Water depth selection during foraging and efficiency in prey capture by the egrets Casmerodius albus and Egretta thula (Aves, Ardeidae) in an urban lagoon in Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil

This study aimed to evaluate the water depth selection during foraging, the efficiency in prey capture, and the food items captured by Casmerodius albus (Linnaeus, 1758) and Egretta thula (Molina, 1782). The work was conducted at an urban lagoon, Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Rio de Janeiro. Four transects were made each month (two in the morning and two in the afternoon) for six months. When the birds were detected foraging, the water depth and the types of prey captured were recorded. There was no significant relationship between the foraging efficiencies of the two species. However, they differed in relation to the water depth when foraging, and also in the food items captured. Casmerodius albus captured mainly fishes while Egretta thula captured mainly invertebrates. The results suggest that the differences in water depth when foraging and the food items captured allow a differential use of the food resources available by C. albus and E. thula at Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas.

Efficiency and environmental regulation: a 'complex situation'

Production of desirable outputs is often accompanied by undesirable by products that have damaging effects on the environment, and whose disposal is frequently regulated by public authorities. In this paper, we compute directional technology distance functions under particular assumptions concerning disposability of bads in order to test for the existence of what we call ‘complex situations’, where the biggest producer is not the greatest polluter. Furthermore, we show that how in such situations, environmental regulation could achieve an effective reduction in the aggregate level of bad outputs without reducing the production of good outputs. Finally, we illustrate our methodology with an empirical application to a sample of Spanish tile ceramic producers.

Efficiency and quality in local government management: the case of Spanish local authorities

This study analyses efficiency levels in Spanish local governments and their determining factors through the application of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methodology. It aims to find out to what extent inefficiency arises from external factors beyond the control of the entity, or on the other hand, how much it is due to inadequate management of productive resources. The results show that on the whole, there is still a wide margin within which managers could increase local government efficiency levels, although it is revealed that a great deal of inefficiency is due to exogenous factors. It is specifically found that the size of the entity, per capita tax revenue, the per capita grants or the amount of commercial activity are some of the factors determining local government inefficiency.

Evidence on the determinants of foreign direct investment: the case of three european regions

This study aims at analyzing the determinants of FDI (foreign direct investment) inflows for a group of European regions. The originality of this approach lies in the use of disaggregated regional data. First, we develop a qualitative description of our database and discuss the importance of the macroeconomic determinants in attracting FDI. Then, we provide an econometric exercise to identify the potential determinants of FDI. In spite of choosing regions presenting economic similarities, we show that regional FDI inflows rely on a combination of factors that differs from one region to another.

Personal redistribution and the regional allocation of public investment

How should an equity-motivated policy-marker allocate public capital (infrastructure) across regions. Should it aim at reducing interregional differences in per capita output, or at maximizing total output? Such a normative question is examined in a model where the policy-marker is exclusively concerned about personal inequality and has access to two policy instruments. (i) a personal tax-transfer system (taxation is distortionary), and (ii) the regional allocation of public investment. I show that the case for public investment as a significant instrument for interpersonal redistribution is rather weak. In the most favorable case, when the tax code is constrained to be uniform across regions, it is optimal to distort the allocation of public investment in favor of the poor regions, but only to a limited extent. The reason is that poor individuals are relatively more sensitive to public trans fers, which are maximized by allocating public investment efficiently. If! the tax code can vary across regions then the optimal policy may involve an allocation of public investment distorted in favor of the rich regions.

Consumption externalities, habit formation, and equilibrium efficiency

We analyze the welfare properties of the competitive equilibrium in a capital accumulation model where individual preferences are subjected to both habit formation and consumption spillovers. We also discuss how consumption externalities and habits interact to generate an inefficient dynamic equilibrium. Finally, we characterize optimal tax policies aimed to restore efficient decentralized paths.

A dual characterization of incentive efficiency

We show that incentive efficient allocations in economies with adverse selection and moral hazard can be determined as optimal solutions to a linear programming problem and we use duality theory to obtain a complete characterization of the optima. Our dual analysis identifies welfare effects associated with the incentives of the agents to truthfully reveal their private information. Because these welfare effects may generate non-convexities, incentive efficient allocations may involve randomization. Other properties of incentive efficient allocations are also derived.

Allocative and productive efficiency in REE with asymetric information

We characterize the divergence between informational and economic efficiency in a rational expectations competitive market with asymmetric information about the costs of production. We find that prices may contain too much or too little information with respect to incentive efficient allocations depending on whether the main role of the price is, respectively, the traditional as index of scarcity or informational. Only when REE degenerate to Cournot equilibria the market solution does not show llocative inefficiency. With multidimensional uncertainty we find that the REE price does not have in general the incentive efficient information mix: It pays to sacrifice allocative efficiency at the REE to improve productive efficiency.

Endogeneizing know-how flows through the nature of R&D investments

In this paper we carefully link knowledge flows to and from a firms innovation process with this firms investment decisions. Three types of investments are considered: investments in applied research, investments in basic research, and investments in intellectual property protection. Only when basic research is performed, can the firm effectively access incoming knowledge flows and these incoming spillovers serve to increase the efficiency of own applied research.. The firm can at the same time influence outgoing knowledge flows, improving appropriability of its innovations, by investing in protection. Our results indicate that firms with small budgets for innovation will not invest in basic research. This occurs in the short run, when the budget for know-how creation is restricted, or in the long-run, when market opportunities are low, when legal protection is not very important, or, when the pool of accessible and relevant external know-how is limited. The ratio! of basic to applied research is non-decreasing in the size of the pool of accessible external know-how, the size and opportunity of the market, and, the effectiveness of intellectual property rights protection. This indicates the existence of economies of scale in basic research due to external market related factors. Empirical evidence from a sample of innovative manufacturing firms in Belgium confirms the economies of scale in basic research as a consequence of the firms capacity to access external knowledge flows and to protect intellectual property, as well as the complementarity between legal and strategic investments.

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.

Cooperative production and efficiency

We characterize the sharing rule for which a contribution mechanism achieves efficiency in a cooperative production setting when agents are heterogeneous. The sharing rule bears no resemblance to those considered by the previous literature. We also show for a large class of sharing rules that if Nash equilibrium yields efficient allocations, the production function displays constant returns to scale, a case in which cooperation in production is useless.

Inter-group conflict and intra-group punishment in an experimental contest game

We study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other. Our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio-political conflict. The relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and independent of whether punishment is available or not. We find, first, that our results contradict the independence of group-size prediction: conflict expenditures of groups are substantially larger than those of individuals, and both are substantially above equilibrium. Towards the end of the experiment material losses in groups are 257% of the predicted level. There is, however, substantial heterogeneity in the investment behaviour of individual group members. Second, allowing group members to punish each other after individual contributions to the contest effort are revealed leads to even larger conflict expenditures. Now material losses are 869% of the equilibrium level and there is much less heterogeneity in individual group members' investments. These results contrast strongly with those from public goods experiments where punishment enhances efficiency and leads to higher material payoffs.

Organisational status and efficiency: the case of the spanish SOE "Paradores"

The purpose of this paper is to provide new evidence on the issue of the effect on public enterprises economic performance of the introduction of some given changes in organisational status and management practices, while keeping the enterprises under public control. Our approach is case study type and relies on comparative efficiency literature. We identify relevant changes on the organisational status of a State owned large hotel group along a period of twenty years, next we measure its annual efficiency indicators, and then evaluate to which extent the observed changes in economic performance can be attributable to the corresponding management reforms carried out. As a result we find that the formally more relevant change in organisational status (the enterprise passing to be a Limited Company), which implied a substantial increase in the enterprise autonomy, did not produce a significant improvement in its economic performance; a finding contrary to what we expected according to agency theory. However, a second relevant organisational change –five years later- when both the principal (government) and the agent (firm’s CEO) changed is consistently related to a significant improvement in economic performance. As a research implication we abide for use more precise agency theory statements; and as a practical implication we argue here that potentialities of improvement brought about by a formal-legal change in the status of the enterprise may require also –in order to actually improve firm’s efficiency- some changes in the firm’s key personal positions: supervisor (principal) and CEO (agent), in the sense that a change to a greater-autonomy for the enterprise it seems should come together a parallel new ‘management culture’. Practical implications Management good practises to apply to other public enterprise’s restructuring in order to improve their efficiency. It’s the first study on organizational changes and efficiency for an important Spanish public enterprise.

Three essays on the psychology of investment and financial markets

Préface My thesis consists of three essays where I consider equilibrium asset prices and investment strategies when the market is likely to experience crashes and possibly sharp windfalls. Although each part is written as an independent and self contained article, the papers share a common behavioral approach in representing investors preferences regarding to extremal returns. Investors utility is defined over their relative performance rather than over their final wealth position, a method first proposed by Markowitz (1952b) and by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), that I extend to incorporate preferences over extremal outcomes. With the failure of the traditional expected utility models in reproducing the observed stylized features of financial markets, the Prospect theory of Kahneman and Tversky (1979) offered the first significant alternative to the expected utility paradigm by considering that people focus on gains and losses rather than on final positions. Under this setting, Barberis, Huang, and Santos (2000) and McQueen and Vorkink (2004) were able to build a representative agent optimization model which solution reproduced some of the observed risk premium and excess volatility. The research in behavioral finance is relatively new and its potential still to explore. The three essays composing my thesis propose to use and extend this setting to study investors behavior and investment strategies in a market where crashes and sharp windfalls are likely to occur. In the first paper, the preferences of a representative agent, relative to time varying positive and negative extremal thresholds are modelled and estimated. A new utility function that conciliates between expected utility maximization and tail-related performance measures is proposed. The model estimation shows that the representative agent preferences reveals a significant level of crash aversion and lottery-pursuit. Assuming a single risky asset economy the proposed specification is able to reproduce some of the distributional features exhibited by financial return series. The second part proposes and illustrates a preference-based asset allocation model taking into account investors crash aversion. Using the skewed t distribution, optimal allocations are characterized as a resulting tradeoff between the distribution four moments. The specification highlights the preference for odd moments and the aversion for even moments. Qualitatively, optimal portfolios are analyzed in terms of firm characteristics and in a setting that reflects real-time asset allocation, a systematic over-performance is obtained compared to the aggregate stock market. Finally, in my third article, dynamic option-based investment strategies are derived and illustrated for investors presenting downside loss aversion. The problem is solved in closed form when the stock market exhibits stochastic volatility and jumps. The specification of downside loss averse utility functions allows corresponding terminal wealth profiles to be expressed as options on the stochastic discount factor contingent on the loss aversion level. Therefore dynamic strategies reduce to the replicating portfolio using exchange traded and well selected options, and the risky stock.

Productive efficiency and regulatory reform: The case of vehicle inspection services

Measuring productive efficiency provides information on the likely effects of regulatory reform. We present a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) of a sample of 38 vehicle inspection units under a concession regime, between the years 2000 and 2004. The differences in efficiency scores show the potential technical efficiency benefit of introducing some form of incentive regulation or of progressing towards liberalization. We also compute scale efficiency scores, showing that only units in territories with very low population density operate at a sub-optimal scale. Among those that operate at an optimal scale, there are significant differences in size; the largest ones operate in territories with the highest population density. This suggests that the introduction of new units in the most densely populated territories (a likely effect of some form of liberalization) would not be detrimental in terms of scale efficiency. We also find that inspection units belonging to a large, diversified firm show higher technical efficiency, reflecting economies of scale or scope at the firm level. Finally, we show that between 2002 and 2004, a period of high regulatory uncertainty in the sample’s region, technical change was almost zero. Regulatory reform should take due account of scale and diversification effects, while at the same time avoiding regulatory uncertainty.