The fast-evolving relationship between the promotion of welfare-enhancing competition and the balanced protection of intellectual property (IP) rights has attracted the attention of policymakers, analysts and scholars. This interest is inevitable in an environment that lays ever greater emphasis on the management of knowledge and innovation and on mechanisms to ensure that the public derives the expected social and economic benefits from this innovation and the spread of knowledge. This book looks at the positive linkage between IP and competition in jurisdictions around the world, surveying developments and policy issues from an international and comparative perspective. It includes analysis of key doctrinal and policy issues by leading academics and practitioners from around the globe and a cutting-edge survey of related developments across both developed and developing economies. It also situates current policy developments at the national level in the context of multilateral developments, at WIPO, WTO and elsewhere.

Nicolas Buclet Waste management issues can be approached in several ways. The question of which treatment technique to adopt is essentially a downstream problem. In our view the issue needed to be tackled further upstream. Waste management is not only a technical problem, it is also an area which involves various actors throughout society. In this book, as in the previous volume (Buclet, Godard, 2000), the organisation of waste management is seen in terms of regimes. A regime is an entire form ofinstitutional, technical, economic and social organisation relating to a specific field, no matter how complex that field is. Regime formation is generally a long-drawn-out process, rooted in the multiple interactions of the actors involved. Legislation plays a crucial role but would not, of itself, lead to the formation of a regime. There is always the old question of causality and which element occurs first: the behaviour of actors who constitute the reality, or the legislation that models their behaviour? Besides legislation, other formal or informal conventions influence the behaviour of actors approaching a common path, making co ordination easier between them. In this book we have insisted on conventional principles. They are the real guides for actors within each national regime."

This book is about bounded rationality and public policy. It is written from the p- spective of someone trained in public economics who has encountered the enormous literature on experiments in decision-making and wonders what implications it has for the normative aspects of public policy. Though there are a few new results or models, to a large degree the book is synthetic in tone, bringing together disparate literatures and seeking some accommodation between them. It has had a long genesis. It began with a draft of a few chapters in 2000, but has expanded in scope and size as the literature on behavioural economics has grown. At some point I realised that the geometric growth of behavioural - search and the arithmetic growth of my writing were inconsistent with an am- tion to be exhaustive. As such therefore I have concentrated on particular areas of behavioural economics and bounded rationality. The resulting book is laid out as follows: Chapter 1 provides an overview of the rest of the book, goes through some basic de?nitions and identi?es themes.

A comprehensive insight into Mancur Olson's work as well as extensions and applications of his work. Chapters cover three main areas: Collective Action, Institutional Sclerosis and Market-Augmenting Government. Some chapters directly assess Olsons contributions, focusing on distinguishing what was original in his works from what was already in the literature, and assess his impact on the fields of public economics and economic history. Other chapters present new tests and frequently extend his work. Each of the chapters is a new piece of scholarship inspired by and intended to honor Mancur Olson, and extend his influence to another generation of Collective Choice scholars and researchers.

Aesthetics and Economics is a pioneering effort at treating aesthetics from the point of view of economic theory, and addresses the contradictions which have arisen from economists' work in this field over the years. Starting from an historical review of the treatment of aesthetics in economic thought, Aesthetics and Economics goes through the integration of a number of recent advances in economic thinking with the main topics of aesthetics, from creativity to interpretation. The subject is systematically treated on the grounds of a restatement of the optimization analysis on non-consequentialist bases, starting from the Kantian definition of aesthetic judgement up to its contemporary developments. A specific information asymmetry characterizing the agents' behaviours arises from the aesthetic qualification of consumption, production and investment processes, thus affecting the usual equilibrium and optimization conditions, resulting in new institutional interventions in the market. Certification' of the aesthetic nature of goods and stocks is needed and gives place to original market strategies and optimization problems.

This book explores theoretical and practical implications of reflecting the fair value of liabilities for insurance companies. In addition, the contributions discuss the disclosure of these values to the financial and regulatory communities and auditing firms which are actually calculating this illusive but important variable. It combines contributions by distinguished practitioners from the insurance, accounting and finance fields, with those of prominent academics. One of the central themes of the collection is that adequate disclosure of the true economic value of insurance company liabilities is both possible and desirable. Wherever possible, the insurance valuation process is wedded with modern financial theory. For example, the use of option pricing theory is applied to insurance companies, where the true value of the firm's liabilities is a critical variable. Methods such as cash flow, earned profit and indirect discount are explored.

This book contains material that I have presented in seminars at the Universities of Bochum, Mannheim, Munich, Salerno, and Southern California at Los Angeles, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna, the Max-Planck-Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, and on various international meetings and conferences. In preparing and revising the material I have benefited from comments, discussions, and advice from several colleagues. I had particularly close and friendly collaboration with Alexander Kemnitz and Robert von Weizsicker to whom I am very grateful. I am also grateful to Michele Boldrin, Axel Borsch-Supan, Friedrich Breyer, Karen Feist, Tullio Jappelli, Leo Kaas, Marco Pagano, Gerhard Schwooiauer, Carl Christian von Weizsacker, and Wolfgang Wiegard for their comments and suggestions. Finally, I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financial support. Mannheim, January 2002 Berthold U. Wigger Contents 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2. Public Pensions and Economic Growth: The Basic Framework . . 5 2. 1. The Analytical Elements 7 2. 1. 1. The Individuals 7 2. 1. 2. The Firms 10 2. 1. 3. The Public Pension Program 11 2. 1. 4. The Competitive Equilibrium 12 2. 2. Productivity Growth 13 2. 3. Allocative Efficiency 19 2. 4. Public Pension Reform 25 Appendix 2 . . . . . . 30 3. The Allocative Role of Intergenerational Transfers in Endogenous Growth Economies 33 3. 1. Investment Externalities, Intergenerational Transfers, and Pareto-improvements . . . . . . . 35 Contents x 3. 1. 1. A Subsidy to Private Savings 35 3. 1. 2. A Pareto-Improving Policy 38 3. 2.

This book presents a collection of papers which evaluate the achievements of the Australian Trade Practices Act 1974 in making Australian markets more competitive. The contributors have all played major roles in Australian and New Zealand antitrust actions, either as expert economic witnesses, as antitrust enforcers, as judges or as quasi-judicial administrators. No other publication presents such in-depth economic analysis of the Act and the cases decided under it in its first two decades of its operation. As well as an introductory paper, this collection includes a foreword by the Hon. George Gear, Assistant Treasurer of the Australian Government and Minister responsible for the administration of the Act, plus two broad analytical overviews of the last two decades of Australian antitrust actions by two economists who have continually been at the heart of antitrust proceedings. In addition, papers are provided which give a judicial view of the Act and economic analysis, which compare the Act with its New Zealand counterpart. Other contributions look in detail at those sections of the Act which cover mergers, misuse of market power, price-fixing and vertical practices. The book shows that the Act has had a major impact on Australian market behavior. Judges, lawyers and economists between them have produced a truly Australian approach to antitrust, which has reflected overseas trends in both law and economics, as well as developed a unique Australian flavor. The book will be of interest to academic and practicing lawyers and economists, judges and corporate executives. It will be essential reading for Australian students in undergraduate courses in antitrust law, business regulation, antitrust economics and industrial organization. It provides by far the most comprehensive economic evaluation of Australian antitrust yet published and so will be the definitive source of information on this topic for non-Australians interested in comparative antitrust legislation and enforcement issues.

The book is dedicated to the question of how much room for national tax policy Member States of the European Union will be able to maintain in the future. It focuses on the possibilities Member States have and the limits they face, such as the need to finance the welfare state or limits of European and International Law. The research question is looked at from different angles. Economic as well as legal aspects are included.

Credit risk analysis is one of the most important topics in the field of financial risk management. Due to recent financial crises and regulatory concern of Basel II, credit risk analysis has been the major focus of financial and banking industry. Especially for some credit-granting institutions such as commercial banks and credit companies, the ability to discriminate good customers from bad ones is crucial. The need for reliable quantitative models that predict defaults accurately is imperative so that the interested parties can take either preventive or corrective action. Hence credit risk analysis becomes very important for sustainability and profit of enterprises. In such backgrounds, this book tries to integrate recent emerging support vector machines and other computational intelligence techniques that replicate the principles of bio-inspired information processing to create some innovative methodologies for credit risk analysis and to provide decision support information for interested parties.

Sponsored by the American Real Estate Society (ARES), Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation addresses a wide variety of timely issues relating to property ownership, rights, and use, including: ancestral burial, historical record of occupancy, treaty implementation problems, eminent domain, the effects of large governmental change, financing projects under formal and informal title or deed document systems, exclusive ownership vs. non-exclusive use rights, public land ownership, tribal or family land claims, insurgency and war, legal systems of ownership, prior government expropriation of lands, moral obligation to indigenous peoples, colonial occupation, and common land leases. These issues can also be broadly grouped into topics, such as conflict between indigenous and western property rights, communal land ownership, land transfer by force, legacy issues related to past colonization and apartheid, and metaphysical/indigenous land value.

Sovereign risk and financial crises play a key role in current international economic developments, particularly in the case of economic downturns. As the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s revealed once again, financial crises are the rule rather than the exception in capitalist economies. The event also revealed that international public debt agreements are contingent claims. In a world of increasing economic interdependencies, the issues of financial crises and country defaults are of critical importance. This volume goes to the heart of the academic discussion on sovereign risk and financial crises by centering on quantitative-empirical aspects, evaluating prominent approaches, and by proposing new methods. Part I of the volume identifies key factors and processes that are central in analyzing sovereign risk while Part II focuses on the determinants and effects of financial crises.

A comprehensive overview of weak convergence of stochastic processes and its application to the study of financial markets. Split into three parts, the first recalls the mathematics of stochastic processes and stochastic calculus with special emphasis on contiguity properties and weak convergence of stochastic integrals. The second part is devoted to the analysis of financial theory from the convergence point of view. The main problems, which include portfolio optimization, option pricing and hedging are examined, especially when considering discrete-time approximations of continuous-time dynamics. The third part deals with lattice- and tree-based computational procedures for option pricing both on stocks and stochastic bonds. More general discrete approximations are also introduced and detailed. Includes detailed examples.

Increased financial performance and employee commitment are among the benefits the CSR model can offer corporations. This discussion presents practitioners and scholars with a unique examination of how firms can maximise productivity through the implementation of CSR programs. This publication discusses how CSR addresses business concerns of feasibility, barriers and drivers of internal and external practice; and whether a CSR program is likely to constitute a success or failure.

Endowed with the authority to enforce justice, government is a necessary prerequisite to human flourishing. Citizens rightfully bear the responsibility to contribute to the existence of just government through the rendering of taxes. Because tax policy is also a reflection of values, citizens in a democratic society should be concerned with how taxes are collected and spent. In Real Tax Burden: More than Dollars and Cents, Alan Viard and Alex Brill explain everything you need to know to understand taxes in America today. The authors describe who pays what and why, the implications of the current system, and provide a vision for reform that is simple, effective, and consistent with our values.

Derived from the international literature on experiences with performance budgeting five elements which constitute performance budgeting as a comprehensive system can be identified in this book. This new definition is then applied to the German state level in order to investigate whether performance budgeting is effective in Germany, in detail, whether it actually leads to a reduction of public expenditure. With a survey in the state Ministries of Finance and an individually constructed panel dataset, the impact of the German performance budgeting reforms on their major aim, the enhancement of fiscal discipline, is empirically analyzed. The main result is that the potential of expenditure savings is prolonged by the enormous investments in the beginning.

In this book, experts from across the globe highlight the state of knowledge in intergovernmental transfer design. The essays collected in the volume represent creative new thinking about challenging policy issues and offer useful options for policy makers. The book offers academics and practitioners a thorough, thematic assessment of unresolved issues in the design of equalization grants.

Covering a topic of massive contemporary importance, this well written volume demonstrates how transportation strategy and environmental sustainability can be pursued in a comprehensive and harmonious, rather than unconnected and potentially conflicting, set of public policies. It applies lessons from several urban areas (e.g., Bogota, Singapore, Mexico City, Sao Paulo), including "success stories" and less successful "hard-won lessons," to a case study in Guangzhou.

This study has been written during my time at the Institute of Public Finance at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany. I am indebted to a number of people who have made this work possible. First and foremost, I thank my teacher Prof. Dr. Bernd Raffelhuschen ] with whom I had the pleasure of working for many exciting years. The German term "Doktorvater" alludes to the fatherly role of a thesis supervisor, and he has truely lived up to this role. Also, I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Hans-Hermann Francke for his co-correction and the valuable comments he has given me. In addition, I wish to thank my family. Especially, my wife, Daniela, has not only supported me with her love and affection but has also kept an eye on my discipline when the going got tough. The greatest sacri?ce in the course of working on this thesis, have been the miles and many hours away from her. Unfortunately, the yearsofmydoctoralstudieswereovershadowedbythedeathofmyfather. Tohimand mymother, Eva-MariaBorgmann, Iamimmenselygratefulfortheirloveandsupport throughout my life. Daniel Besendorfer and Erik Luth ] have been close companions and friends at the Institute of Public Finance from my ?rst days in Freiburg, and I have gained from their friendship enormously. This work has largely pro?ted from comments and suggestions of many colleagues who have also been great fun to work with. Among them, I especially thank Holger Bonin, Oliver Ehrentraut, Matthias Heidler, Stefan Fetzer, Pascal Krimmer, and Stefan Moog."

This book provides an up-to-date summary of the consequences of demographic aging for labor markets, financial markets, economic growth, social security schemes and public finances in Germany, essentially reflecting the present state of knowledge in any of these areas. All contributions are written by leading experts in their fields and are based on results that emerge at the forefront of current research.

The aim of this book is to analyse specific sets of macro and structural policies in selected Eastern European countries. The book includes studies on the major Western CIS countries, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, plus a set of cross-country and regional studies. The analysis in this book contributes importantly to the discussion about the economic prospects of the CIS countries.

Following the birth of the European Monetary Union (EMU) economists are still divided in their assessment of the ability of its key institutions to provide macroeconomic stability and foster the reforms necessary to stimulate economic growth. In this collection, experts focus on issues of fiscal policy, monetary policy and labour markets and ask: Can the stability and growth pact provide an adequate framework for the conduct of national fiscal policies? Is the ECB reacting with competence and flexibility to a rapidly changing macroeconomic environment? How do national labour markets react to the macroeconomic institutions and what are the structural reforms needed in labour markets? Blending empirical and theoretical data, this book offers one of the most comprehensive surveys of research in macroeconomic policymaking within the EMU.

Most higher education finance literature assumes that students cannot pledge their future earnings to finance their education in a free society. Investing in Human Capital, first published in 2004, challenges that assumption and explores human capital contracts as an alternative mechanism for financing higher education. Investing in Human Capital tracks the roots of the idea behind human capital contracts, discusses the beneficial consequences they would have on students and on higher education markets, and describes how they can develop in light of the innovations that have taken place in financial markets during the last decades. The book also explores the challenges - ethical and financial - that such instruments face and offers implementation alternatives that can bring about their existence in the context of a national higher education financing programme.

Conventional wisdom warns that unaccountable political and business agents can enrich a few at the expense of many. But logically extending this wisdom implies that associated principals - voters, consumers, shareholders - will favor themselves over the greater good when 'rules of the game' instead create too much accountability. Democratic Governance and Economic Performance rigorously develops this hypothesis, and finds statistical evidence and case study illustrations that democratic institutions at various governance levels (e.g., federal, state, corporation) have facilitated opportunistic gains for electoral, consumer, and shareholder principals. To be sure, this conclusion does not dismiss the potential for democratic governance to productively reduce agency costs. Rather, it suggests that policy makers, lawyers, and managers can improve governance by weighing the agency benefits of increased accountability against the distributional costs of favoring principal stakeholders over more general economic opportunities. Carefully considering the fundamentals that give rise to this tradeoff should interest students and scholars working at the intersection of social science and the law, and can help professionals improve their own performance in policy, legal, and business settings.

The idea of writing this bookarosein 2000when the ?rst author wasassigned to teach the required course STATS 240 (Statistical Methods in Finance) in the new M. S. program in ?nancial mathematics at Stanford, which is an interdisciplinary program that aims to provide a master's-level education in applied mathematics, statistics, computing, ?nance, and economics. Students in the programhad di?erent backgroundsin statistics. Some had only taken a basic course in statistical inference, while others had taken a broad spectrum of M. S. - and Ph. D. -level statistics courses. On the other hand, all of them had already taken required core courses in investment theory and derivative pricing, and STATS 240 was supposed to link the theory and pricing formulas to real-world data and pricing or investment strategies. Besides students in theprogram, thecoursealso attractedmanystudentsfromother departments in the university, further increasing the heterogeneity of students, as many of them had a strong background in mathematical and statistical modeling from the mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences but no previous experience in ?nance. To address the diversity in background but common strong interest in the subject and in a potential career as a "quant" in the ?nancialindustry, thecoursematerialwascarefullychosennotonlytopresent basic statistical methods of importance to quantitative ?nance but also to summarize domain knowledge in ?nance and show how it can be combined with statistical modeling in ?nancial analysis and decision making. The course material evolved over the years, especially after the second author helped as the head TA during the years 2004 and 2005.