tree or mountain, or a temple or sacred fire. At times this axis mundi could assume the personified form of a ruler or important religious practitioner. The deities and supernatural entities that inhabited these realms could and often did cross the three cosmic realms.
The Living and the Dead
Authors: Fitzsimmons James L. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractIn ancient Mesoamerica, the dead remained social actors and, as such, they often continued to play significant roles in the lives of everyday people. Unlike contemporary Western views of the dead, where even deceased political figures lack true agency, the dead of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica were ever-present and were believed to be capable of making their influence tangible for the living. In addition to passively defining territorial boundaries and resource rights, for example, the dead could engage in a variety of more active exploits, ranging from “dancing” at weddings to “witnessing” royal accessions. In short, the dead were a vital part of life in Mesoamerica. Hence, the death of an individual in ancient Mesoamerica may be viewed as the beginning of a long process of social rebirth and reinvention. This article discusses ancient Mesoamerican views about the relationships between the living and the dead; the use of physical spaces in which the dead were buried in order to establish social or political positions; human remains and mortuary rituals; and ancestor veneration.
Art in the Aztec Empire
Authors: Umberger Emily 
Published: February 2013

AbstractArchaeological remains testify to the spread of goods and ideas over broad areas of Mesoamerica at different times throughout its prehispanic history. However, most material expansions are unaccompanied by texts, so it is difficult to identify which resulted from empires, and which from other types of interaction, like trade, gift giving, and emulation. In contrast, the Aztec Empire, which dominated central Mexico during its final pre-conquest years, is known to us mostly through documents written during and after its overthrow by Spaniards in 1521. Ironically, the material remains do not match the expectations raised by the documents. More relics have been excavated and studied in the last few decades than previously, but relatively few scholars have yet engaged with their evidence. This article shows how the imagery of sculptures can supplement and refine our notions of Aztec strategies.
Early Mesoamerican Writing Systems
Authors: Justeson John 
Published: February 2013

AbstractFrom a comparative perspective, the early development of writing in Mesoamerica is poorly preserved. In Mesopotamia, more than six thousand tablets attest the first two centuries of the archaic, proto-cuneiform stage of the world's most ancient writing system. In contrast, the first few centuries of Mesoamerican writing, up to about 400 bc, are probably represented by fewer than a dozen texts. This article discusses Formative period scripts, relationships among the scripts, representational principles, spelling grammatical morphemes, and precursors of writing.
Maya Writing
Authors: Grube Nikolai 
Published: February 2013

AbstractAncient Maya civilization is widely known for its hieroglyphic writing system. Although the Maya were not the only Mesoamerican civilization that had developed writing, Maya hieroglyphs have received major attention because of the sheer size of the script corpus as well as the fact that Maya writing has been deciphered during the last thirty years so that approximately 75 percent of its written texts can now be understood. This article discusses the structure of Maya writing, sentences and text structure, the language of Maya inscriptions, and social dimensions of Maya writing and literature.
Population Decline during and after Conquest
Authors: Storey Rebecca 
Published: February 2013

AbstractTwo big controversies continue to be debated about what happened to Native Americans when Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere to conquer and colonize. The first controversy is over how many people were present and thus what was the scale of the depopulation. The second controversy is over what caused the depopulation. Most researchers agree that there are two main culprits: the introduction of new diseases from the Old World and the stresses caused by conquest and colonization. This article first looks at the evidence for the pre-contact population of Mesoamerica. Then, it discusses the casualties of conquest. The important controversy over the causes of depopulation after conquest is then investigated in depth. Research on this subject is still ongoing.
Legal Institutions and Economic Development
Authors: Beck Thorsten 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article focuses on the economic approach to institutions, looking at their role of supporting markets and exchange between economic agents, overcoming market frictions. The article is organized as follows. First, it defines legal institutions and presents different attempts at measuring them. Then, it surveys the historic, theoretical, and empirical literature that shows the importance of legal institutions for capitalism and economic development. It presents different theories of the divergence of legal institutions across countries and empirical evidence. The final section summarizes and looks forward.
Capital Markets and Financial Politics: Preferences and Institutions
Authors: Roe Mark J. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article outlines the main weaknesses in the interaction between political institutions and capitalism in both developed and developing nations, illustrates this interplay with historical capital markets examples, and shows how the interaction between capital markets and politics has been seen in the academic literature. It focuses not on the standard and important channel of how institutions affect preferences and outcomes, but on how and when immediate preferences can trump, restructure, and even displace established institutions. The article is organized as follows. First, it describes the concepts of how capital markets depend on political institutions and preferences. The second part shows how political divisions can lead to differing capital markets outcomes in the developed world, describing conflicts between haves and have-nots and fissures among the haves. The third part develops these concepts for the developing world, looking at elites' interests, nonelites' interests, political stability, and the impact of economic inequality. The fourth part examines several contemporary and historical examples in the developed world, including the power of labor in Europe, managers in modern America, populists in American history, and the forces for codetermination in mid-twentieth-century Germany. The fifth part extends and deepens the argument, showing the impact of left-to-right shifts over time and how these can be better analyzed in the academic literature. The sixth part describes overall limits to a political economy approach, while the final section concludes.
The Role of Finance in Economic Development: Benefits, Risks, and Politics
Authors: Beck Thorsten 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article explores the role of the financial sector for economic growth, the causes and consequences of financial fragility, and the politics behind financial deepening and fragility. In doing so, it identifies the critical role of the financial sector within capitalist economies, a role with bright and dark sides. Specifically, it surveys the large theoretical and empirical literature that links a sound financial system to the process of economic development. It discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on bank fragility and banking crises and surveys the literature on the political economy of financial deepening. Importantly, it relates these three strands of the literature to each other and to the current crisis.
Management and Governance of the Business Enterprise: Agency, Contracting, and Capabilities Perspectives
Authors: Teece David J. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article contrasts three views or paradigms of the business enterprise and of critical management issues regarding governance. The first two are the agency and contracting paradigms. These dominate most discussion of the governance of corporate activities. The third is the capabilities perspective, which is starting to gain attention in the literature. Agency theory highlights how incentives should be crafted and governance activities focused to bring about better performance for shareholders when ownership and control are separated. Transaction cost economics highlights, as does agency theory, the importance of opportunism. But it adds asset specificity considerations that are also relevant to organizational design choices, including governance mechanisms. The capabilities perspective focuses less on managing opportunism and more on harnessing and managing opportunity. In that sense, it is closer to the essence of capitalism.
Executive Compensation: Governance and the Financial Crisis
Authors: Conyon Martin J. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article provides a broad discussion of executive compensation and incentives, investigating whether outcomes are consistent with economic theory. The rest of this article is organized as follows. It discusses various economic approaches to executive pay. Then it investigates factors that have been driving the growth in CEO compensation. It provides a commentary on executive compensation and the recent financial crisis. A final section offers some concluding remarks.
The East Asian (mostly Japanese) model of Capitalism
Authors: Odagiri Hiroyuki 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses the East Asian model of capitalism, contrasting it with the textbook version of capitalism, which in most cases is based on an Anglo–American model, and illustrates that the latter is hardly universal. In fact, the latter can be a minority model. It discusses the East Asian model from four perspectives that must be at the center of any such discussion. They are business groups, corporate ownership and management, interfirm relationships, and laissez-faire versus industrial policy.
Refounding Capitalism
Authors: Phelps Edmund 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article addresses the following questions: What is capitalism? What is the distinctive merit of a well-functioning capitalism? Can dynamism justify capitalism? It considers how the element of instability in capitalist systems affect the argument for continuing with capitalism. This is followed by discussions of whether there are reforms that address speculative swings while causing little or no damage to economic dynamism and inclusion; address the decline in the past decade of economic dynamism while causing little or no increase in instability; and address the still insufficient levels of economic inclusion without stifling dynamism.
The Private Equity Contract
Authors: Davidoff Steven M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article studies the question of the private equity contract in the post-2007 financial crisis. It considers the causes and consequences of the private equity contract during periods of financial crisis. It then argues that the private equity contract is a relevant part of the past success of private equity, and outlines the development and origins of the private equity contract and its structure. From there the article examines the effect of the financial crisis on the private equity contract, where it emphasizes the role that the private equity contract has had in the private equity industry. This article also presents the failures of the private equity contract and its ability to limit the development of private equity.
Buyouts in Western European Countries: The Impact on Company Growth and Innovation
Authors: Ughetto Elisa 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article studies a sample of 265 buyouts that were conducted from 1997 until 2004. These buyouts involved companies in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, and the Netherlands. It explores the extent to which buyouts affect the performance of target companies for a three-year period around the deal date. It then assesses whether such operations encourage or limit the innovation activity of acquired firms. Finally, this article discusses the effects of private equity investments on firm growth. An assessment of the total innovative effort of the sample firms is also included.
Private Equity: Value Creation and Performance
Authors: Graf Christian , Kaserer Christoph , Schmidt Daniel M. 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article serves as a comprehensive overview of the performance of private equity transactions. It gathers information from an analysis of 10,328 private equity deals, which include 3,296 pure buyout transactions. It introduces a new perspective for the analysis of the key drivers of value creation of private equity. It then isolates the impact of market timing, leverage, and operational improvements on transactions returns before focusing on the transactions in the financial institution industry. This article also provides indirect evidence that shows the possibility of operational improvements being the primary value drivers in other industries as well.
Do Private Equity Fund-of-Funds Managers Provide Value?
Authors: Knill April 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article addresses the question of whether the private equity fund-of-funds managers provide value or not. It studies the value added by funds of funds, and suggests that fund-of-funds managers do not appear to perform better on a risk-adjusted basis than their peers. This article also tries to determine if these managers provide the private equity investor with value. It also considers if the institutional investors should invest in getting the necessary connection that would help them directly access private equity investments.
The Role of Private Equity in Private Acquisitions
Authors: Gonenc Halit , Leisink Koos 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article addresses the role of private equity in private acquisitions, and studies strategic bidder announcement returns for firms that obtain private targets that are backed with private equity or not. It first determines what bidders of private equity-backed targets gain from private deals. Next, it examines the announcement returns of bidders across gains that involve only private equity firms and introduces the firms' ability to control.
Buyouts Around the World
Authors: Andres Christian , Betzer Andre , Gider Jasmin 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article discusses global buyouts. It tries to explain the international differences in buyout markets across countries, but is not concerned with the performance and investment strategies on the fund level. The first section takes a look at the buyout activity of different countries, and then it forms a relationship between buyouts, the institutional environment, and the quality of corporate governance. The following section reviews the present empirical evidence of buyout strategies that are pursued in various geographical regions. Finally, this article tries to relate the findings to the institutional environments.
Keys to Fundraising Success in Nascent Venture Capital Firms
Authors: Walske Jennifer , Zacharakis Andrew 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article applies resource-based view (RBV) theory and asks which founding conditions are most closely related to a new firm's ability to capture its earliest resources. RBV theory suggests that a firm creates a competitive advantage if its strategy is closely married to firm-specific resources. By tightly linking firm resources and strategy, other firms are less likely to replicate firm strategy. While RBV theory has been widely used to assess firm performance, its use in understanding early firm resource acquisition has been largely unexplored. The article explores how the combination of founders' human capital and early strategy correlate with a nascent venture capital firm's ability to raise its first fund. It begins with a discussion of theory and related hypotheses, and then elaborates on findings, noting the research's limitations. It concludes with a summary of findings and suggestions for future research.
Performance Implications of Venture Capital Syndication Networks
Authors: Trapido Denis 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article considers the performance implications of venture capital syndication networks. First, it reviews theories of functions of syndication networks. Each of these theories suggests a way that networks help venture investors access better-performing investment targets or better manage them. The four functions that can be examined with the data used in this article—trust generation, preventing abuse of information asymmetries, sharing of management experience, and sharing of risk evaluation expertise—are discussed in detail. Next, it constructs measures of these four functions and uses them to describe the evolution of the venture capital (VC) syndication networks in the United States. This description focuses on the role of VC networks in and after the venture investment boom that peaked in 2000. Finally, it examines the effect of the four functions on the performance of venture investment recipients. As the performance of VC investors is determined by that of their investment recipients, the conclusions of this analysis extend to the performance of VC investors. The concluding section discusses the implications of the results for the sustainability of VC's role in nurturing cutting-edge, breakthrough technologies.
Venture Capital Law Firms: An Analysis of Equity Investments and Networks
Authors: Vronsky Paul 
Published: February 2013

AbstractThis article explores the role of lawyers in the venture capital industry. It addresses two interrelated topics: how lawyers factor into venture capital networks and the role of equity investments by Silicon Valley law firms in the companies they represent. The structure of the article follows the parallel tracks of network effects in venture capital and equity investments by lawyers in client companies, tying them together at appropriate points. First it explores the existing literature in these two fields. Next it develops a theoretical framework for lawyers as a part of venture capital networks and for lawyers taking equity investments in clients, concluding with why the two may be interrelated. The final section includes empirical results from data gathered by the authors of initial public offerings from a one-year sample in 2006–2007 as well as three years for specific venture capital law firms and venture capital funds. Aside from linking equity investment and network effects, these results are quite unlike what has been analyzed by other authors. The article offers a more comprehensive survey of Silicon Valley law firms and venture capital funds, as well as a more rigorous comparison to what law firms are doing in other geographical and industry spaces. It concludes with a discussion of the study's limitations and suggestions for further research.