Showing papers on "restrict published in 2015"

Contractible Contracts in Common Agency Problems

Abstract: This article analyses contractual situations between many principals and many agents. The agents have private information, and the principals take actions. Principals have the ability to contract not only on the reports of the agents but also on the contracts offered by other principals. Contracts are required to be representable in a formal language. The main result of the article is a characterization of the allocations that can be implemented as equilibria in our contracting game. We then restrict attention to exclusive-contracting environments, in which the agent may select the contract of at most one principal. In this setting, our characterization result implies that principals can collude to implement the monopolist outcome. Finally, in general, equilibrium contracts turn out to be incomplete. That is, a contract will restrict the action space of a principal but will not necessarily determine a single action

The Link to the Subject-Matter: A Glass Ceiling for Sustainable Public Contracts?

Abstract: The reform of the EU procurement directives has introduced or refined a number of techniques for sustainable public contracting. However it has also applied a general limiting principle in the form of the ‘link to the subject-matter’ (LtSM) requirement, derived from the case law of the Court of Justice. This limiting principle is intended to restrict the ability of contracting authorities to apply general corporate sustainability requirements or preferences in their procurement. This paper examines the origins and possible justifications for the LtSM requirement, questioning its coherence and clarity. It then turns to an analysis of how it may restrict the effectiveness of sustainability criteria in public contracts, drawing on examples related to renewable energy generation, transport emissions and fair trade products. An alternative approach is outlined based upon a looser interpretation of the requirement, supported by an understanding that procurement decisions do not constitute a form of regulation but are uniquely placed to test the effectiveness of measures for sustainable production and consumption.

PSPOs: the new control orders threatening our public spaces

Abstract: This year has seen a growing number of councils proposing Public Space Protection Orders – a geographically defined version of asbos that could severely restrict people’s freedoms in urban spaces

Role of lockup provision and institutional investors in restricting ipo flipping activity: Is there a moderating effect of investor demand?

Abstract: This paper examines the moderating effect of pre-listing investor demand on the direct influence of lockup provision and institutional investors' participation on flipping activity. By definition, flipping activity is a liquidation of IPOs by new shareholders during the first few trading days. If flipping activity is done substantially, it has potential to erode wealth of the issuing companies and shareholders. To reduce such adverse effects, issuers and underwriters could restrict availability of tradable shares in the immediate aftermarket by relying on the direct restrictive role of lockup provision and institutional investors' participation. However, the role of restricting supply of IPOs in the immediate aftermarket could be hindered if the IPOs are highly demanded. The shift of the demand curve to the right when supply of the IPOs is restricted should induce a new equilibrium at a higher price level. The resulting price appreciation will motivate investors to flip to optimize their returns, pushing flipping activity to a higher level. Using data of 370 Malaysian IPOs covering the period from January 2000 to December 2012, this study finds that pre-listing investor demand does moderate the role of lockup provision (period) and institutional investors' participation in restricting flipping activity but in the opposite manner.

Constraints on Matching Markets Based on Moral Concerns

Abstract: Various markets ban or heavily restrict monetary transfers. This is often motivated by moral concerns. However, it appears to be disputable whether the observed restrictions on transfers are the appropriate market design answer to these concerns. Instead of exogenously restricting transfers on a matching market, we introduce a desideratum based on fairness objectives and study its market design implications. The desideratum we concentrate on is discrimination-freeness, i.e. one’s access to certain resources is independent of one’s wealth endowment. A key assumption in our model is that preferences are not quasilinear but wealth has an impact on the willingness to pay. We show that matchings without transfers based on ordinal object rankings are at the efficient frontier of discrimination-free social choice functions. Implementable social choice functions are discrimination-free if and only if an agent’s object assignment only depends on ordinal object rankings and her money assignment is constant. If money can be used outside the market designer’s control even externality-freeness is needed: an agent’s object assignment has to be independent of other agents’ types. We discuss several applications in the context of discrimination-freeness including compensation for kidney donors.

Productivity and performance in the public sector

Abstract: In times of budgetary difficulties it is not surprising to see the performance of the public sector questioned. What is surprising is that what is meant by it, and how it is measured, does not seem to matter to either the critics or the advocates of the public sector. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest a definition and a way to measure the performance of the public sector or rather of its main components. Our approach is explicitly rooted in the principles of welfare and production economics. We will proceed in three stages. First of all we present what we call the "performance approach" to the public sector. This concept rests on the principal-agent relation that links a principal, i.e., the public authority, and an agent, i.e., the person in charge of the public sector unit, and on the definition of performance as the extent to which the agent fulfils the objectives assigned to him by the principal. Performance is then measured by using the notion of productive efficiency and of "best practice" frontier technique. We then move to the issue of measuring the productivity of some canonical components of the public sector (railways transportation, waste collection, secondary education and health care). We survey some typical studies of productive efficiency and emphasize the important idea of disentangling conceptual and data problems. This raises the important question that given the available data, does it make sense to assess and measure the productivity of such public sector activities? In the third stage we try to assess the performance of the overall public sector. We argue that for such a level of aggregation one should restrict the performance analysis to the outcomes and not relate it to the resources involved. As an illustration we then turn to an evaluation of the performance of the European welfare states and its evolution over time, using frontier techniques. The results confirm that countries with lowest performance grew faster but this is not sufficient to confirm a path towards convergence.

Bounding the Labor Supply Responses to a Randomized Welfare Experiment: A Revealed Preference Approach

Abstract: We study the short-term impact of Connecticut's Jobs First welfare reform experiment on women's labor supply and welfare participation decisions. A non-parametric optimizing model is shown to restrict the set of counterfactual choices compatible with each woman's actual choice. These revealed preference restrictions yield informative bounds on the frequency of several intensive and extensive margin responses to the experiment. We find that welfare reform induced many women to work but led some others to reduce their earnings in order to receive assistance. The bounds on this latter "opt-in" effect imply that intensive margin labor supply responses are non-trivial.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Considerations regarding performance measurement in the public sector

Abstract: The study of performance in the public sector is still a subject of intense investigation, but which gives rise to contradictions. The need for monitoring performance in the public sector is certain, the problem that exists is "how to monitor it?", so as not to fall into the trap of performance. What principles and characteristics must a management and performance measurement meet in order to be fully capable to generate real performance and not give birth, or even restrict speculative behaviors? This article aims to identify the features of an optimal system of performance monitoring in the public sector, characteristics that must be fulfilled by performance indicators and to conduct a comparative analysis of the level of performance of the public sector in the EU member countries based on a score function.

Performance Evaulation of ISO C restrict on the Power Architecture

Abstract: The C99 standard for the C programming language introduced the new type qualifier restrict which acts as a hint for the compiler and the programmer that the specified pointer is not aliased by any other pointer if the pointed object can be modified. By using restrict on pointers the compiler may, if implemented and allowed, optimize code even further. This thesis investigates how well the C compilers GCC, Clang and XL C implements optimizations based on restrict on the Power architecture. By running a modified Livermore benchmark consisting of different loops that are suitable for restrict based optimizations we show that all three compilers are capable of doing restrict based optimizations. Furthermore we investigate loops using a pipeline simulator in order to understand the performance characteristics of the optimizations. We show that the performance for each loop vary by compiler, some loops have their running time significantly reduced while others, somewhat surprisingly, actually have their run time increased. Finally we provide some general suggestions for programmers and compiler developers on how to best use restrict.

Legal Limits to Technology Use

Abstract: This entry describes the efforts by some states to limit citizens' use of digital communication technologies. The entry details five common characteristics of these limits to use. The first characteristic deals with limits placed on citizens' access to certain forms of content through digital communication technologies. The second details how certain categories of citizens are singled out and how their use of digital communication technologies is restricted. The third and fourth characteristics illustrate the ways that states may restrict use based on time and place. Finally, the last characteristic illustrates the different technological and legal means by which citizens' use is limited. This entry concludes by suggesting that many future technologies will face limits to use with similar characteristics. Keywords: information and communication technology; innovation; law, regulation; limits of use; policy