Managing competition in professional services and the burden of inertia

Professional services require certain organizational patterns in order to avoid information asymmetries and external effects. These same patterns are used within production structures involving various degrees of monopoly. However, competitive restraints are justified today only when substantial external effects are clearly present, whereas information asymmetries hardly justify such restraints because reputational investments have become widespread in the economy and are relatively efficient in overcoming such asymmetries. As a consequence, innovation in the production of externalities can make competitive constraints unnecessary.

Good practice for dialogue and communication as strategic principle for policing political manifestations in Europe (GODIAC):the anthology

The volume is divided into two parts; the fi rst deals with issues related to the police, and the second addresses issues related to demonstrators and protesters. We hope that this volume will provide further insight into issues associated with policing at major events and shed light on the complexity of the organisations, motives, and strategies in play whenever protester groups are involved.

Short communication. SNP analyses of the 5HT1R and STAT genes in Pacific white shrimp, Litopenaeus vannamei

La industria de la producción de camarón es una de las industrias acuícolas que se encuentra en más crecimiento en la actualidad. Los estudios para encontrar marcadores genéticos son muy efectivos para la mejora de sus propiedades y de gran interés para los productores de camarón. En este trabajo se utilizaron seis individuos de una población de Litopenaeus vannamei, donde se encontraron cuatro polimorfismos de nucleótido único (SNPs) en el gen 5HT1R (5-hidroxitriptamina receptor1) y un SNP en el gen STAT (transductor de señal y activador de la transcripción). Sin embargo, el polimorfismo en el gen STAT resultó ser homocigoto en una población diferente utilizada para análisis de asociación. Los presentes análisis revelaron que el alelo C, en dos polimorfismos SNP (C109T y C395G) del gen 5HT1R, tiende a estar asociado con el aumento del peso corporal. Consideramos que hay necesidad de hacer nuevos estudios utilizando una muestra más amplia y diversa de la población en cuestión.

Applying RADIC in Open MPI: the methodology used to implement RADIC over a Message Passing Library

Fault tolerance has become a major issue for computer and software engineers because the occurrence of faults increases the cost of using a parallel computer. RADIC is the fault tolerance architecture for message passing systems which is transparent, decentralized, flexible and scalable. This master thesis presents the methodology used to implement the RADIC architecture over Open MPI, a well-know large-used message passing library. This implementation kept the RADIC architecture characteristics. In order to validate the implementation we have executed a synthetic ping program, besides, to evaluate the implementation performance we have used the NAS Parallel Benchmarks. The results prove that the RADIC architecture performance depends on the communication pattern of the parallel application which is running. Furthermore, our implementation proves that the RADIC architecture could be implemented over an existent message passing library.

Re-opening the black box in societal metabolism: the application of MuSIASEM to water

In this paper we address the complexity of the analysis of water use in relation to the issue of sustainability. In fact, the flows of water in our planet represent a complex reality which can be studied using many different perceptions and narratives referring to different scales and dimensions of analysis. For this reason, a quantitative analysis of water use has to be based on analytical methods that are semantically open: they must be able to define what we mean with the term “water” when crossing different scales of analysis. We propose here a definition of water as a resource that deal with the many services it provides to humans and ecosystems. WE argue that water can fulfil so many of them since the element has many characteristics that allow for the resource to be labelled with different attributes, depending on the end use –such as drinkable. Since the services for humans and the functions for ecosystems associated with water flows are defined on different scales but still interconnected it is necessary to organize our assessment of water use across different hierarchical levels. In order to do so we define how to approach the study of water use in the Societal Metabolism, by proposing the Water Metabolism, tganized in three levels: societal level, ecosystem level and global level. The possible end uses we distinguish for the society are: personal/physiological use, household use, economic use. Organizing the study of “water use” across all these levels increases the usefulness of the quantitative analysis and the possibilities of finding relevant and comparable results. To achieve this result, we adapted a method developed to deal with multi-level, multi-scale analysis - the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM) approach - to the analysis of water metabolism. In this paper, we discuss the peculiar analytical identity that “water” shows within multi-scale metabolic studies: water represents a flow-element when considering the metabolism of social systems (at a small scale, when describing the water metabolism inside the society) and a fund-element when considering the metabolism o ecosystems (at a larger scale when describing the water metabolism outside the society). The theoretical analysis is illustrated using two case which characterize the metabolic patterns regarding water use of a productive system in Catalonia and a water management policy in Andarax River Basin in Andalusia.

Specialization and rent-seeking in moral enforcement: The case of confession

Moral codes are produced and enforced by more or less specialized means and are subject to standard economic forces. This paper argues that the intermediary role played by the Catholic Church between God and Christians, a key difference from Protestantism, faces the standard trade-off of specialization benefits and agency costs. It applies this trade-off hypothesis to confession of sins to priests, an institution that epitomizes such intermediation, showing that this hypothesis fits cognitive, historical and econometric evidence better than a simpler rent-seeking story. In particular, Catholics who confess more often are observed to comply more with the moral code; however, no relationship is observed between mass attendance and moral compliance. The data also links the current decline in confession to the rise in education, which makes moral self-enforcement less costly, and to the productivity gap suffered by confession services, given its necessarily interpersonal nature.

Communication in networks with hierarchical branching

We present a simple model of communication in networks with hierarchical branching. We analyze the behavior of the model from the viewpoint of critical systems under different situations. For certain values of the parameters, a continuous phase transition between a sparse and a congested regime is observed and accurately described by an order parameter and the power spectra. At the critical point the behavior of the model is totally independent of the number of hierarchical levels. Also scaling properties are observed when the size of the system varies. The presence of noise in the communication is shown to break the transition. The analytical results are a useful guide to forecasting the main features of real networks.

Intrinsic subspace convergence in TDD MIMO communication

In numerical linear algebra, students encounter earlythe iterative power method, which finds eigenvectors of a matrixfrom an arbitrary starting point through repeated normalizationand multiplications by the matrix itself. In practice, more sophisticatedmethods are used nowadays, threatening to make the powermethod a historical and pedagogic footnote. However, in the contextof communication over a time-division duplex (TDD) multipleinputmultiple-output (MIMO) channel, the power method takes aspecial position. It can be viewed as an intrinsic part of the uplinkand downlink communication switching, enabling estimationof the eigenmodes of the channel without extra overhead. Generalizingthe method to vector subspaces, communication in thesubspaces with the best receive and transmit signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) is made possible. In exploring this intrinsic subspace convergence(ISC), we show that several published and new schemes canbe cast into a common framework where all members benefit fromthe ISC.

Incumbent audit firm-provided tax services and the clients with low financial reporting quality

This study investigates whether incumbent audit firm-provided tax services enhance or impair the likelihood of acknowledging client companies’ low financial reporting quality. In particular, we examine the association between tax-related fees and the likelihood of timely restatements, and internal control weakness disclosures among a sample of US companies that all have misstatements in financial information. The empirical findings indicate that companies paying higher tax-related fees are less likely to disclose SOX 404 internal control weakness disclosures, implying that underlying control problems are unacknowledged when incumbent audit firm provided tax-related fees are higher. However, the findings suggest that just providing both audit and tax-related services does not have an impact on audit quality per se, but rather it is the magnitude of the tax-related fees in particular that counts. We also find some evidence suggesting that companies paying higher tax-related fees have higher likelihood of restatement lags, whereas companies paying smaller tax-related fees to their audit firm restate financial statements in a timelier manner. Overall, the findings suggest that audit scrutiny of client companies with low quality financial reporting is weaker when the magnitude of tax-related fees is higher.

Economic growth and atmospheric pollution in Spain: discussing the environmental Kuznets curve by hypothesis

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis posits an inverted U relationship between environmental pressure and per capita income. Recent research has examined this hypothesis for different pollutants in different countries. Despite certain empirical evidence shows that some environmental pressures have diminished in developed countries, the hypothesis could not be generalized to the global relationship between economy and environment at all. In this article we contribute to this debate analyzing the trends of annual emission flux of six atmospheric pollutants in Spain. The study presents evidence that there is not any correlation between higher income level and smaller emissions, except for SO2 whose evolution might be compatible with the EKC hypothesis. The authors argue that the relationship between income level and diverse types of emissions depends on many factors. Thus it cannot be thought that economic growth, by itself, will solve environmental problems.

Public enterprise reforms and efficiency in regulated environments: the case of the postal sector

Purpose - This paper focuses on analyzing the effect that public reforms have on the efficiency of state-owned enterprises in regulated environments. Design/methodology/approach - The research is focused in the postal sector where public and private companies must obey a legal framework related to provide a universal service. The analysis is carried out using a panel of 7 European postal operators for the period 1997-2003. The activity analyzed was the letter mail division; we take as key variable the unit cost of a letter and use a translog cost function where as independent variables we include traffic levels, labor cost per employee, quality and availability of the service as well as the type of ownership (public or private). Additionally, in a second stage the geographical differences among countries are considered. Findings - Results indicate that postal operators that experienced organizational changes without being privatized, such as the Spanish and Greek operators, do not have higher unit costs than privatized postal operators like the one of Germany and the Netherlands. Moreover, we find that in all cases the operator of Ireland appear to be the most efficient. In this case restructuring process has been carried out giving an important leadership role to workers. This suggests us that labor culture could be a key variable to study when analyzing reform processes in public enterprises. Originality/value - Our findings show that in a regulated environment like in the postal sector, public and private companies can obtain similar efficiency levels in term of unit costs.

The Rise of democracy in Europe and the fight against mass poverty in Latin America: the implications for marxist thought of some recent mainstream papers

Recently a number of mainstream papers have treated the rise of democracy in 19th century Europe and its instability in Latin America in an eminently Marxist fashion. This paper sets out their implications for Marxist thought. With respect to Europe, Marx's emphasis on political action backed by the threat of violence is vindicated but his justification for socialism is not. With respect to Latin America, the unequal distribution of wealth is the cause of political instability that is, in turn, the root cause of mass poverty. In addition it is possible to explain some of the paradoxical characteristics of neo-liberalism and to make a weak argument for socialism in spite of its rejection in Europe.

The EU as a security provider in its neighbourhood: the case of non-proliferation of WMD in the Mediterranean area

As a consequence of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the US-led war against Iraq, WMD and their proliferation have become a central element of the EU security agenda. In December 2003, the European Council adopted even a EU Strategy against Proliferation of WMD. The approach adopted in this Strategy can be largely described as a ‘cooperative security provider’ approach and is based on effective multilateralism, the promotion of a stable international and regional environment and the cooperation with key partners. The principal objective of this paper is to examine in how far the EU has actually implemented the ‘cooperative security provider’ approach in the area which the Non-proliferation Strategy identifies as one of its priorities – the Mediterranean. Focusing on the concept of security interdependence, the paper analyses first the various WMD dangers with which the EU is confronted in the Mediterranean area. Afterwards, it examines how the EU has responded to these hazards in the framework of the Barcelona process and, in particular, the new European Neighbourhood Policy. It is argued that despite its relatively powerful rhetoric, the EU has largely failed, for a wide range of reasons, to apply effectively its non-proliferation approach in the Mediterranean area and, thus, to become a successful security provider.