Market institutions and judicial rulemaking

Assuming that the degree of discretion granted to judges was the main distinguishing feature between common and civil law until the 19th century, we argue that constraining judicial discretion was instrumental in protecting freedom of contract and developing the market order in civil law. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the history of Western law. In England, a unique institutional balance between the Crown and the Parliament guaranteed private property and prompted the gradual evolution towards a legal framework that facilitated market relationships, a process that was supported by the English judiciary. On the Continent, however, legal constraints on the market were suppressed in a top-down fashion by the founders of the liberal state, often against the will of the incumbent judiciary. Constraining judicial discretion there was essential for enforcing freedom of contract and establishing the legal order of the market economy. In line with this evidence, our selection hypothesis casts doubts on the normative interpretation of empirical results that proclaim the superiority of one legal system over another, disregarding the local conditions and institutional interdependencies on which each legal system was grounded.

Pension plan funding and stock market efficiency

The paper argues that the market signifficantly overvalues firms with severely underfunded pension plans. These companies earn lower stock returns than firms with healthier pension plans for at least five years after the first emergence of the underfunding. The low returns are not explained by risk, price momentum, earnings momentum, or accruals. Further, the evidence suggests that investors do not anticipate the impact of the pension liability on future earnings, and they are surprised when the negative implications of underfunding ultimately materialize. Finally, underfunded firms have poor operating performance, and they earn low returns, although they are value companies.

Report on a review of selected general and application controls over the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Contractor Pay System for the period May 5, 2008 through July 31, 2008

Report on a review of selected general and application controls over the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Contractor Pay System for the period May 5, 2008 through July 31, 2008

Tasavallan Presidentti Urho Kekkosen vierailu Tshekkoslovakiaan 1.-4.10.1969 (Tasavallan Presidentin radio- ja TV-haastattelu Romanian, Unkarin ja Tshekkoslovakian matkojen jälkeen 6.10.1969)

Haastattelu

Kristillisen TV-ohjelman ennakkosuunnitteluvaiheen erityispiirteitä

Opinnäytetyöni on kirjallinen tutkielma ja käsittelen siinä uuden kristillisiin arvoihin pohjaavan tv-ohjelmasarjan ennakkosuunnitteluvaihetta kristilliselle televisiokanavalle. Varsinainen tavoitteeni oli selvittää ennakkosuunnitteluvaiheen erityispiirteitä kristityn tuottajan näkökulmasta. Tutkimukseni perustuu teemahaastatteluun, ja haastattelin kolmea kristittyä av-tuottajaa, jotka ovat aiemmin tuottaneet kristillisiä ohjelmia, sekä oman työni havainnointiin ja reflektointiin tuottajana. Aluksi määrittelen kristillisyyden käsitteen ja sen, mitä sillä tässä työssä tarkoitetaan. Lisäksi esittelen viitekehyksenä kristilliseen tv-toimintaan liittyvää tietoa kotimaassa ja ulkomailla. Haastattelut paljastivat, että kristillistä tv-ohjelmaa suunniteltaessa on tärkeää huomioida se, että kristilliselle tv-kanavalle tehdyistä ohjelmista ei makseta, vaan kustannukset jäävät ohjelman tekijöille. Rahanpuute ilmeneekin kristillisten ohjelmien tuotantojen ongelmana. Ohjelman sisällöllä on keskeinen merkitys suunnitteluvaiheessa. Sen on oltava sisällöllisesti syvällistä ja tarkkaan mietittyä ja suunniteltua. Ohjelman tekijöiltä tarvitaankin kristillistä näkökulmaa, jotta haluttu lopputulos saavutettaisiin. Rukous oli haastateltujen tuottajien kristillisyyden ilmentymä ohjelman suunnittelussa. Sen avulla he kokivat, että Jumala pääsee vaikuttamaan heissä tahtomisen ja tekemisen. Kun halutaan välittää kristillistä sanomaa, ohjelman sisällöntuottajien, eli käsikirjoittajan ja ohjaajan, on oltava kristittyjä, mikäli he vaikuttavat suoraan sisältöön. Muun työryhmän kristillisyydellä ei ole niin suurta merkitystä, jos asenne on positiivinen kristillisiä arvoja, muuta työryhmää ja työtä kohtaan. Tuottajien kristillisyys vaikuttaa heidän tekemiinsä valintoihin, ohjelmien sisältöön ja kanssakäymiseen muiden ihmisten kanssa.

Is bank debt special for the transmission of monetary policy? Evidence from the stock market

We combine existing balance sheet and stock market data with two new datasets to studywhether, how much, and why bank lending to firms matters for the transmission of monetarypolicy. The first new dataset enables us to quantify the bank dependence of firms precisely,as the ratio of bank debt to total assets. We show that a two standard deviation increase inthe bank dependence of a firm makes its stock price about 25% more responsive to monetarypolicy shocks. We explore the channels through which this effect occurs, and find that thestock prices of bank-dependent firms that borrow from financially weaker banks display astronger sensitivity to monetary policy shocks. This finding is consistent with the banklending channel, a theory according to which the strength of bank balance sheets mattersfor monetary policy transmission. We construct a new database of hedging activities andshow that the stock prices of bank-dependent firms that hedge against interest rate riskdisplay a lower sensitivity to monetary policy shocks. This finding is consistent with aninterest rate pass-through channel that operates via the direct transmission of policy ratesto lending rates associated with the widespread use of floating-rates in bank loans and creditline agreements.

Improving electricity market price scenarios by means of forecasting factor models

In liberalized electricity markets, generation Companies must build an hourly bidthat is sent to the market operator. The price at which the energy will be paid is unknown during the bidding process and has to be forecast. In this work we apply forecasting factor models to this framework and study its suitability.

Understanding and Fighting the Medicine Counterfeit Market

Medicine counterfeiting is a serious worldwide issue, involving networks of manufacture and distribution that are an integral part of industrialized organized crime. Despite the potentially devastating health repercussions involved, legal sanctions are often inappropriate or simply not applied. The difficulty in agreeing on a definition of counterfeiting, the huge profits made by the counterfeiters and the complexity of the market are the other main reasons for the extent of the phenomenon. Above all, international cooperation is needed to thwart the spread of counterfeiting. Moreover effort is urgently required on the legal, enforcement and scientific levels. Pharmaceutical companies and agencies have developed measures to protect the medicines and allow fast and reliable analysis of the suspect products. Several means, essentially based on chromatography and spectroscopy, are now at the disposal of the analysts to enable the distinction between genuine and counterfeit products. However the determination of the components and the use of analytical data for forensic purposes still constitute a challenge. The aim of this review article is therefore to point out the intricacy of medicine counterfeiting so that a better understanding can provide solutions to fight more efficiently against it.

How market access shapes human capital investment in a peripheral country

Human capital endowment is one of the main factors influencing the level of development of a region. This paper analyses whether remoteness from economic activity has a negative effect on human capital accumulation and, consequently, on economic development. Making use of microdata this research proves that remoteness from economic activity has contributed to explain the divergences in the level of education observed across Spanish provinces over the last 50 years. The effect is significant even when controlling for the improvement of education supply. Nonetheless, the accessibility effect has been petering out since the 1960s due to the decreasing barriers to mobility.

A study of the labour market trajectories in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

We present an analysis of the register of all unemployment episodes in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg over a recent period of 55 months. We apply propensity score matching to account forthe systematic differences among the groups of subjects (registrants) and unemployment spells.We devise graphical and tabular summaries for describing the sequences of employment states ofthe members of the labour force who register at Agence pour le d?veloppement de l'emploi, theLuxembourg Public Unemployment Agency. Some employment-related information about themis collected by linking their records to the national register of social security contributions, maintained by Inspection g?n?rale de la s?curit? sociale. A class of univariate indices for characterisingthe sequences of labour force states is defined.

Labor market heterogeneity and the aggregate matching function

The matching function -a key building block in models of labor market frictions- impliesthat the job finding rate depends only on labor market tightness. We estimate such amatching function and find that the relation, although remarkably stable over 1967-2007,broke down spectacularly after 2007. We argue that labor market heterogeneities are notfully captured by the standard matching function, but that a generalized matching functionthat explicitly takes into account worker heterogeneity and market segmentation is fullyconsistent with the behavior of the job finding rate. The standard matching function canbreak down when, as in the Great Recession, the average characteristics of the unemployedchange too much, or when dispersion in labor market conditions -the extent to which somelabor markets fare worse than others- increases too much.

Normalisation informatique et marchés de services : le cas du XML

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a generic computing language that provides an outstanding case study of commodification of service standards. The development of this language in the late 1990s marked a shift in computer science as its extensibility let store and share any kind of data. Many office suites software rely on it. The chapter highlights how the largest multinational firms pay special attention to gain a recognised international standard for such a major technological innovation. It argues that standardisation processes affects market structures and can lead to market capture. By examining how a strategic use of standardisation arenas can generate profits, it shows that Microsoft succeeded in making its own technical solution a recognised ISO standard in 2008, while the same arena already adopted two years earlier the open source standard set by IBM and Sun Microsystems. Yet XML standardisation also helped to establish a distinct model of information technology services at the expense of Microsoft monopoly on proprietary software