A Law and Economics Analysis of Trade Secrets: Optimal Scope of Law, Misappropriation and Alternative Damages Regimes

This thesis is primarily based on three core chapters, focused on the fundamental issues of trade secrets law. The goal of this thesis is to come up with policy recommendations to improve legal structure governing trade secrets. The focal points of this research are the following. What is the optimal scope of trade secrets law? How does it depend on the market characteristics such as degree of product differentiation between competing products? What factors need to be considered to balance the contradicting objectives of promoting innovation and knowledge diffusion? The second strand of this research focuses on the desirability of lost profits or unjust enrichment damage regimes in case of misappropriation of a trade secret. A comparison between these regimes is made and simple policy implications are extracted from the analysis. The last part of this research is an empirical analysis of a possible relationship between trade secrets sharing and misappropriation instances faced by firms.

Fighting corruption with pyramids: A Law and Economics approach to combating corruption in post-socialist countries

Corruption is, in the last two decades, considered as one of the biggest problems within the international community, which harms not only a particular state or society but the whole world. The discussion on corruption in law and economics approach is mainly run under the veil of Public choice theory and principal-agent model. Based on this approach the strong international initiatives taken by the UN, the OECD and the Council of Europe, provided various measures and tools in order to support and guide countries in their combat against corruption. These anti-corruption policies created a repression -prevention-transparency model for corruption combat. Applying this model, countries around the world adopted anti-corruption strategies as part of their legal rules. Nevertheless, the recent researches on the effects of this move show non impressive results. Critics argue that “one size does not fit all” because the institutional setting of countries around the world varies. Among the countries which experience problems of corruption, even though they follow the dominant anti-corruption trends, are transitional, post-socialist countries. To this group belong the countries which are emerging from centrally planned to an open market economy. The socialist past left traces on institutional setting, mentality of the individuals and their interrelation, particularly in the domain of public administration. If the idiosyncrasy of these countries is taken into account the suggestion in this thesis is that in public administration in post-socialist countries, instead of dominant anti-corruption scheme repression-prevention-transparency, corruption combat should be improved through the implementation of a new one, structure-conduct-performance. The implementation of this model is based on three regulatory pyramids: anti-corruption, disciplinary anti-corruption and criminal anti-corruption pyramid. This approach asks public administration itself to engage in corruption combat, leaving criminal justice system as the ultimate weapon, used only for the very harmful misdeeds.

Essays in the Economics of Ageing

In the first paper, I assess if financial incentives may be used as an effective device to induce workers to postpone retirement by evaluating the Italian so called “super bonus” reform. The bonus consisted in economic incentives given for a limited period to private sector workers who had reached the requirements for seniority pension. Crucially for this study, public workers were not entitled to the bonus. Using data from the Bank of Italy Survey on Household Income andWealth, and exploiting the DID-Probit strategy proposed by Blundell et al. (JEEA, 2004), I assess the effect of the bonus on the decision to postpone retirement, by comparing private and public workers before and after the reform. Results suggest a reduction of 12ppt in the proportion of private workers who decided to retire among those qualifying for retirement. Results also suggest, not trivially, that most of the effect of the reform is driven by low-income workers. Finally, I propose an estimate of the extensive margin elasticity of Italian older workers. The second study estimates a structural reduced form of the “option value” model developed by Stock and Wise (1990) using Italian data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE).Exploiting exogenous changes in social security wealth (SSW) results show a significant effect in the expected direction of SSW and of marginal incentives to retire. Results are robust even after controlling for individual heterogeneity and its correlation with financial incentives. Using detailed information on individuals, the results also highlights the importance of individual and job characteristics, which have been very little explored by this literature, as determinants of retirement. This suggests the potential of “tagging” in the design of social security incentives in order to reduce choice distortions and improve the overall efficiency of the system.

Essays in Applied and Labor Economics

This thesis consists of three self-contained papers. In the first paper I analyze the labor supply behavior of Bologna Pizza Delivery Vendors. Recent influential papers analyze labor supply behavior of taxi drivers (Camerer et al., 1997; and Crawford and Meng, 2011) and suggest that reference-dependence preferences have an important influence on drivers’ labor-supply decisions. Unlike previous papers, I am able to identify an exogenous and transitory change in labor demand. Using high frequency data on orders and rainfall as an exogenous demand shifter, I invariably find that reference-dependent preferences play no role in their labor’ supply decisions and the behavior of pizza vendors is perfectly consistent with the predictions of the standard model of labor’ supply. In the second paper, I investigate how the voting behavior of Members of Parliament is influenced by the Members seating nearby. By exploiting the random seating arrangements in the Icelandic Parliament, I show that being seated next to Members of a different party increases the probability of not being aligned with one’s own party. Using the exact spatial orientation of the peers, I provide evidence that supports the hypothesis that interaction is the main channel that explain these results. In the third paper, I provide an estimate of the trade flows that there would have been between the UK and Europe if the UK had joined the Euro. As an alternative approach to the standard log-linear gravity equation I employ the synthetic control method. I show that the aggregate trade flows between Britain and Europe would have been 13% higher if the UK had adopted the Euro.

Management control systems : subcomponents, optimal design and the role of time as a contingency

Management Control System (MCS) research is undergoing turbulent times. For a long time related to cybernetic instruments of management accounting only, MCS are increasingly seen as complex systems comprising not only formal accounting-driven instruments, but also informal mechanisms of control based on organizational culture. But not only have the means of MCS changed; researchers increasingly ap-ply MCS to organizational goals other than strategy implementation.rnrnTaking the question of "How do I design a well-performing MCS?" as a starting point, this dissertation aims at providing a comprehensive and integrated overview of the "current-state" of MCS research. Opting for a definition of MCS, broad in terms of means (all formal as well as informal MCS instruments), but focused in terms of objectives (behavioral control only), the dissertation contributes to MCS theory by, a) developing an integrated (contingency) model of MCS, describing its contingencies, as well as its subcomponents, b) refining the equifinality model of Gresov/Drazin (1997), c) synthesizing research findings from contingency and configuration research concerning MCS, taking into account case studies on research topics such as ambi-dexterity, equifinality and time as a contingency.