Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México

About: Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México is a education organization based out in Mexico City, Mexico. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Population. The organization has 1098 authors who have published 2532 publications receiving 39083 citations. The organization is also known as: Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico & Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology.

Banks and Entrepreneurs in Porfirian Mexico: Inside Exploitation or Sound Business Strategy?

Abstract: Banks in Porfirian Mexico widely engaged in the practice of making long-term loans to their own directors, a practice known as 'auto-prestamo'. This was neither pernicious nor fraudulent. Rather, Porfirian banks behaved as the financial arms of extended kinship and personal business groups. These groups used banks to raise impersonal capital for their diversified enterprises and give their partnerships a more permanent institutional base. Investors in these banks knew full well that they were investing in the businesses of a particular group and developed sophisticated techniques to monitor bank directors. However, because entry into banking was severely restricted under Porfirian law, the system concentrated economic power in a few hands and contributed to Mexico's oligopolistic industrial structure. The prevalent view in the historical and social science literature has been that traditional institutions, particularly kinship-based or personalised business practices, have been a major impediment to Latin America's economic growth. Alternatively, however, some scholars have suggested that family ties and personal relationships can compensate for the difficulty of enforcing contracts, for insecurity of property rights, and for lack of organised markets that characterise pre-industrial societies such as Mexico in I880.1 Kinship groups and personal networks, however, were not enough on their own to organise and finance the complex economic enterprises factories, railroads, mines, and plantations that Noel Maurer is Profesor Asociado del Departamento Academico de Economia, Instituto Tecnol6gico Aut6nomo de Mexico. * I would like to thank Stephen Haber, Gavin Wright, Avner Greif, Ted Beatty, Joachim Voth, and the anonymous referees of the Journal of Latin American Studies for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Any and all errors are, of course, entirely my own. 1See especially the work of Nathaniel H. Leff, 'Industrial Organization and Entrepreneurship in the Developing Countries: The Economic Groups', Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol. 26, April 1978; 'Capital Markets and the Less Developed Countries: The Group Principle', in Ronald McKinnon (ed.), Money and Finance in Economic Growth and Development: Essays in Honor of Edward S. Shaw (New York, 1976), pp. 97-z22, and 'Entrepreneurship and Economic Development: The Problem Revisited', Journal of Economic Literature, vol. 17, March I979, pp. 46-64. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.136 on Tue, 05 Jul 2016 06:22:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Heteroclinic primary intersections and codimension one Melnikov method for volume-preserving maps.

Abstract: We study families of volume preserving diffeomorphisms in R3 that have a pair of hyperbolic fixed points with intersecting codimension one stable and unstable manifolds. Our goal is to elucidate the topology of the intersections and how it changes with the parameters of the system. We show that the “primary intersection” of the stable and unstable manifolds is generically a neat submanifold of a “fundamental domain.” We compute the intersections perturbatively using a codimension one Melnikov function. Numerical experiments show various bifurcations in the homotopy class of the primary intersections.

Exploring the benefits of mentoring activities for the mentor

Abstract: Purpose – Mentoring is more and more studied by researchers on account of its professional and personal impact on mentees. This contribution has two main objectives. First, to empirically validate the benefits for the mentor and to test links between mentoring activities and benefits through a multidimensional analysis. Second, to incorporate two variables structuring the relationship into the analysis: the formal vs informal nature of the mentoring relationship and the gender composition of the dyad. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 161 French managers have been surveyed. Findings – The results show that mentors value the personal dimension of the relationship more than the professional dimension. Moreover, informal mentoring favours the perception of a rewarding experience by the mentor, whereas formal mentoring is synonymous with improved professional performance. This research calls into question the advantage of same-sex dyads, suggesting that heterogeneity favours improved performance. Originality/value – The originality of the paper was to focus on the homogeneity of the mentor-protege dyad in terms of gender.

A practical method for obtaining prior distributions in reliability

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a comprehensive methodology to specify prior distributions for commonly used models in reliability. The methodology is based on characteristics easy to communicate by the user in terms of time to failure. This information could be in the form of intervals for the mean and standard deviation, or quantiles for the failure-time distribution. The derivation of the prior distribution is done for two families of proper initial distributions, namely s-normal-gamma, and uniform distribution. We show the implementation of the proposed method to the parameters of the s-normal, lognormal, extreme value, Weibull, and exponential models. Then we show the application of the procedure to two examples appearing in the reliability literature, and . By estimating the prior predictive density, we find that the proposed method renders consistent distributions for the different models that fulfill the required characteristics for the time to failure. This feature is particularly important in the application of the Bayesian approach to different inference problems in reliability, model selection being an important example. The method is general, and hence it may be extended to other models not mentioned in this paper.