Are Bar Associations Anticompetitive? An Empirical Analysis of Recommended Prices for Legal Services in Spain

The European Commission Report on Competition in Professional Services found that recommended prices by professional bodies have a significant negative effect on competition since they may facilitate the coordination of prices between service providers and/or mislead consumers about reasonable price levels. Professional associations argue, first, that a fee schedule may help their members to properly calculate the cost of services avoiding excessive charges and reducing consumers’ searching costs and, second, that recommended prices are very useful for cost appraisal if a litigant is condemned to pay the legal expenses of the opposing party. Thus, recommended fee schedules could be justified to some extent if they represented the cost of providing the services. We test this hypothesis using cross‐section data on a subset of recommended prices by 52 Spanish bar associations and cost data on their territorial jurisdictions. Our empirical results indicate that prices recommended by bar associations are unrelated to the cost of legal services and therefore we conclude that recommended prices have merely an anticompetitive effect.

Can the change in the composition of the US GDP explain the Great Moderation? A test via oil price shocks

The paper investigates whether the growing GDP share of the services sector can contribute to explain the great moderation in the US. We identify and analyze three oil price shocks and use a SVAR analysis to measure their economic impact on the US economy at both the aggregate and the sectoral level. We find mixed support for the explanation of the great moderation in terms of shrinking oil shock volatilities and observe that increases (decreases) in oil shock volatilities are contrasted by a weakening (strengthening) in their transmission mechanism. Across sectors, services are the least affected by any oil shock. As the contribution of services to the GDP volatility increases over time, we conclude that a composition effect contributed to moderate the conditional volatility to oil shocks of the US GDP.

Competitive Pressure and Job Interview Lying: A Game Theoretical Analysis

We consider a job contest in which candidates go through interviews (cheap talk) and are subject to reference checks. We show how competitive pressure - increasing the ratio of "good" to "bad" type candi- dates - can lead to a vast increase in lying and in some cases make bad hires more likely. As the number of candidates increases, it becomes harder to in- duce truth-telling. The interview stage becomes redundant if the candidates, a priori, know each others' type or the result of their own reference check. Finally, we show that the employer can bene t from committing not to reject all the applicants.

Full Implementation of Rank Dependent Prizes

A manager/mechanism designer must allocate a set of money prizes ($1, $2, .., $n) between n agents working in a team. The agents know the state i.e. who contributed most, second most, etc. The agents' prefer- ences over prizes are state independent. We incorporate the possibility that the manager knows the state with a tiny probability and present a simple mechanism that uniquely implement prizes that respects the true state.

La metodología científica en economía de la empresa en la actualidad

[ES] Mientras la realidad se transforma a gran ritmo, las ideas de ciencia y de conocimiento científico entran en crisis. Esta crisis también se manifiesta en los estudios empresariales: muchos afirman que la Economía de la Empresa no es ciencia, sino un conjunto de conocimientos diversos, débilmente conectados entre sí. Otros se pierden en investigaciones alejadas de la realidad, y un último grupo no consigue remontar un enfoque meramente practicista. Por ello, estimamos que es un buen momento para recordar los fundamentos que sustentan una ciencia: su objeto formal y material y su método. Para ello se realizará una exposición sintética del pensamiento del profesor Soldevilla.

A note on bargaining power and managerial delegation in multimarket oligopolies

In a two-stage delegation game model with Nash bargaining between a manager and an owner, an equivalence result is found between this game and Fershtman and Judd's strategic delegation game (Fershtman and Judd, 1987). Interestingly, although both games are equivalent in terms of profits under certain conditions, managers obtain greater rewards in the bargaining game. This results in a redistribution of profits between owners and managers.

Optimal overall emissions taxation in durable goods oligopoly

We analyze optimal second-best emission taxes in a durable good industry under imperfect competition. The analysis is performed for three different types of emissions and for situations where the good is rented, sold or simultaneously sold and rented. We show, for durable goods that may cause pollution in a period (or in periods) different from the production period, that the expected overall emission tax and the expected total marginal environmental damage per unit produced in each period are the relevant variables to consider in the analysis of overinternalization and in the comparison of optimal emission taxes for renting, selling and renting-selling firms. Our results allow to extend some previous results in the literature to these durable goods and provide an adequate perspective on some other results (in particular, we point out the limitations of focusing only, for those durable goods, on the level and effects of the optimal emission tax in the production period).

Influence of Wind and Grain Size on Migration of Asymmetric Sand Waves

Large parts of shallow seas are covered by regular seabed patterns and sand wave is one kind of these patterns. The instability of the sedimentary structures may hazard pipelines and the foundations of offshore structures. In the last decade or so, it's a focus for engineers to investigate the movement mechanism of sand waves. Previous theoretical studies of the subject have developed a general model to predict the growth and migration of sand waves, which is based on the two-dimensional vertical shallow water equations and the bed-form deformation equations. Although the relation between wave-current flow and sand bed deformation has been established, the topographic influence has not been considered in the model. In this paper some special patterns, which are asymmetric and close to the reality, are represent as the perturbed seabed and the evolution of sand waves is calculated. The combination of a steady flow induced by wind and a sinusoidal tidal flow is considered as the basic flow. Finally the relations of some parameters (grain size, etc.) and sand waves' growth and migration are discussed, and the growth rate and migration speeds of asymmetric sand waves are carried out.

Understanding Tariff Deficit and its Challenges

Regulators and market participants have become increasingly concerned about the Spanish electricity tariff deficit due to its size and the difficulties to control its growth. The deficit can be traced to inefficiencies in market organization and solutions should be designed to mitigate those inefficiencies. Tariff deficits have allowed for the transfer of part of the present costs of electricity services to future consumers, but this situation has reached a limit and a deep revision of regulation in this market cannot be postponed. In general, solutions that interfere with market prices and signals are not appropriate.

Democratic Values Transmission

This study addresses the issue of intergenerational transmission of democratic values embedded in social choice rules. We focus on a few rules which have been the focus of social choice theory: plurality, plurality with a runoff, majoritarian compromise, social compromise and Borda rule. We confront subjects with preferences profiles of a hypothetical electorate over a set of four alternatives. Different rules produce different outcomes and subjects decide which alternative should be chosen for the society whose preference profile is shown. We elicit each subject's preferences over rules and his/her parents' and check whether there is any relationship; 186 students and their parents attended the sessions at Istanbul Bilgi University. Overall, we find support for the hypothesis of parental transmission of democratic values and gender differences in the transmitted rule.

Economic Effects of Global Warming under Stock Growth Uncertainty: The European Sardine Fishery

Global warming of the oceans is expected to alter the environmental conditions that determine the growth of a fishery resource. Most climate change studies are based on models and scenarios that focus on economic growth, or they concentrate on simulating the potential losses or cost to fisheries due to climate change. However, analysis that addresses model optimization problems to better understand of the complex dynamics of climate change and marine ecosystems is still lacking. In this paper a simple algorithm to compute transitional dynamics in order to quantify the effect of climate change on the European sardine fishery is presented. The model results indicate that global warming will not necessarily lead to a monotonic decrease in the expected biomass levels. Our results show that if the resource is exploited optimally then in the short run, increases in the surface temperature of the fishery ground are compatible with higher expected biomass and economic profit.

Invariant-free deduction systems for temporal logic

In this thesis we propose a new approach to deduction methods for temporal logic. Our proposal is based on an inductive definition of eventualities that is different from the usual one. On the basis of this non-customary inductive definition for eventualities, we first provide dual systems of tableaux and sequents for Propositional Linear-time Temporal Logic (PLTL). Then, we adapt the deductive approach introduced by means of these dual tableau and sequent systems to the resolution framework and we present a clausal temporal resolution method for PLTL. Finally, we make use of this new clausal temporal resolution method for establishing logical foundations for declarative temporal logic programming languages. The key element in the deduction systems for temporal logic is to deal with eventualities and hidden invariants that may prevent the fulfillment of eventualities. Different ways of addressing this issue can be found in the works on deduction systems for temporal logic. Traditional tableau systems for temporal logic generate an auxiliary graph in a first pass.Then, in a second pass, unsatisfiable nodes are pruned. In particular, the second pass must check whether the eventualities are fulfilled. The one-pass tableau calculus introduced by S. Schwendimann requires an additional handling of information in order to detect cyclic branches that contain unfulfilled eventualities. Regarding traditional sequent calculi for temporal logic, the issue of eventualities and hidden invariants is tackled by making use of a kind of inference rules (mainly, invariant-based rules or infinitary rules) that complicates their automation. A remarkable consequence of using either a two-pass approach based on auxiliary graphs or aone-pass approach that requires an additional handling of information in the tableau framework, and either invariant-based rules or infinitary rules in the sequent framework, is that temporal logic fails to carry out the classical correspondence between tableaux and sequents. In this thesis, we first provide a one-pass tableau method TTM that instead of a graph obtains a cyclic tree to decide whether a set of PLTL-formulas is satisfiable. In TTM tableaux are classical-like. For unsatisfiable sets of formulas, TTM produces tableaux whose leaves contain a formula and its negation. In the case of satisfiable sets of formulas, TTM builds tableaux where each fully expanded open branch characterizes a collection of models for the set of formulas in the root. The tableau method TTM is complete and yields a decision procedure for PLTL. This tableau method is directly associated to a one-sided sequent calculus called TTC. Since TTM is free from all the structural rules that hinder the mechanization of deduction, e.g. weakening and contraction, then the resulting sequent calculus TTC is also free from this kind of structural rules. In particular, TTC is free of any kind of cut, including invariant-based cut. From the deduction system TTC, we obtain a two-sided sequent calculus GTC that preserves all these good freeness properties and is finitary, sound and complete for PLTL. Therefore, we show that the classical correspondence between tableaux and sequent calculi can be extended to temporal logic. The most fruitful approach in the literature on resolution methods for temporal logic, which was started with the seminal paper of M. Fisher, deals with PLTL and requires to generate invariants for performing resolution on eventualities. In this thesis, we present a new approach to resolution for PLTL. The main novelty of our approach is that we do not generate invariants for performing resolution on eventualities. Our method is based on the dual methods of tableaux and sequents for PLTL mentioned above. Our resolution method involves translation into a clausal normal form that is a direct extension of classical CNF. We first show that any PLTL-formula can be transformed into this clausal normal form. Then, we present our temporal resolution method, called TRS-resolution, that extends classical propositional resolution. Finally, we prove that TRS-resolution is sound and complete. In fact, it finishes for any input formula deciding its satisfiability, hence it gives rise to a new decision procedure for PLTL. In the field of temporal logic programming, the declarative proposals that provide a completeness result do not allow eventualities, whereas the proposals that follow the imperative future approach either restrict the use of eventualities or deal with them by calculating an upper bound based on the small model property for PLTL. In the latter, when the length of a derivation reaches the upper bound, the derivation is given up and backtracking is used to try another possible derivation. In this thesis we present a declarative propositional temporal logic programming language, called TeDiLog, that is a combination of the temporal and disjunctive paradigms in Logic Programming. We establish the logical foundations of our proposal by formally defining operational and logical semantics for TeDiLog and by proving their equivalence. Since TeDiLog is, syntactically, a sublanguage of PLTL, the logical semantics of TeDiLog is supported by PLTL logical consequence. The operational semantics of TeDiLog is based on TRS-resolution. TeDiLog allows both eventualities and always-formulas to occur in clause heads and also in clause bodies. To the best of our knowledge, TeDiLog is the first declarative temporal logic programming language that achieves this high degree of expressiveness. Since the tableau method presented in this thesis is able to detect that the fulfillment of an eventuality is prevented by a hidden invariant without checking for it by means of an extra process, since our finitary sequent calculi do not include invariant-based rules and since our resolution method dispenses with invariant generation, we say that our deduction methods are invariant-free.