Window-dressing in German interwar balance sheets

German accounting rules value assets and liabilities asymmetricallyand thus lead to grossly distorted balance sheets. In the interwardebate on a reform of disclosure regulation, financial expertsconsidered the (undisclosed) tax balance sheet, which had to bedrawn up separately for the corporate tax assessment, as a paradigmfor adequate financial disclosure. However, due to tax secrecy thaywere barred from analyzing tax documents. Using archival evidence,we analyze tax balance sheets from which the reliability of disclosedbalance sheets of the interwar period can be assessed. It emergesthat companies overstated their profits in the middand late 1920s,but grossly understated them in the Nazi economy.

Price regulation of plastic money: A critical assessment of Spanish rules

Recent decisions by the Spanish national competition authority (TDC) mandate paymentsystems to include only two costs when setting their domestic multilateral interchange fees(MIF): a fixed processing cost and a variable cost for the risk of fraud. This artificiallowering of MIFs will not lower consumer prices, because of uncompetitive retailing; but itwill however lead to higher cardholders fees and, likely, new prices for point of saleterminals, delaying the development of the immature Spanish card market. Also, to the extent that increased cardholders fees do not offset the fall in MIFs revenue, the task of issuing new cards will be underpaid relatively to the task of acquiring new merchants, causing an imbalance between the two sides of the networks. Moreover, the pricing scheme arising from the decisions will cause unbundling and underprovision of those services whose costs are excluded. Indeed, the payment guarantee and the free funding period will tend to be removed from the package of services currently provided, to be either provided by third parties, by issuers for a separate fee, or not provided at all, especially to smaller and medium-sized merchants. Transaction services will also suffer the consequences that the TDC precludes pricing them in variable terms.

Collaborative explicit plasticity framework: a conceptual scheme for the generation of plastic and group-aware user interfaces

The advent of new advances in mobile computing has changed the manner we do our daily work, even enabling us to perform collaborative activities. However, current groupware approaches do not offer an integrating and efficient solution that jointly tackles the flexibility and heterogeneity inherent to mobility as well as the awareness aspects intrinsic to collaborative environments. Issues related to the diversity of contexts of use are collected under the term plasticity. A great amount of tools have emerged offering a solution to some of these issues, although always focused on individual scenarios. We are working on reusing and specializing some already existing plasticity tools to the groupware design. The aim is to offer the benefits from plasticity and awareness jointly, trying to reach a real collaboration and a deeper understanding of multi-environment groupware scenarios. In particular, this paper presents a conceptual framework aimed at being a reference for the generation of plastic User Interfaces for collaborative environments in a systematic and comprehensive way. Starting from a previous conceptual framework for individual environments, inspired on the model-based approach, we introduce specific components and considerations related to groupware.

Optical analysis of textured plastic substrates to be used in thin silicon solar cells

Light confinement strategies in thin-film silicon solar cells play a crucial role in the performance of the devices. In this work, the possible use of Ag-coated stamped polymers as reflectors to be used in n-i-p solar cells is studied. Different random roughnesses (nanometer and micrometer size) have been transferred on poly(methylmethacrylate) (PMMA) by hot embossing. Morphological and optical analyses of masters, stamped polymers and reflectors have been carried out evidencing a positive surface transference on the polymer and the viability of a further application in solar cells.

Invasive populations of Senecio pterophorus are neither more productive nor more plastic than the native populations

Successful plant invaders may have specific morphological and physiological traits that promote invasion in a new habitat. The Evolution of Increased Competitive Ability (EICA) hypothesis predicts that plants released from natural enemies in the introduced habitats are more competitive and perform better than plants from the native populations. An increased phenotypic plasticity may also favour invasion because it allows plants to function under a wider range of environments. In this study we used Senecio pterophorus (Asteraceae) to test whether introduced plant populations are 1)more competitive and 2) more plastic compared with the native populations. We conducted a common garden experiment using plants from the native range (South Africa, Eastern Cape), an expanded range (South Africa, Western Cape) and two introduced ranges (Australia and Europe) under different conditions of water availability. Contrary to the EICA and the increased plasticity hypotheses, plants from the invasive and expanded populations grew less and responded less to watering than those from their native range. These results may be caused by a depleted competition as well as the presence of genetic bottlenecks in the newly invaded areas.