Identity formation in social networks websites: facebook and the interaction between young individuals in the cases of Slovenia and Catalonia

This paper lays down some theoretical framework for further research to be made on the subject of how identity of young Slovenian and Catalan users is forming within the social networking website Facebook. The author pursues his interest based on observation of how communicationand thus interaction between users is changing and how this is reflected in everyday practices. In so doing he tries to identify the connections between the individual, society and technology, asthese are more and more interwoven, and we cannot think one without the other in thecontemporary globalised world.

Cost del tractament del SIDA i d'Hepatitis C per a l'Estat : Comparació de la despesa d'una persona en llibertat vs. un pres

Un dels principals motius que ens va impulsar en l’elecció del tema és que es tracta d’untema que pot despertar curiositat entre la població.Un altre motiu, es que varem trobar que està íntimament relacionat amb els estudis queestem cursant, donat que afecta als pressupostos de l’estat i a la seva restricciópressupostària, i per tant, està directament relacionat amb la macroeconomia. En el nostrecas, reduirem l’àmbit d’estudi al territori català, de manera que estudiarem aquestes duesmalalties dins la despesa en sanitat pública catalana. A demés, estan finançades amb elsnostres impostos, i per tant la seva despesa afecta a la restricció pressupostària delsciutadans.L’elecció d’aquestes malalties no ha estat feta a l’atzar. Inicialment, varem pensar enestudiar els costos dels interns penitenciaris que patien aquestes malalties. Com que laSIDA i d’hepatitis C són les malalties més freqüents dins la presó, i les que tenen unscostos més característics donada la complexitat dels seus tractaments, varem pensar queserien prou representatives.No obstant, a mesura que ens anàvem endinsant en el tema, ens varem adonar que tambéseria molt interessant comparar el cost de les malalties amb el de les persones no recluses, iesbrinar si hi havia algun tipus de cost diferencial. És per això que varem decidir analitzaraquestes dues malalties tant dins com fora.Un altre factor que ens ha impulsat en l’elecció del tema és el fet que el nombre d’interns ales presons té un ritme de creixement constant que s’ha accelerat en els últims anys,sobretot degut a l’augment de la immigració. Això implica un augment progressiu de ladespesa, que es tradueix en una necessitat d’ingressos majors per tal de poder equilibrar larestricció de la qual parlàvem abans.També varem voler anar una mica més lluny i analitzar el pes d’aquestes malalties dins dela despesa que la generalitat ha establert per a la sanitat pública. Com les dues son MDO (malalties de declaració obligatòria ) estan finançades completament pel sector públic.L’objectiu era veure si representaven un cost tant elevat com pensàvem.OBJECTIUS DEL TREBALL:· Demostrar l’elevat cost que suposen certes malalties per l’estat.· Manifestar els canvis en el cost de les malalties amb l’evolució delstractaments.· Analitzar els costos sanitaris extres que es produeixen a les presons.· Destacar l’augment accelerat del nombre d’interns i l’augment del cost sanitarique això suposa. METODOLOGIA: Per tal de poder realitzar l’estudi comparatiu, hem hagut de calcular manualment els costosde les malalties, tot informant-nos del preu dels medicament, les dosis, el cost de lesconsultes externes,etc. A més, per a calcular el cost del tractament dins la presó, ens hemhagut d’informar dels aspectes més generals que envolten a un pres, per poder veure sirealment existeix un cost diferencial respecte la malaltia a l’exterior. Per obtenir aquestesdiverses informacions, ens hem hagut de posar en contacte amb el personal que treballa ala presó que hem pres com a model d’estudi.Així, podem dividir les nostres fonts d’informació en 3 categories:• Obtenció d’informació directament amb el personal de la presó:– Entrevista amb la directora d’infermeria de la Secretaria de ServeisPenitenciaris, Rehabilitació i Justícia Juvenil– Entrevista amb la Cap d’infermeria del Centre Quatre Camins.• Informació a partir de mostres facilitades pels propis funcionaris de la presó• Informació a partir d’estudis sobre el tema i de dades oficials, concretament lesdades oficials sobre els Pressupostos de la Generalitat.

On the Structural Difference between the Evolutionary Approach of Young and that of Kandori, Mailath, and Rob

We provide robust examples of symmetric two-player coordination games in normal form that reveal that equilibrium selection by the evolutionary model of Young (1993) is essentially different from equilibrium selection by the evolutionary model of Kandori, Mailath and Rob (1993).

Global Nash convergence of Foster and Young's regret testing

We construct an uncoupled randomized strategy of repeated play such that, if every player follows such a strategy, then the joint mixed strategy profiles converge, almost surely, to a Nash equilibrium of the one-shot game. The procedure requires very little in terms of players' information about the game. In fact, players' actions are based only on their own past payoffs and, in a variant of the strategy, players need not even know that their payoffs are determined through other players' actions. The procedure works for general finite games and is based on appropriate modifications of a simple stochastic learningrule introduced by Foster and Young.

A generalization of histogram type estimators

We introduce simple nonparametric density estimators that generalize theclassical histogram and frequency polygon. The new estimators are expressed as linear combination of density functions that are piecewisepolynomials, where the coefficients are optimally chosen in order to minimize the integrated square error of the estimator. We establish the asymptotic behaviour of the proposed estimators, and study theirperformance in a simulation study.

The political cost of reforms

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politiciansperceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters.To do so, it proposes a model of elections where political ability is ex-ante unknownand investment in reforms is unobservable. On the one hand, elections improve accountability and allow to keep well-performing incumbents. On the other, politiciansmake too little reforms in an attempt to signal high ability and increase their reappointment probability. Although in a rational expectation equilibrium voters cannotbe fooled and hence reelection does not depend on reforms, the strategy of underinvesting in reforms is nonetheless sustained by out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Contrary tothe conventional wisdom, uncertainty makes reforms more politically viable and may,under some conditions, increase social welfare. The model is then used to study howpolitical rewards can be set so as to maximize social welfare and the desirability of imposing a one-term limit to governments. The predictions of this theory are consistentwith a number of empirical regularities on the determinants of reforms and reelection.They are also consistent with a new stylized fact documented in this paper: economicuncertainty is associated to more reforms in a panel of 20 OECD countries.

Gender gaps in performance: Evidence from young lawyers

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associatelawyers in the United States. Unlike most high-skilled professions, the legal professionhas widely-used objective methods to measure and reward lawyers' productivity: thenumber of hours billed to clients and the amount of new-client revenue generated. Wefind clear evidence of a gender gap in annual performance with respect to bothmeasures. Male lawyers bill ten-percent more hours and bring in more than double thenew-client revenue. We show that the differential impact across genders in the presenceof young children and the differences in aspirations to become a law-firm partneraccount for a large part of the difference in performance. These performance gaps haveimportant consequences for gender gaps in earnings. While individual and firmcharacteristics explain up to 50 percent of earnings gap, the inclusion of performancemeasures explains most of the remainder.

Caution, children crossing: Heterogeneity of victim's cost of care and negligence rule

The paper deals with a bilateral accident situation in which victims haveheterogeneous costs of care. With perfect information,efficient care bythe injurer raises with the victim's cost. When the injurer cannot observeat all the victim's type, and this fact can be verified by Courts, first-bestcannot be implemented with the use of a negligence rule based on thefirst-best levels of care. Second-best leads the injurer to intermediate care,and the two types of victims to choose the best response to it. This second-bestsolution can be easily implemented by a negligence rule with second-best as duecare. We explore imperfect observation of the victim's type, characterizing theoptimal solution and examining the different legal alternatives when Courts cannotverify the injurers' statements. Counterintuitively, we show that there is nodifference at all between the use by Courts of a rule of complete trust and arule of complete distrust towards the injurers' statements. We then relate thefindings of the model to existing rules and doctrines in Common Law and Civil Lawlegal systems.

Cost system design and cost management in the Spanish public sector

Cost systems have been shown to have developed considerably in recent years andactivity-based costing (ABC) has been shown to be a contribution to cost management,particularly in service businesses. The public sector is composed to a very great extentof service functions, yet considerably less has been reported of the use of ABC tosupport cost management in this sector.In Spain, cost systems are essential for city councils as they are obliged to calculate thecost of the services subject to taxation (eg. waste collection, etc). City councils musthave a cost system in place to calculate the cost of services, as they are legally requirednot to profit , from these services.This paper examines the development of systems to support cost management in theSpanish Public Sector. Through semi-structured interviews with 28 subjects within oneCity Council it contains a case study of cost management. The paper contains extractsfrom interviews and a number of factors are identified which contribute to thesuccessful development of the cost management system.Following the case study a number of other City Councils were identified where activity-based techniques had either failed or stalled. Based on the factors identified inthe single case study a further enquiry is reported. The paper includes a summary usingstatistical analysis which draws attention to change management, funding and politicalincentives as factors which had an influence on system success or failure.

A dilution cost approach to financial intermediation and securities markets

This paper proposes a model of financial markets and corporate finance,with asymmetric information and no taxes, where equity issues, Bankdebt and Bond financing may all co-exist in equilibrium. The paperemphasizes the relationship Banking aspect of financial intermediation:firms turn to banks as a source of investment mainly because banks aregood at helping them through times of financial distress. The debtrestructuring service that banks may offer, however, is costly. Therefore,the firms which do not expect to be financially distressed prefer toobtain a cheaper market source of funding through bond or equity issues.This explains why bank lending and bond financing may co-exist inequilibrium. The reason why firms or banks also issue equity in our modelis simply to avoid bankruptcy. Banks have the additional motive that theyneed to satisfy minimum capital adequacy requeriments. Several types ofequilibria are possible, one of which has all the main characteristics ofa "credit crunch". This multiplicity implies that the channels of monetarypolicy may depend on the type of equilibrium that prevails, leadingsometimes to support a "credit view" and other times the classical "moneyview".

Convertibility, currency controls and the cost of capital in Western Europe, 1950-1999

For most of the post-war period, Europe s capital markets remained largely closed to international capital flows. Thispaper explores the costs of this policy. Using an event-study methodology, I examine the extent to which restrictions ofcurrent and capital account convertibility affected stock returns. The delayed introduction of full currency convertibilityincreased the cost of capital. Also, a string of measures designed to reduce capital mobility before the ultimate collapseof the Bretton Woods System had considerable negative effects. These findings offer an explanation for the mountingevidence suggesting that capital account liberalization facilitates growth.

An assessment of empirical Bayes and composite estimators for small areas

We compare a set of empirical Bayes and composite estimators of the population means of the districts (small areas) of a country, and show that the natural modelling strategy of searching for a well fitting empirical Bayes model and using it for estimation of the area-level means can be inefficient.

Using composite estimators to improve both domain and total area estimation

In this article we propose using small area estimators to improve the estimatesof both the small and large area parameters. When the objective is to estimateparameters at both levels accurately, optimality is achieved by a mixed sampledesign of fixed and proportional allocations. In the mixed sample design, oncea sample size has been determined, one fraction of it is distributedproportionally among the different small areas while the rest is evenlydistributed among them. We use Monte Carlo simulations to assess theperformance of the direct estimator and two composite covariant-freesmall area estimators, for different sample sizes and different sampledistributions. Performance is measured in terms of Mean Squared Errors(MSE) of both small and large area parameters. It is found that the adoptionof small area composite estimators open the possibility of 1) reducingsample size when precision is given, or 2) improving precision for a givensample size.

On the performance of small-area estimators: Fixed vs. random area parameters

Most methods for small-area estimation are based on composite estimators derived from design- or model-based methods. A composite estimator is a linear combination of a direct and an indirect estimator with weights that usually depend on unknown parameters which need to be estimated. Although model-based small-area estimators are usually based on random-effects models, the assumption of fixed effects is at face value more appropriate.Model-based estimators are justified by the assumption of random (interchangeable) area effects; in practice, however, areas are not interchangeable. In the present paper we empirically assess the quality of several small-area estimators in the setting in which the area effects are treated as fixed. We consider two settings: one that draws samples from a theoretical population, and another that draws samples from an empirical population of a labor force register maintained by the National Institute of Social Security (NISS) of Catalonia. We distinguish two types of composite estimators: a) those that use weights that involve area specific estimates of bias and variance; and, b) those that use weights that involve a common variance and a common squared bias estimate for all the areas. We assess their precision and discuss alternatives to optimizing composite estimation in applications.