The Effect of Urban Fortification on Public Space

This dissertation contributes to empirical studies on the spatial extent and intensity of urban fortification/security zones and their influence on urban public space. Urban public space has been based on creating open and safe environments for city dwellers. However, ultra-secure urban spaces have been found to filter citizens, restrict movement, and modify individual behavior. This first part of this study determines where security zones manifest themselves, quantify the fortification of the security zones, and measure the intensity of these spaces in three major U.S. cities. The second part of the study offers an explanation of how social and commercial activity is being affected by security zones

Review of Economic Theories of Regulation

This paper reviews the economic theories of regulation. It discusses the public and private interest theories of regulation, as the criticisms that have been leveled at them. The extent to which these theories are also able to account for privatization and deregulation is evaluated and policies involving re-regulation are discussed. The paper thus reviews rate of return regulation, price-cap regulation, yardstick regulation, interconnection and access regulation, and franchising or bidding processes. The primary aim of those instruments is to improve the operating efficiency of the regulated firms. Huge investments will be needed in the regulated network sectors. The question is brought up if regulatory instruments and institutions primarily designed to improve operating efficiency are equally well-placed to promote the necessary investments and to balance the resulting conflicting interests between for example consumers and investors.Regulation, Deregulation, Public Interest Theories, Private Interest Theories, Interest Groups, Public Choice, Market Failures, Price-cap Regulation, Rate of Return Regulation, Yardstick Competition, Franchise Bidding, Access Regulation.

Cryptocurrencies in Modern Finance: A Literature Review

The focus on cryptocurrencies in the finance and banking sectors is gaining momentum. In this paper, we investigate the role of cryptocurrencies in modern finance. We apply a narrative literature review method to synthesize prior research and draw insights into the opportunities and challenges of leveraging cryptocurrencies. The results indicate that cryptocurrencies offer businesses and individuals’ lower transaction costs, higher efficiencies, increased security and privacy, meaningful diversification benefits, alternative financing solutions, and financial inclusion.Challenges exist related to the integration of cryptocurrencies in modern finance. These include the lack of regulatory standards, the risk of criminal activity, high energy and environmental costs, regulatory bans and usage restrictions, security and privacy concerns, and the high volatility of cryptocurrencies.The current review is useful for scholars and managers, including those seeking to have a more balanced understanding of these emerging financial instruments.JEL Classification: E42, F30, F65, G21, G23How to Cite:Rejeb, A., Rejeb, K., & Keogh, J. G. (2021). Cryptocurrencies in Modern Finance: a Literature Review. Etikonomi, 20(1), 93 – 118. https://doi.org/10.15408/etk.v20i1.16911

Influence of Privatization Policies on Residential Satisfaction in Military Family Housing

Little published research has examined the post-implementation outcomes of public private partnerships for housing, specifically the Military Privatized Housing Initiative (MPHI) from the perspective of the end user, the Military Family Housing (MFH) resident. Using Mettler and SoRelle\u27s conceptualization of policy feedback theory as the foundation, the purpose of this repeated cross-sectional study was to assess residential satisfaction pre- and post- implementation of the MPHI. The study also addressed the influence of sociodemographic factors on MFH residents\u27 perceived residential satisfaction. Secondary data were collected using 2 Department of Defense surveys administered pre- and post-implementation. An independent-samples t test was used to examine residential satisfaction before and after implementation of the MPHI. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the influence of sociodemographic characteristics on residential satisfaction of MFH residents. Results indicated that privately-managed MFH residents were less satisfied than residents of government-managed MFH (p \u3c .001). Results also showed that paygrade, branch of service, ethnicity/race, and having children or dependents in a household were significant determinants of residential satisfaction for government-managed MFH residents (p \u3c .05). In privately-managed MFH, residents having children or dependents in the household was a significant determinant of residential satisfaction (p \u3c .05). The positive social change implications stemming from this study include recommendations to policy makers to continue examination of MPHI outcomes and improve data collection consistency to ensure current housing policies are meeting the needs of military families

Exploring Online Fraudsters’ Decision-Making Processes

A growing body of evidence suggests the situational context influences the social engineer (SE) characteristics and tactics offenders (i.e., fraudsters) deploy during the development of an online fraud event. Several attempts have been made to examine online the macro-social development of an online fraud event. Nevertheless, macro-level social examinations have been largely unsuccessful in combating online fraud because offenders and victims, including offender victims, are not computers; therefore, offenders’ interactions, motives, and tactics are very difficult to surmise. To address online fraud, three independent studies were conducted to explore what is known about online fraudsters and investigate what is not accounted. Specifically, a scoping review of offenders SE characteristics and tactics is conducted. In addition, two empirical investigations examining linguistic cues used by offender and offender victims are conducted. for that present day literature or governmental reports do not address. Together, these studies examine the influence of the situational context on offenders’ decision-making process, like their SE characteristics and tactics. The results and limitations associated with each study, along with recommendations for further research are discussed

Innovation-Specific Patent Protection and Growth

In this thesis, I am undertaking the analysis of the effects of increasing intellectual property rights on the reallocation of different kinds of research and development within an endogenous growth framework. This thesis’ approach considers the innovation process as sequential and cumulative in nature and studies the effects of different property rights regimes on a country’s innovative performance. In particular, by explicitly modelling basic and applied research and development (R&D) within a general equilibrium framework, I try to overtake the existing growth theory, which usually aggregates all sources of R&D and innovation, neglecting intermediate inventive steps. My approach is certainly inspired by the current Schumpeterian growth theory (see Aghion and Howitt, 1998 and 2009), which envisages new products and processes arising from Poisson processes, whose arrival rates depend on private and public R&D. However, unlike the previous Schumpeterian models, in most of the chapters of this thesis, creative destruction itself is modelled as a two-stage processes, or more precisely, as a sequence of investment decisions in R&D, whose result is a probability to invent (basic research) or to innovate (applied research). Hence, the first step, "basic research", creates a research tool which is by itself not profitable, but has the potential to become the basis for the second step innovation. The second step is a marketable product which increases consumers' utility and, through the grant of a patent, generates the monopolistic rent for the second step innovator, i.e. the manufacturer of the new product. This is a natural and simple way to explicitly model basic and applied research, yet it entails non-trivial technical complications in the models along with strong policy implications. Chapter 2 tries to answer the following research question: in order to foster innovation and growth should basic research be publicly or privately funded? This chapter studies the impact of the shift in the U.S. patent system towards the patentability and commercialization of the basic R&D undertaken by universities. Such a shift rendered the U.S. universities more responsive to "market" forces. Prior to 1980, universities undertook research employing researchers motivated by "curiosity." After 1980, universities patent their research and behave as private firms. This move, in a context of two-stage inventions (basic and applied research) has an a priori ambiguous effect on innovation and welfare. Chapter 2 builds a Schumpeterian model and matches it to the data to evaluate this important turning point. iii Chapter 3 extends the model presented by Chapter 2 by introducing Kremer’s (1998) mechanism for inducing innovation by means of auctions for new patents. Such patent buy-outs are run by the public sector in order to reward innovators and freely disseminate most of the new basic research findings. My work is the first attempt to use Kremer’s idea to address the issue of the patentability of basic research and the financing of early innovation. The same Chapter 3 also quantitatively analyses the impact of the so called “research exemption” of patented basic knowledge. Under the research exemption doctrine, if the second innovator is successful in developing a saleable product or process, then he or she can patent it and yet infringe another patent. The key question that modern economies' innovation systems have been facing in the past few decades is: how should basic research be funded in view of maximizing the efficiency of the innovation system as a whole? In other words, is it possible to conceive the privatization of a country's basic knowledge and an efficient system of incentives to basic research? The study presented by Chapter 4 provides a quantitative assessment on the effects of the US patent reforms that, at the beginning of the Eighties, brought to the patentability of research tools, often invented by the university-led research activity. In particular, Chapter 4 re-examines the policy scenarios and the comparisons presented throughout Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 in order to try to provide these two with a robust empirical support. In the first scenario, only the public sector institutions undertake basic research, rendering all results publicly available for firms, racing to find patentable applications. In the second scenario, important for assessing the post-1980 reforms in the US system of innovation, basic research itself is privatized, and hence patented by private firms. The most important question for the political economy of basic research is which system is most conducive to innovation and growth. The public system permits more idea dissemination, but may not give basic researchers enough incentives to focus their research on the directions most needed by the private developers downstream. The private system optimally channels basic research, but, by allowing the patentability of ideas upstream, precludes free entry into applied R&D. This generates conflicting effects, and the policy conclusions depend on the value of all the relevant parameters in the economy. In Chapter 4, I estimated the most important of these parameters with the US data immediately preceding the major reorganization of university and basic research in the 80s, and I simulated the two scenarios. The resulting simulations show that public R&D system, prevailing at that time, was indeed outperforming every privatized alternative scenario. iv Since the incentives to conduct basic or applied research play a central role for economic growth, Chapter 5 tries to answer the following research question: how does increasing early innovation appropriability affect basic research, applied research, education, and wage inequality? Chapter 5 analyses the macroeconomic effects of patent protection by incorporating a two-stage cumulative innovation structure into a quality-ladder growth model with skill acquisition. It focuses on two issues (a) the over-protection vs. the under-protection of intellectual property rights in basic research; (b) the evolution of jurisprudence shaping the bargaining power of the upstream innovators. It shows that the dynamic general equilibrium interactions may seriously mislead the empirical assessment of the growth effects of IPR policy: stronger protection of upstream innovation always looks bad in the short- and possibly medium-run. In a common law system an explicit dynamic macroeconomic analysis is appropriate; hence I have incorporated the mathematical modelling of the evolution of the common law into the rational expectations of the agents. This major modification allows me to schematically replicate the evolution of the skill premium, education, and strengthening of intellectual property rights (IPR) happened in the US during the Eighties and Nineties of the XX century. Chapter 5 also provides a simple "rule of thumb" indicator of the basic researcher bargaining power and 5 shows that IPR evolution can be introduced into a fully rational expectation framework. This helps explaining the well-known dynamics of the skill premium and education in the US, that motivated well-known theories of skill biased technical change and directed technical change (see Acemoglu 2008). Chapter 6, finally, draws inspiration from an important recent empirical literature on competition and productivity in the service sectors (see Nicoletti and Scarpetta, 2003; Alesina et al., 2005; Griffith et al., 2006; Aghion et al., 2006) to build a theoretical framework to predict whether innovation is hampered by the lack of completion in the non-manufacturing sectors. In this final chapter, I have built a simple model of process innovation where the provision of essential services (intermediate inputs, for example financial services or transports) for the production of the final good is subject to sectorial regulation, which shapes the market structure of the intermediate sector as a non-competitive one. The structure adopted in this chapter allows examining the effects on the economy of the presence of two different monopolized tasks: the intermediate service provision and the use of the innovation. The ultimate purpose is to show how the lack of competition in an intermediate essential sector, like the service sector, is actually able to depress productivity growth in the final sector

Price discrimination

This paper surveys recent economic research on price discrimination, both in monopoly and oligopoly markets. Topics include static and dynamic forms of price discrimination, and both final and input markets are considered. Potential antitrust aspects of price discrimination are highlighted throughout the paper. The paper argues that the informational requirements to make accurate policy are very great, and with most forms of price discrimination a laissez-faire policy may be the best available in practical terms. However, careful case-by-case analysis of situations involving selective price cuts and margin squeeze seems worthwhile.Price discrimination; bundling; entry deterrence; competition policy

Governmental-Owner Power Imbalance and Privatization

Privatization is defined as the sale of state-owned assets by governmental agencies to private investors (e.g., Megginson, Nash, Netter, and Poulsen, 2004; Villalonga, 2000). Research on privatization has focused on privatization techniques (e.g., share issue privatization or voucher privatization), social welfare, governmental commitments to economic development, and varieties of outcomes of privatizations. Most prior studies from the financial economics perspective take privatization as a natural research context to examine the function of capital markets, the impact of national institutional settings, and the differences between partial privatization and initial public offerings. Very little research, however, has examined the determinants of privatization from an organizational perspective. This dissertation proposes that privatization decisions of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are influenced by different interests in governmental agencies. Using the resource dependence theory, I studied the power relationships of SOEs and their governmental owners. Four panel databases of 206 pharmaceutical firms across eight years in China were combined to answer the research question of this dissertation: What is the role of power imbalance between different governmental owners in the privatization of an SOE? The results suggest that organizational effectiveness and efficiency of an SOE increase the likelihood of its privatization. Results also show that provincial governmental owners are more likely to privatize SOEs if they can successfully attract foreign direct investment projects. Furthermore, the likelihood of privatization increases with the power asymmetry between the provincial government and the central government but decreases with the degree of the defense mechanism used by SOEs