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Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School; 12/2021, Against the backdrop of mounting public demand for action against corruption the world over, the central objective and motivation behind this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of strategies that can help societies improve their control of corruption. More specifically, it investigates the overarching, policy-relevant research question of how to render donor-supported anti-corruption efforts more effective. Rooted in a cumulative research design, this thesis consists of three papers that approach the research question from different angles. The first paper lays the theoretical groundwork by tracing the historic roots of the widespread view today that corruption is unacceptable and delimits the corruption phenomenon conceptually by comparing it to its opposites. In addition, it places corruption in the context of the grand theories of development and derives the main theories of change from the corruption literature. The second paper connects contemporary corruption research with anti-corruption practice and identifies paradigmatic shifts in donor-supported anti-corruption efforts. It discusses the most frequently adopted anti-corruption instruments and develops typologies of interventions to facilitate a systematic analysis of the fragmented landscape of donor-supported anti-corruption activities. The third paper applies the analytical framework introduced in the second paper to study the case of the World Bank. The paper presents and interprets the first comprehensive inventory of World Bank activities that addressed corruption explicitly between 1996 and 2016. Building on the inventory data and on expert interviews, the paper investigates the impact of factors internal and external to the World Bank on the institution’s anti-corruption programming. Overall, the in-depth analysis of a major donor revealed that organizational-level factors such as those related to the underlying financial model, organizational culture, and policy mandate may constrain the anti-corruption policy formulation process and lead to inapt design and reduced effectiveness of anti-corruption reforms. From this finding follows the practical conclusion for donors that giving greater consideration to internal incentive structures and its impact on development policy design may contribute to improving the effectiveness of interventions.

Bernstein Conference 2021 abstract. http://bernstein-conference.de

Being able to distinguish between true DNA variants and technical sequencing artefacts is a fundamental task in whole genome, exome or targeted gene analysis. Variant calling tools provide diagnostic parameters, such as strand bias or an aggregated overall quality for each called variant, to help users make an informed choice about which variants to accept or discard. Having several such quality indicators poses a problem for the users of variant callers because they need to set or adjust thresholds for each such indicator. Alternatively, machine learning methods can be used to train a classifier based on these indicators. This approach needs large sets of labeled training data, which is not easily available. The new approach presented here relies on the idea that a true DNA variant exists independently of technical features of the read in which it appears (e.g. base quality, strand, position in the read). Therefore the nucleotide separability classification problem - predicting the nucleotide state of each read in a given pileup based on technical features only - should be near impossible to solve for true variants. Nucleotide separability, i.e. achievable classification accuracy, can either be used to distinguish between true variants and technical artefacts directly, using a thresholding approach, or it can be used as a meta-feature to train a separability-based classifier. This article explores both possibilities with promising results, showing accuracies around 90%.

It is crucial for survival to rapidly and accurately determine the location of objects. As humans, we constantly estimate positions of stationary and moving targets around us, and do so successfully, despite eye movements that induce motion on the retina. One vital brain area has been identified for localization and motion processing: the middle temporal area (MT). We set forth to investigate the responses of single cells and local field potentials (LFP) in area MT of the rhesus macaque in order to study its tuning properties during eye movements. We presented randomly positioned, flickering bars to map neurons’ visual responses. Meanwhile, we superimposed a fixation point to keep the eyes still or a moving random dot pattern, which induced Optokinetic Nystagmus, a specific type of eye movement. During fixation, we found the responses of area MT to be—contrary to the current beliefs in literature—polarity sensitive (project 1). Our findings indicate that the receptive field (RF) position in area MT is yoked to the eye, independent of eye position and eye movement. That is, the cells are coding in an eye-centered reference frame and the cells’ RFs do not shift (project 2). We found that in area MT, eye position modulated not only neurons’ firing rates; the power in the gamma spectrum exhibited gain modulation as well—gain fields (project 3). Finally, we show dramatic changes during fast eye movements of both neuronal firing rates and LFP. The LFP modulation depended highly on the frequency band, i.e. theta power was strongly enhanced while the stimulus frequencies in the gamma range were decreased. We speculate that the LFP modulations allow us to identify layer specific differences. Furthermore, these modulations lead us to suggest a new mechanism for saccadic suppression: de-synchronization (project 4). In conclusion, we advanced the knowledge on motion processing and perceptual stability and proposed a novel role for de-synchronization in the phenomenon of saccadic suppression.