Catalan Policies and Experiences on Cooperative Repositories

The Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) together with the Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC) started in 1999 a cooperative repository, named TDR, to file in digital format the full-text of the read thesis at the universities of our country to spread them worldwide in open access preserving the intellectual copyright of the authors. This became operational in 2001 and today it is a service fully consolidated not only among the Catalan universities, but also used by other Spanish universities. Since then, there are four additional cooperative repositories which have been created: RECERCAT, for research papers; RACO, for scientific, cultural and erudite Catalan magazines; PADICAT, for archiving Catalan web sites; and MDC, for Catalan digital collections of pictures, maps, posters, old magazines... These five repositories have some common characteristics: they are open access, that is, they are accessible on the internet for free; they mostly comply with the Open Archive Initiative interoperability protocol for facilitating the efficient dissemination of content; and they have been built in a cooperative manner so that it is easy to adopt common procedures and to share the repository developing and managing costs, it permits more visibility of the indexed documents throughout the search engines, and a better provision for long-term preservation can be made. In this paper we present the common policy established for the Catalan cooperative repositories, we describe the five of them briefly, and we comment on the results obtained of our 6-year experience since the first one became operational.

Fiscal insurance and debt management in OECD economies

Assuming the role of debt management is to provide hedging against fiscal shocks we consider three questions: i) what indicators can be used to assess the performance of debt management? ii) how well have historical debt management policies performed? and iii) how is that performance affected by variations in debt issuance? We consider these questions using OECD data on the market value of government debt between 1970 and 2000. Motivated by both the optimal taxation literature and broad considerations of debt stability we propose a range of performance indicators for debt management. We evaluate these using Monte Carlo analysis and find that those based on the relative persistence of debt perform best. Calculating these measures for OECD data provides only limited evidence that debt management has helped insulate policy against unexpected fiscal shocks. We also find that the degree of fiscal insurance achieved is not well connected to cross country variations in debt issuance patterns. Given the limited volatility observed in the yield curve the relatively small dispersion of debt management practices across countries makes little difference to the realised degree of fiscal insurance.

Labour market frictions, social policies, and barriers to technology adoption

Barriers to technological changes have recently been shown to be a key element in explaining differences in output per worker across countries. This study examines the role that labour market features and institutions have in explaining barriers to technology adoption. I build a model that includes labour market frictions, capital market imperfections and heterogeneity in workers' skills. I found that the unemployment rate together with the welfare losses that workers experiment after displacement are key factors in explaining the existence of barriers to technology adoption. Moreover, I found that none of these factors alone is sufficient to build these barriers. The theory also suggests that welfare policies like the unemployment insurance system may enhance these kinds of barriers while policies like a severance payment system financed by an income tax seem to be more effective in eliminating them.

Bargaining one-dimensional policies and the efficiency of super majority rules

We consider negotiations selecting one-dimensional policies. Individuals have single-peaked preferences, and they are impatient. Decisions arise from a bargaining game with random proposers and (super) majority approval, ranging from the simple majority up to unanimity. The existence and uniqueness of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium is established, and its explicit characterization provided. We supply an explicit formula to determine the unique alternative that prevails, as impatience vanishes, for each majority. As an application, we examine the efficiency of majority rules. For symmetric distributions of peaks unanimity is the unanimously preferred majority rule. For asymmetric populations rules maximizing social surplus are characterized.

Organizational configurations of strategic choices and strategic management accounting

This is the first study to adopt a configurational paradigm in an investigation of strategic management accounting (SMA) adoption. The study examines the alignment and effectiveness of strategic choice and strategic management accounting (SMA) system design configurations. Six configurations were derived empirically by deploying a cluster analysis of data collected from a sample of 193 large Slovenian companies. The first four clusters appear to provide some support for the central configurational proposition that higher levels of vertical and horizontal configurational alignments are associated with higher levels of performance. Evidence that contradicts the theory is also apparent, however, as the remaining two clusters exhibit high degrees of SMA vertical and horizontal alignment, but low performance levels. A particular contribution of the paper concerns its demonstration of the way that the configurational paradigm can be operationalised to examine management accounting phenomena and the nature of management accounting insights that can derive from applying the approach.

The Impact of democratization: a preliminary investigation on social policies and political violence in Latin America

The recent strides of democracy in Latin America have been associated to conflicting outcomes. The expectation that democracy would bring about peace and prosperity have been only partly satisfied. While political violence has been by and large eradicated from the sub-continent, poverty and social injustice still prevail and hold sway. Our study argues that democracy matters for inequality through the growing strength of center left and left parties and by making political leaders in general more responsive to the underprivileged. Furthermore, although the pension reforms recently enacted in the region generated overall regressive outcomes on income distribution, democratic countries still benefit from their political past: where democratic tradition was stronger, such outcomes have been milder. Democratic tradition and the specific ideological connotations of the parties in power, on the other hand, did not play an equally crucial role in securing lower levels of political violence: during the last wave of democratizations in Latin America, domestic peace was rather an outcome of political and social concessions to those in distress. In sum, together with other factors and especially economic ones, the reason why recent democratizations have provided domestic peace in most cases, but have been unable so far to solve the problem of poverty and inequality, is that democratic traditions in the subcontinent have been relatively weak and, more specifically, that this weakness has undermined the growth of left and progressive parties, acting as an obstacle to redistribution. Such weakness, on the other hand, has not prevented the drastic reduction of domestic political violence, since what mattered in this case was a combination of symbolic or material concessions and political agreements among powerful élites and counter-élites.

Price policies and Price dispersion in the private healthcare insurance industry: The Catalan case

We present an overlapping generations model that explains price dispersion among Catalonian healthcare insurance firms. The model shows that firms with different premium policies can coexist. Furthermore, if interest rates are low, firms that apply equal premium to all insureds can charge higher average prices than insurers that set premiums according to the risk of insured. Economic theory, health insurance, health economics.

Social perceptions of floods and flood management in a Mediterranean area (Costa Brava, Spain)

Taking as an example three study cases in the Costa Brava area, this paper examines the social perceptionof floods through surveys, interviews and Focus Group sessions. Perception is then related to vulnerability, flood management, and citizen’s preferences regarding alternatives to curb flood losses in the future. The study concludes that flood awareness and the willingness to take actions regarding this hazard are clearly related to the degree of social involvement with the affairs of the local community. Furthermore, participatory settings such as Focus Group sessions appear to enable a better environment for assessing and implementing flood management options that attempt to modify human activities rather than modify natural processes as has been frequently the case in the past

Electoral Platforms, Implemented Policies, and Abstention

Recent studies of American politics evidence that political polarization of both the electorate and the political elite have moved 'almost in tandem for the past half century' (McCarty et al., 2003, p.2), and that party polarization has steadily increased since the 1970s. On the other hand, the empirical literature on party platforms and implemented policies has consistently found an imperfect but nonnegligible correlation between electoral platforms and governmental policies: while platforms tend to be polarized, policies are moderate or centrist. However, existing theoretical models of political competition are not manifestly compatible with these observations. In this paper, we distinguish between electoral platforms and implemented policies by incorporating a non-trivial policy-setting process. It follows that voters may care not only about the implemented policy but also about the platform they support with their vote. We find that while parties tend to polarize their positions, the risk of alienating their constituency prevents them from radicalizing. The analysis evidences that the distribution of the electorate, and not only the (expected) location of a pivotal voter, matters in determining policies. Our results are consistent with the observation of polarized platforms and moderate policies, and the alienation and indifference components of abstention.

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.

Fiscal decentralization policies and sub-national government debt in evolving federations

As part of a process of democratization, many countries spanning Europe, Latin Amertica, Africa, and Asia are reorganizing their governments bydevolving fiscal responsibility and authority to newly empowered regionaland local governments. Although decentralization in each country proceedsdifferently, a common element tends to be an initially heavy relianceon central government grants to fund regional spending. We develop atheoretical model of regional borrowing decisions in which the incentivesfor regional borrowing depend crucially on how the regions expect thefederal system of finance to evolve. We examine the implications of themodel using data on Spanish regions for the period 1984-1995 and findevidence that regions may be borrowing inefficiently in response toincentives imbedded in the Spanish system of fiscal decentralization.

Credible redistributive policies and migration across US States

Does worker mobility undermine governments ability to redistribute income? Thispaper analyzes the experience of US states in the recent decades. We build a tractablemodel where both migration decisions and redistribution policies are endogenous. Wecalibrate the model to match skill premium and worker productivity at the state level,as well as the size and skill composition of migration flows. The calibrated modelis able to reproduce the large changes in skill composition as well as key qualitativerelationships of labor flows and redistribution policies observed in the data. Our resultssuggest that regional di¤erences in labor productivity are an important determinantof interstate migration. We use the calibrated model to compare the cross-section ofredistributive policies with and without worker mobility. The main result of the paperis that interstate migration has induced substantial convergence in tax rates acrossUS states, but no race to the bottom. Skill-biased in-migration has reduced the skillpremium and the need for tax-based redistribution in the states that would have hadthe highest tax rates in the absence of mobility.

Electoral platforms, implemented policies and abstention

Recent studies of American politics evidence that political polarization of both the electorate and the political elite have moved 'almost in tandem for the past half century' (McCarty et al., 2003, p.2), and that party polarization has steadily increased since the 1970s. On the other hand, the empirical literature on party platforms and implemented policies has consistently found an imperfect but nonnegligible correlation between electoral platforms and governmental policies: while platforms tend to be polarized, policies are moderate or centrist. However, existing theoretical models of political competition are not manifestly compatible with these observations.In this paper, we distinguish between electoral platforms and implemented policies by incorporating a non-trivial policy-setting process. It follows that voters may care not only about the implemented policy but also about the platform they support with their vote. We find that while parties tend to polarize their positions, the risk of alienating their constituency prevents them from radicalizing. The analysis evidences that the distribution of the electorate, and not only the (expected) location of a pivotal voter, matters in determining policies. Our results are consistent with the observation of polarized platforms and moderate policies, and the alienation and indifference components of abstention.