Cultural change in the FCA, PRA & Bank of England: Practising what they preach?

Our report examines how the culture of the financial regulators contributed to the financial crisis. It assesses the actions taken by the UK’s financial regulators to change their culture. It identifies the progress which has been made and the barriers encountered. To gather information we interviewed current and former staff at the regulators together with stakeholders from large and small financial institutions, consumer and SME groups and regulatory experts. The report includes the reactions from staff at the regulators to the cultural change programmes and the perceptions of external stakeholders

Policy Analysis in the health-services market: accounting for quality and quantity

We provide a theoretical and empirical framework for evaluating the eects of policy reforms on physician labor supply. We argue that any policy evaluation must account for both the quality and the quantity of services provided. The introduction of quality into the analysis has implications for both the theoretical and empirical analysis of labor supply, and consequently policy evaluation. In particular, endogenous quality choices introduce non- linearities into the budget constraint since the marginal return to an hour of work depends on the quality of services provided. We illustrate by considering a particular example: the recent reform in compensation contracts for specialist physicians in the province of Quebec (Canada). Prior to 1999, most Quebec specialist physicians were paid fee-for-service con- tracts; they received a piece rate for each clinical service provided. In 1999, the government introduced a mixed remuneration system, under which physicians received a base (half-daily or daily) wage, independent of services provided, and a reduced fee-for-service. Moreover, the government allowed physicians to choose their contract. We derive theoretical results for the eect of the reform on the quantity and quality of services supplied by analyzing "local" prices and virtual income. We propose discretizing the choice set as an empirical approach to policy evaluation in the presence of non-linear budget constraints.Health production, Quality of health services, Discretized models

Cartels uncovered.

How many cartels are there? The answer is important in assessing the need for competition policy. We present a Hidden Markov Model that answers the question, taking into account that often we do not know whether a cartel exists in an industry or not. We take the model to data from a period of legal cartels - Finnish manufacturing industries 1951 - 1990. Our estimates suggest that once born, cartels are persistent; by the end of the period, almost all industries were cartellized. Our model may be extended to identify key policy parameters from data generated under different competition policy regimes.antitrust; cartel; competition; detection; hidden Markov models; illegal; legal; policy; registry;

Genetic Characterization of the Local Pirenaica Cattle for Parentage and Traceability Purposes

Pirenaica is the most important autochthonous cattle breed within the Protected Geographic Indication (PGI) beef quality label in the Basque region, in northern Spain. The short tandem repeats (STRs) are powerful markers to elucidate forensic cases and traceability across the agri-food sector. The main objective of the present work was to study the phylogenetic relationships of Pirenaica cattle and other breeds typically raised in the region and provide the minimum number of STR markers for parentage and traceability purposes. The 30-STR panel recommended by the International Society of Animal Genetics-Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (ISAG-FAO) was compared against other commercial STR panels. The 30-STR panel showed a combined matching probability of 1.89 × 10−25 and a power of exclusion for duos of 0.99998. However, commercial STR panels showed a limited efficiency for a reliable parentage analysis in Pirenaica, and at least a 21-STR panel is needed to reach a power of exclusion of 0.9999. Machine-learning analysis also demonstrated a 95% accuracy in assignments selecting the markers with the highest FST in Pirenaica individuals. Overall, the present study shows the genetic characterization of Pirenaica and its phylogeny compared with other breeds typically raised in the Basque region. Finally, a 21-STR panel with the highest FST markers is proposed for a confident parentage analysis and high traceability.This work was supported by Basque Government: [Grand number of Biomics: IT-833-13], [Grand number of Lactiker: IT944-16]; Basque Government, Department of Economic Development & Competitiveness [Doctoral fellowship of D.G]

Development of a model-based algorithm for the assessment of the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Questa tesi presentata AAS-PD (Sistema di Assessment Adattivo per i disturbi psicologici), un sistema computerizzato di assessment psicologico adattivo per il Disturbo Ossessivo-Compulsivo (DOC). Tale sistema software è basato su una rappresentazione forma del DOC, chiamata Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA), e rappresenta una novità nel campo della psicologia clinica. AAS-PD prende una struttura di conoscenza (struttura clinica), ed esegue l'assessment facendo inferenze probabilistiche su tale struttura, usando come criterio di stop la misura dell'entropia della struttura. I risultati mostrano che AAS-PD assegna correttamente pattern di risposta a stati clinici, evidenziando inoltre alcuni miglioramenti del modello formale da fare. Sviluppi futuri comportano lo sviluppo di un vero e proprio software capace di supportare il clinico nell'assessment dei principali disturbi psicologici / This thesis presents AAS-PD (Adaptive Assessment System for psychological disorders), a computerized adaptive psychological assessment system for the Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This software system is based on a formal representation of the OCD called Formal Psychological Assessment (FPA), and represents an innovation in the field of clinical psychology. AAS-PD requires a knowledge structure (clinical structure), and performs the assessment by making probabilistic inferences of such a structure, using as stop criterion the measure of entropy of the structure. The results show that PD-AAS properly assigns response patterns to clinical states, and note some improvements of the formal model to do. Future developments will involve the development of a real software that supports the clinician in the assessment of the major psychological disordersope

Once More unto the Breach: Confronting the Standard of Review (Again) and the Imperative of Correctness Review when Interpreting the Scope of Refugee Protection

The Supreme Court of Canada’s standard of review jurisprudence has been marked by the ascendancy of reasonableness as the presumptive standard of review of decisions involving an administrative tribunal’s interpretation and application of its home statute. To the extent that this approach would lead to the reasonableness review of administrative decision-makers’ interpretation of the scope and meaning of provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act that implement the basic human rights conferred in international conventions to which Canada is a party, it must be changed. Interpretations of the scope of the Refugee Convention and Convention Against Torture raise questions of law of central importance to the legal system and outside the relative expertise of decision-makers under the Act. Such questions warrant uniform and consistent answers that can ultimately only be provided by national courts. Moreover, given the serious impact of refugee protection decisions on the claimants’ life, liberty and security of the person, tolerating divergent interpretations of basic human rights through reasonableness review is arbitrary and contrary to the rule of law. Accordingly, the potential for inconsistent interpretations must be resolved decisively through correctness review

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We propose featured team automata to support variability in the development and analysis of teams, which are systems of reactive components that communicate according to specified synchronisation types. A featured team automaton concisely describes a family of concrete product models for specific configurations determined by feature selection. We focus on the analysis of communication-safety properties, but doing so product-wise quickly becomes impractical. Therefore, we investigate how to lift notions of receptiveness (no message loss) to the level of family models. We show that featured (weak) receptiveness of featured team automata characterises (weak) receptiveness for all product instantiations. A prototypical tool supports the developed theory.Ter Beek received funding from the MIUR PRIN2017 FTXR7S project ITMaTTerS (Methods and Tools for Trust worthy Smart Systems). Cledou and Proença received funding from the ERDF_European Regiona lDevelopment Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation_ COMPETE 2020 Programme (project DaVinci, POCI-01-0145-FEDER-029946) and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT_Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. Proença also received National Funds through FCT/MCTES, within the CISTER Research Unit(UIDP/UIDB/04234/2020); by the Norte Portugal Regional OperationalProgramme_NORTE2020 (project REASSURE, NORTE-01- 0145-FEDER-028550) under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through ERDF the FCT; and European Funds through the ECSEL Joint Undertaking(JU) under grant agreement No 876852 (project VALU3S).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio