Governance mechanisms in Spanish financial intermediaries

This paper examines the governance of Spanish Banks around two main issues. First, does a poor economic performance activate those governance interventions that favor the removal of executive directors and the merger of non-performing banks? And second, does the relationship between governance intervention and economic performance vary with the ownership form of the bank? Our results show that a bad performance does activate governance mechanisms in banks, although for the case of Savings Banks intervention is confined to a merger or acquisition. Nevertheless, the distinct ownership structure of Savings Banks does not fully protect non-performing banks from disappearing. Product-market competition compensates for those weak internal governance mechanisms that result from an ownership form which gives voice to several stakeholder groups.

Corrigendum to "On randomized matching mechanisms" [Economic Theory 8(1996)377-381]

Ma (1996) studied the random order mechanism, a matching mechanism suggested by Roth and Vande Vate (1990) for marriage markets. By means of an example he showed that the random order mechanism does not always reach all stable matchings. Although Ma's (1996) result is true, we show that the probability distribution he presented - and therefore the proof of his Claim 2 - is not correct. The mistake in the calculations by Ma (1996) is due to the fact that even though the example looks very symmetric, some of the calculations are not as ''symmetric.''

On group strategy-proof mechanisms for a many-to-one matching model

For the many-to-one matching model in which firms have substitutable and quota q-separable preferences over subsets of workers we show that the workers-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for the workers. In order to prove this result, we also show that under this domain of preferences (which contains the domain of responsive preferences of the college admissions problem) the workers-optimal stable matching is weakly Pareto optimal for the workers and the Blocking Lemma holds as well. We exhibit an example showing that none of these three results remain true if the preferences of firms are substitutable but not quota q-separable.

How universal is behavior? A four country comparison of spite, cooperation and errors in voluntary contribution mechanisms

This paper studies behavior in experiments with a linear voluntary contributions mechanism for public goods conducted in Japan, the Netherlands, Spain and the USA. The same experimental design was used in the four countries. Our 'contribution function' design allows us to obtain a view of subjects' behavior from two complementary points of view. If yields information about situations where, in purely pecuniary terms, it is a dominant strategy to contribute all the endowment and about situations where it is a dominant strategy to contribute nothing. Our results show, first, that differences in behavior across countries are minor. We find that when people play "the same game" they behave similarly. Second, for all four countries our data are inconsistent with the explanation that subjects contribute only out of confusion. A common cooperative motivation is needed to explain the date.

Implementació amb Visual Basic d'un algorisme per a encriptar i desencriptar

Treball de recerca realitzat per un alumne d’ensenyament secundari i guardonat amb un Premi CIRIT per fomentar l'esperit científic del Jovent l’any 2005. La criptografia és l’art d’escriure un llenguatge convingut, amb l’ús d’unes claus i de la seva operació inversa se’n diu criptoanalitzar. Els sistemes criptogràfics han estat emprats al llarg de la història. Actualment existeixen multituds de software i de hardware destinats a analitzar el tràfic de dades en xarxes de computadores. Encara que aquestes eines constitueixen un avenç en tècniques de seguretat i protecció, el seu ús indegut es al mateix temps un greu problema i una enorme font d’atacs a la intimitat dels seus usuaris i a la integritat dels seus propis sistemes. Des d’aquest punt de vista, s’explica com s’ha dissenyat dos aplicacions informàtiques per encriptar i desencriptar.

Cooperative vs. non-cooperative mechanisms in the EU decision making process

According to the account of the European Union (EU) decision making proposed in this paper, this is a bargaining process during which actors shift their policy positions with a view to reaching agreements on controversial issues.

El Sistema de financiación de las comunidades autónomas de régimen común: un análisis crítico y algunas propuestas de reforma

We identify a number of elements of the current Spanish system of regional financing that do not conform satisfactorily to the principles of equity, autonomy and efficiency that should inspire its design. Our main conclusion is that although the system presents a series of shortcomings that would require an in-depth reform, its basic focus on the equalization of the service provision capacity of all regional governments should be preserved because it is in accordance with the constitutional guarantee of equal rights for all citizens and with notions of horizontal equity that are widely shared in our country. In fact, the main shortcoming of the system is, in our opinion, that it does not fully guarantee such equality in practice. Additional weaknesses of the system are its lack of transparency, the absence of mechanisms to maintain vertical equilibrium across the different levels of the administration and a significant deficit of fiscal autonomy and responsibility on the pa

Mechanisms of agglomeration: Evidence from the location of new manufacturing firms in Spain

El objetivo de esta investigación es aportar evidencia sobre las fuentes de las economías de aglomeración para el caso español. De todas las maneras posibles que se han tomado en la literatura para medir las economías de aglomeración, nosotros lo analizamos a partir de las decisiones de localización de las empresas manufactureras. La literatura reciente ha puesto de relieve que el análisis basado en la disyuntiva localización / urbanización (relaciones dentro de un mismo sector) no es suficiente para entender las economías de aglomeración. Sin embargo, las relaciones entre los diferentes sectores sí resultan significativas al examinar por qué las empresas que pertenecen a diferentes sectores se localizan unas al lado de las otras. Con esto en mente, intentamos explicar que relaciones entre diferentes sectores pueden explicar coaglomeración. Para ello, nos centramos en aquellas relaciones entre sectores definidos a partir de los mecanismos de aglomeración de Marshall, es decir, labor market, input sharing y knowledge spillovers. Trabajamos con el labor market pooling en la medida en que los dos sectores utilizan los mismos trabajadores (clasificación de ocupaciones). Con el segundo mecanismo de Marshall, input sharing, introducimos cómo dos sectores tienen una relación de comprador / vendedor. Por último, nos referimos a dos sectores que utilizan las mismas tecnologías en cuanto a los knowledge spillovers. Con el fin de capturar todos los efectos de los mecanismos de aglomeracion en España, en esta investigación trabajamos con dos ámbitos geográficos, los municipios y los mercados de trabajo locales. La literatura existente nunca se ha puesto de acuerdo en cual es el ámbito geográfico en el que mejor trabajan los mecanismos Marshall, por lo que hemos cubierto todas las unidades geográficas potenciales.

Smooth multibidding mechanisms

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects (possibly with the help of a social planner). Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is "smoother" in the sense that small variations in an agent's bids do not lead to dramatic changes in the probability of selecting a project. This mechanism is shown to possess several interesting properties. Unlike in the study by Pérez Castrillo and Wettstein (2002), the equilibrium outcome is unique. Second, it ensures an equal sharing of the surplus that it induces. Finally, it enables reaching an outcome as close to effciency as is desired.

Modified differentials and basic cohomology for Riemannian foliations

We define a new version of the exterior derivative on the basic forms of a Riemannian foliation to obtain a new form of basic cohomology that satisfies Poincaré duality in the transversally orientable case. We use this twisted basic cohomology to show relationships between curvature, tautness, and vanishing of the basic Euler characteristic and basic signature.

Index theory for basic Dirac operators on Riemannian foliations

In this paper we prove a formula for the analytic index of a basic Dirac-type operator on a Riemannian foliation, solving a problem that has been open for many years. We also consider more general indices given by twisting the basic Dirac operator by a representation of the orthogonal group. The formula is a sum of integrals over blowups of the strata of the foliation and also involves eta invariants of associated elliptic operators. As a special case, a Gauss-Bonnet formula for the basic Euler characteristic is obtained using two independent proofs.

WePreserve 2009: DPE/Planets/CASPAR/nestor Joint Training Event: The Preservation challenge: basic concepts and practical applications (Barcelona, 23-27 març 2009)

Reseña del congreso WePreserve 2009 que tuvo lugar los pasados 23 al 27 de marzo en Barcelona, organizadopor la Facultad de Biblioteconomía y Documentación de la Universitat de Barcelona, con la colaboración del Institut d'Estudis Catalans, la Biblioteca de Catalunya y el Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona. El seminario 2009 WePreserve se celebra anualmente desde el año 2007 y participan todas las figuras de referencia europeas en materia de investigación en sistemas y metodologías que garantizan la preservación digital de los documentos: Digital Preservation Europe (DPE), Preservation and Long-term Access Through Networked Services (Planets), Cultural Artistic and Scientific Knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), y Network of expertise in Digital long-term preservation (nestor).

CoDaPack. An Excel and Visual Basic based software of compositional data analysis. Current version and discussion form upcoming versions

In the eighties, John Aitchison (1986) developed a new methodological approach for the statistical analysis of compositional data. This new methodology was implemented in Basic routines grouped under the name CODA and later NEWCODA inMatlab (Aitchison, 1997). After that, several other authors have published extensions to this methodology: Marín-Fernández and others (2000), Barceló-Vidal and others (2001), Pawlowsky-Glahn and Egozcue (2001, 2002) and Egozcue and others (2003). (...)

A Sustainable Development Strategy for the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion: Basic Guidelines

L'estudi presenta té per objecte formular els requisits necessaris per posar en marxa una estratègia per al desenvolupament sostenible de l'Euroregió Pirineus-Mediterrània. Aquest és un projecte de cooperació transfronterera regional promogut per l'expresident de la Generalitat, Honorable Sr Pasqual Maragall, que, a més de Catalunya, inclou Aragó, Illes Balears, Llenguadoc-Rosselló i Migdia-Pirineus. A la Unió Europea hi ha més de 70 euroregions, que han estat en funcionant per diferents periodes de temps, després d'haver estat creat per regions o entitats locals, o ambdós

Categorization of bibsonomy tags to apply privacy-preserving mechanisms.

In this technical report, we approach one of the practical aspects when it comes to represent users' interests from their tagging activity, namely the categorization of tags into high-level categories of interest. The reason is that the representation of user profiles on the basis of the myriad of tags available on the Web is certainly unfeasible from various practical perspectives; mainly concerningthe unavailability of data to reliably, accurately measure interests across such fine-grained categorization, and, should the data be available, its overwhelming computational intractability. Motivated by this, our study presents the results of a categorization process whereby a collection of tags posted at BibSonomy #http://www.bibsonomy.org# are classified into 5 categories of interest. The methodology used to conduct such categorization is in line with other works in the field.