Una reflexión sobre la impronta romana del 'beneficio de separación de patrimonios' en el Código Civil catalán

The roman institution of the separatio bonorum is a pretorian remedy that relies on the principle of equity, created as to protect the deceased creditors and/or legatees. It provides them a"benefit" in the case of selling the goods of the heir-deubtor, enabling them to separate and reserve for themselves that whole patrimonium, as to avoid that by the act of selling, the heirs creditors could go to it; and like this they maintain intact their guarantee, which relies on the whole goods and assets left by the deceased. The separation of patrimonies implied the existence of 2 different groups of goods: that of the heirs" and that one of the deceased, which are not the same in legal terms, in spite of having a common owner at this point, the heir. This institution was regulated in the 6th title of the 42nd book of the Digesto, and in the 72th title, 7th book of the Justinean Code, and its interest is really high due to its material complexity and its procedure. The aim of this work is to analyze the institution of the separatio bonorum in Roman Law, and its importance in the same figure, actually regulated in the 4th book of the Catalan civil code.

Critical Mobilities

The field of mobility studies examines social phenomena through the lens of movement. In this perspective, societies are regarded as being constantly reconfigured as they are shaped by a series of mobile entities (capital, people, information). This book engages critically with many of the claims and challenges of mobility studies by providing empirically rich reports of mobilities and their limitations. Instead of assuming a seamless world of flows, the volume foregrounds questions of power, inequality, and moorings as integral to the movement of capital, goods, images, practices, or people. It brings together the work of several internationally renowned scholars, who engage with these movements at critical sites. This is the first book to provide a critical and interdisciplinary view of mobilities covering a broad range of issues rather than a single domain. The chapters deal with current and important issues, such as organ transplants, illegal migrations, urban globalization, international policies of higher education institutions, and scientific diasporas. As a whole, the book provides new insights into how power relations shape mobilities and societies.

The INTERNORM Project: Bridging Two Worlds of Expert- and Lay-Knowledge in Standardization

This paper presents a pilot project to reinforce participatory practices in standardization. The INTERNORM project creates an interactive knowledge center based on the sharing of academic skills and experiences accumulated by the civil society, especially consumer associations, environmental associations and trade unions to strengthen the participatory process of standardization. The first objective of the project is action-oriented: INTERNORM provides a common knowledge pool supporting the participation of civil society actors to international standard-setting activities by bringing them together with academic experts in working groups and providing logistic and financial support to their participation in meetings of national and international technical committees. The second objective is analytical: the standardization action provides a research field for a better understanding of the participatory dynamics underpinning international standardization. This paper presents three incentives that explain civil society (non-)involvement in standardization that overcome conventional resource-based hypotheses: an operational incentive related to the use of standards in the selective goods provided by associations to their membership; a thematic incentive provided by the setting of priorities by strategic committees created in some standardization organization; and a rhetorical incentive related to the discursive resource that civil society concerns offers to the different stakeholders.

Structural development accounting

We construct and estimate a unified model combining three of the main sources ofcross-country income disparities: differences in factor endowments, barriers to technologyadoption and the inappropriateness of frontier technologies to local conditions. The keycomponents are different types of workers, distortions to capital accumulation, directedtechnical change, costly adoption and spillovers from the world technology frontier. Despiteits parsimonious parametrization, our empirical model provides a good fit of GDP data forup to 86 countries in 1970 and 122 countries in 2000. Removing barriers to technologyadoption would increase the output per worker of the average non-OECD country relativeto the US from 0.19 to 0.61, while increasing skill premia in all countries. Removing barriersto trade in goods amplifies income disparities, induces skill-biased technology adoptionand increases skill premia in the majority of countries. These results are reverted if tradeliberalization is coupled with international IPR protection.

Inclusion of soil erosion impacts in life cycle assessment on a global scale: application to energy crops in Spain

Purpose: Despite the fundamental role of ecosystem goods and services in sustaining human activities, there is no harmonized and internationally agreed method for including them in life cycle assessment (LCA). The main goal of this study was to develop a globally applicable and spatially resolved method for assessing land-use impacts on the erosion regulation ecosystem service.Methods: Soil erosion depends much on location. Thus, unlike conventional LCA, the endpoint method was regionalized at the grid-cell level (5 arc-minutes, approximately 10×10 km2) to reflect the spatial conditions of the site. Spatially explicit characterization factors were not further aggregated at broader spatial scales. Results and discussion: Life cycle inventory data of topsoil and topsoil organic carbon (SOC) losses were interpreted at the endpoint level in terms of the ultimate damage to soil resources and ecosystem quality. Human health damages were excluded from the assessment. The method was tested on a case study of five three-year agricultural rotations, two of them with energy crops, grown in several locations in Spain. A large variation in soil and SOC losses was recorded in the inventory step, depending on climatic and edaphic conditions. The importance of using a spatially explicit model and characterization factors is shown in the case study.Conclusions and outlook: The regionalized assessment takes into account the differences in soil erosion-related environmental impacts caused by the great variability of soils. Taking this regionalized framework as the starting point, further research should focus on testing the applicability of the method trough the complete life cycle of a product and on determining an appropriate spatial scale at which to aggregate characterization factors, in order to deal with data gaps on location of processes, especially in the background system. Additional research should also focus on improving reliability of the method by quantifying and, insofar as it is possible, reducing uncertainty.

¿Activos desde cuándo? la edad de acceso al mercado de trabajo en la España del siglo XVIII

Este trabajo trata sobre la edad a la que niños y niñas accedían al trabajo remunerado en la España del siglo XVIII. Utilizando como fuente los Memoriales del Catastro de Ensenada (1751-1753), se propone la edad de diez años como edad media de acceso, a partir de la cual se puede calcular la tasa de actividad. La Mancha era una región rica en industria rural, sobre todo de manufacturas textiles, que abastecían al mercado madrileño, el de otras ciudades e incluso al colonial, y que generaban una fuerte demanda de trabajo femenino. Esta estructura productiva explica por qué las niñas se incorporaban al trabajo remunerado antes que los niños, por qué eran escolarizadas desde muy pequeñas en las ‘escuelas de labor’ y no en las escuelas de primeras letras como los niños, y por qué, en definitiva, sus tasas de alfabetización un siglo después eran inferiores a la ya muy baja media femenina española. En la España del siglo XVIII mujeres y niñas estaban masivamente empleadas en las manufacturas, sobre todo textiles, como ocurría en gran parte de Europa. Entender y contabilizar el trabajo realizado por mujeres y niñas, mucho más difundido de lo que se cree habitualmente, y centrado en manufacturas y servicios, transforma nuestra visión de la estructura de la actividad en la España pre-industrial, normalmente identificada con el trabajo agrícola y ganadero.

Subsidy design: wealth versus benefits

A government would like to subsidize an indivisible good. Consumers' valuations of the good vary according to their wealth and benefits from the good. A subsidy scheme may be based on consumers' wealth or benefit information. We translate a wealth-based policy to a benefit-based policy, and vice versa, and give a necessary and sufficient condition for the pair of policies to implement the same assignment: consumers choose to purchase the good under the wealth-based policy if and only if they choose to do so under the translated benefit-based policy. General taxation allows equivalent policies to require the same budget.

Precios implícitos de los atributos de los productos turísticos: ¿Qué esconde el efecto de la localización?

Different studies have decomposed the prices of tourism products into the implicit prices of their attributes (category and services), location and time of the year. These studies usually consider location as a residual indicator of the environment surrounding the tourism product, that is, an indicator unexplained by the model and which includes several elements. This paper analyses in-depth the factors which, according with previous studies, might be include in the variable “location”, such as natural capital; cultural, gastronomic and sportive supply; or public goods and services

Generic brands and product differentiation strategies

Generic or own brand products were initially only lesser expensive copies of the branded label alternative, but nowadays, pricing alone is not enough in order to survive in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) or Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)markets. With this in mind manufacturers of generic brands have adapted to this rapidlygrowing niche by investing in design and marketing during the initial phase in order to be perceived as having a quality product comparable to that of the branded products. In addition, they have gone further ahead with a second phase and resorted to innovativeproduct differentiation strategies and even pure innovation in many cases. These strategies have granted generic brands constantly increasing market shares and a position of equals relative to national brands.Using previous analyses and case studies, this paper will provide conceptual and empirical evidence to explain the surprisingly fast growth and penetration of generic supermarket brands, which in their relatively short lifespan, have grown to rival the historical market leaders, the branded products. According to this analysis, the main conclusion is that the growth in generic brands can be explained not only by price competition, but also by the use of innovative product differentiation strategies.

Essays in equilibrium asset pricing

Introduction This dissertation consists of three essays in equilibrium asset pricing. The first chapter studies the asset pricing implications of a general equilibrium model in which real investment is reversible at a cost. Firms face higher costs in contracting than in expanding their capital stock and decide to invest when their productive capital is scarce relative to the overall capital of the economy. Positive shocks to the capital of the firm increase the size of the firm and reduce the value of growth options. As a result, the firm is burdened with more unproductive capital and its value lowers with respect to the accumulated capital. The optimal consumption policy alters the optimal allocation of resources and affects firm's value, generating mean-reverting dynamics for the M/B ratios. The model (1) captures convergence of price-to-book ratios -negative for growth stocks and positive for value stocks - (firm migration), (2) generates deviations from the classic CAPM in line with the cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns and (3) generates a non-monotone relationship between Tobin's q and conditional volatility consistent with the empirical evidence. The second chapter proposes a standard portfolio-choice problem with transaction costs and mean reversion in expected returns. In the presence of transactions costs, no matter how small, arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return. When two such rates follow stochastic processes, it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them. The reason is that immediate arbitrage would induce a definite expenditure of transactions costs whereas, without arbitrage intervention, there exists some, perhaps sufficient, probability that these two interest rates will come back together without any costs having been incurred. Hence, one can surmise that at equilibrium the financial market will permit the coexistence of two riskless rates that are not equal to each other. For analogous reasons, randomly fluctuating expected rates of return on risky assets will be allowed to differ even after correction for risk, leading to important violations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The combination of randomness in expected rates of return and proportional transactions costs is a serious blow to existing frictionless pricing models. Finally, in the last chapter I propose a two-countries two-goods general equilibrium economy with uncertainty about the fundamentals' growth rates to study the joint behavior of equity volatilities and correlation at the business cycle frequency. I assume that dividend growth rates jump from one state to other, while countries' switches are possibly correlated. The model is solved in closed-form and the analytical expressions for stock prices are reported. When calibrated to the empirical data of United States and United Kingdom, the results show that, given the existing degree of synchronization across these business cycles, the model captures quite well the historical patterns of stock return volatilities. Moreover, I can explain the time behavior of the correlation, but exclusively under the assumption of a global business cycle.

Anàlisi econòmica i financera dels sectors de béns de consum i serveis de consum de la Borsa de Madrid

Aquest treball consisteix en una anàlisi econòmica i financera dels sectors de béns de consum i serveis de consum de la Borsa de Madrid en el període 2007-2011. Aquest consisteix en realitzar un estudi dels diferents comptes anuals consolidats de les diferents empreses que configuren cadascun dels sectors mitjançant diferents instruments financers, amb l’objectiu de saber si la crisi econòmica i financera actual ha afectat o no aquests.

War and the evolution of belligerence and bravery.

Tribal war occurs when a coalition of individuals use force to seize reproduction-enhancing resources, and it may have affected human evolution. Here, we develop a population-genetic model for the coevolution of costly male belligerence and bravery when war occurs between groups of individuals in a spatially subdivided population. Belligerence is assumed to increase an actor's group probability of trying to conquer another group. An actor's bravery is assumed to increase his group's ability to conquer an attacked group. We show that the selective pressure on these two traits can be substantial even in groups of large size, and that they may be driven by two independent reproduction-enhancing resources: additional mates for males and additional territory (or material resources) for females. This has consequences for our understanding of the evolution of intertribal interactions, as hunter-gatherer societies are well known to have frequently raided neighbouring groups from whom they appropriated territory, goods and women.

Aplicación de la metodología “policy deployment” planificación estratégica a un departamento de suministro de materiales para aerogeneradores para reducir inventarios

Debido a la necesidad de diferenciarse y hacer frente a la competencia, las empresas han apostado por desarrollar operaciones que den valor al cliente, por eso muchas de ellas han visto en las herramientas lean la oportunidad para mejorar sus operaciones. Esta mejora implica la reducción de dinero, personas, equipos grandes, inventario y espacio, con dos objetivos: eliminar despilfarro y reducir la variabilidad. Para conseguir los objetivos estratégicos de la empresa es imprescindible qué éstos estén alineados con los planes de la gerencia a nivel medio y a su vez con el trabajo realizado por los empleados para asegurar que cada persona está alineada en la misma dirección y al mismo tiempo. Ésta es la filosofía de la planificación estratégica. Por ello uno de los objetivos de este proyecto será el desarrollar una herramienta que facilite la exposición de los objetivos de la empresa y la comunicación de los mismos a todos los niveles de la organización para a partir de ellos y tomando como referencia la necesidad de reducir inventarios en la cadena de suministro se realizará un estudio de la producción de un componente de control del aerogenerador para conseguir nivelarla y reducir su inventario de producto terminado. Los objetivos particulares en este apartado serán reducir el inventario en un 28%, nivelar la producción reduciendo la variabilidad del 31% al 24%, mantener un stock máximo de 24 unidades garantizando el suministro ante una demanda variable, incrementar la rotación del inventario en un 10% y establecer un plan de acción para reducir el lead time entre un 40-50%. Todo ello será posible gracias a la realización del mapa de valor presente y futuro para eliminar desperdicios y crear un flujo continuo y el cálculo de un supermercado que mantenga el stock en un nivel óptimo.

Evaluación y optimización de los servicios de un taller de mantenimiento mediante el software de simulación ARENA

Debido a la necesidad de diferenciarse y hacer frente a la competencia, las empresas han apostado por desarrollar operaciones que den valor al cliente, por eso muchas de ellas han visto en las herramientas lean la oportunidad para mejorar sus operaciones. Esta mejora implica la reducción de dinero, personas, equipos grandes, inventario y espacio, con dos objetivos: eliminar despilfarro y reducir la variabilidad. Para conseguir los objetivos estratégicos de la empresa es imprescindible qué éstos estén alineados con los planes de la gerencia a nivel medio y a su vez con el trabajo realizado por los empleados para asegurar que cada persona está alineada en la misma dirección y al mismo tiempo. Ésta es la filosofía de la planificación estratégica. Por ello uno de los objetivos de este proyecto será el desarrollar una herramienta que facilite la exposición de los objetivos de la empresa y la comunicación de los mismos a todos los niveles de la organización para a partir de ellos y tomando como referencia la necesidad de reducir inventarios en la cadena de suministro se realizará un estudio de la producción de un componente de control del aerogenerador para conseguir nivelarla y reducir su inventario de producto terminado. Los objetivos particulares en este apartado serán reducir el inventario en un 28%, nivelar la producción reduciendo la variabilidad del 31% al 24%, mantener un stock máximo de 24 unidades garantizando el suministro ante una demanda variable, incrementar la rotación del inventario en un 10% y establecer un plan de acción para reducir el lead time entre un 40-50%. Todo ello será posible gracias a la realización del mapa de valor presente y futuro para eliminar desperdicios y crear un flujo continuo y el cálculo de un supermercado que mantenga el stock en un nivel óptimo.

Total Cost of Transportation Analysis of Road and Highway Issues, HR-388, 2002

In the administration, planning, design, and maintenance of road systems, transportation professionals often need to choose between alternatives, justify decisions, evaluate tradeoffs, determine how much to spend, set priorities, assess how well the network meets traveler needs, and communicate the basis for their actions to others. A variety of technical guidelines, tools, and methods have been developed to help with these activities. Such work aids include design criteria guidelines, design exception analysis methods, needs studies, revenue allocation schemes, regional planning guides, designation of minimum standards, sufficiency ratings, management systems, point based systems to determine eligibility for paving, functional classification, and bridge ratings. While such tools play valuable roles, they also manifest a number of deficiencies and are poorly integrated. Design guides tell what solutions MAY be used, they aren't oriented towards helping find which one SHOULD be used. Design exception methods help justify deviation from design guide requirements but omit consideration of important factors. Resource distribution is too often based on dividing up what's available rather than helping determine how much should be spent. Point systems serve well as procedural tools but are employed primarily to justify decisions that have already been made. In addition, the tools aren't very scalable: a system level method of analysis seldom works at the project level and vice versa. In conjunction with the issues cited above, the operation and financing of the road and highway system is often the subject of criticisms that raise fundamental questions: What is the best way to determine how much money should be spent on a city or a county's road network? Is the size and quality of the rural road system appropriate? Is too much or too little money spent on road work? What parts of the system should be upgraded and in what sequence? Do truckers receive a hidden subsidy from other motorists? Do transportation professions evaluate road situations from too narrow of a perspective? In considering the issues and questions the author concluded that it would be of value if one could identify and develop a new method that would overcome the shortcomings of existing methods, be scalable, be capable of being understood by the general public, and utilize a broad viewpoint. After trying out a number of concepts, it appeared that a good approach would be to view the road network as a sub-component of a much larger system that also includes vehicles, people, goods-in-transit, and all the ancillary items needed to make the system function. Highway investment decisions could then be made on the basis of how they affect the total cost of operating the total system. A concept, named the "Total Cost of Transportation" method, was then developed and tested. The concept rests on four key principles: 1) that roads are but one sub-system of a much larger 'Road Based Transportation System', 2) that the size and activity level of the overall system are determined by market forces, 3) that the sum of everything expended, consumed, given up, or permanently reserved in building the system and generating the activity that results from the market forces represents the total cost of transportation, and 4) that the economic purpose of making road improvements is to minimize that total cost. To test the practical value of the theory, a special database and spreadsheet model of Iowa's county road network was developed. This involved creating a physical model to represent the size, characteristics, activity levels, and the rates at which the activities take place, developing a companion economic cost model, then using the two in tandem to explore a variety of issues. Ultimately, the theory and model proved capable of being used in full system, partial system, single segment, project, and general design guide levels of analysis. The method appeared to be capable of remedying many of the existing work method defects and to answer society's transportation questions from a new perspective.