Challenges in the regulation of broadband in Hungary

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Capturing industrial CO2 emissions in Spain: Infrastructures, costs and break-even prices

This paper examines the conditions for the deployment of large-scale pipeline and storage infrastructure needed for the capture of CO2 in Spain by 2040. It details a modeling framework that allows us to determine the optimal infrastructure needed to connect a geographically disaggregated set of emitting and storage clusters, along with the threshold CO2 values necessary to ensure that the considered emitters will make the necessary investment decisions. This framework is used to assess the relevance of various policy scenarios, including (i) the perimeter of the targeted emitters for a CCS uptake, and (ii) the relevance of constructing several regional networks instead of a single grid to account for the spatial characteristics of the Spanish peninsula. We find that three networks naturally emerge in the north, center and south of Spain. Moreover, the necessary CO2 break-even price critically depends on the presence of power stations in the capture perimeter. Policy implications of these findings concern the elaboration of relevant, pragmatic recommendations to envisage CCS deployment locally, focusing on emitters with lower substitution options toward low-carbon alternatives

E-finance-lab at the House of Finance : about us

The financial services industry is believed to be on the verge of a dramatic [r]evolution. A substantial redesign of its value chains aimed at reducing costs, providing more efficient and flexible services and enabling new products and revenue streams is imminent. But there seems to be no clear migration path nor goal which can cast light on the question where the finance industry and its various players will be and should be in a decade from now. The mission of the E-Finance Lab is the development and application of research methodologies in the financial industry that promote and assess how business strategies and structures are shared and supported by strategies and structures of information systems. Important challenges include the design of smart production infrastructures, the development and evaluation of advantageous sourcing strategies and smart selling concepts to enable new revenue streams for financial service providers in the future. Overall, our goal is to contribute methods and views to the realignment of the E-Finance value chain. ..

Stepping stones and access holidays: the fallacies of regulatory micro-management

Good intentions are no substitute for sound economic regulation. Using the ‘in-vestment ladder’ as the stick and access holidays as the carrot is hardly an ef-fective way to generate competition. On the contrary, this approach creates a regulatory spiral. What regulators plead for today is in effect an obligatory shar-ing regime for nearly all network elements. However, this splitting up of net-works into their elements by ad hoc regulatory interventions is destroying con-sumer welfare. Instead, rule-based regulation of network-specific market power should be implemented by means of a disaggregated regulatory mandate, limit-ing incentive regulation to essential facilities as a whole. --

Can financial infrastructures foster economic development?

In this paper, financial infrastructures increase the efficiency of the banking sector: they decrease the market power (due to horizontal differentiation) of the financial intermediaries, lower the cost of capital, increase the number of depositors and the amount of intermediated savings, factors which in turn increase the growth rate and may help countries to take off from a poverty trap. Taxation finances financial infrastructures and decreases the private productivity of capital. Growth and welfare maximising levels of financial infrastructures are computed.Endogenous growth; Imperfect competition; Financial infrastructures

Assigning Creative Commons Licenses to Research Metadata: Issues and Cases

This paper discusses the problem of lack of clear licensing and transparency of usage terms and conditions for research metadata. Making research data connected, discoverable and reusable are the key enablers of the new data revolution in research. We discuss how the lack of transparency hinders discovery of research data and make it disconnected from the publication and other trusted research outcomes. In addition, we discuss the application of Creative Commons licenses for research metadata, and provide some examples of the applicability of this approach to internationally known data infrastructures.Comment: 9 pages. Submitted to the 29th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems (JURIX 2016), Nice (France) 14-16 December 201

European Regional Development Policies: History and Current Issues

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the European regional development funds do not allow simultaneous achievement of goals of efficiency and equity when they are dedicated to financing transportation infrastructures. The paper first gives some insights on the history and the nature of regional development funds. Then we focus on the degree to which Ireland, Spain and Portugal (but not Greece), the main beneficiaries of regional policies, have been able to move to the European average (in terms of per capita income) since their membership in the EU, which also corresponds to the time when regional assistance was initiated in these countries. Empirical evidence also reveals that income disparities are increasing among regions within each of these countries and this raises the question as to whether the impact of regional funds is or is not rather favorable to this particular convergence pattern, given that one of the primary objectives of regional funding has been to ensure greater cohesion over the whole European territory. The answer comes mainly from the type of infrastructure regional funds finance. Since a significant part of regional funds is devoted to transportation issues, their impact on regional development has to be seen in the light of characteristics of the transport sector and the specific requirements in transport of each individual sector. The paper concludes that transportation infrastructures promote the country's aggregate growth but cannot be seen as an efficient instrument to reduce interregional disparities in Europe.published or submitted for publicatio

Regulatory unbundling in telecommunications

Due to its dynamic nature, and the increasing importance of competitive sub-parts, the telecommunications sector provides particularly interesting insights for studying regulatory unbundling. Based on the theory of monopolistic bottle-necks the fallacies of overregulation by undue unbundling obligations are indicated. Neither the promotion of infrastructure competition by mandatory un-bundling of competitive subparts of telecommunications infrastructure, nor regulatory induced network fragmentation within monopolistic bottleneck com-ponents is justified. The impact of the shrinking of the areas of network specific market power on the remaining unbundling regulation is analyzed. Finally, the phasing-out potentials of unbundling regulation in European telecommunica-tions markets are pointed out. --

Congestion, Private Peering and Capacity Investment on the Internet.

This paper presents a model of private bilateral and multilateral peering arrangements between Internet backbone providers when the network is congested. We study how different forms of interconnection and the competitive conditions of the market affect backbones' investments in network and peering point capacities. We show that network and peering point capacities are equilibrium complements; increasing competition reduces capacity investments (under-investment), thus worsening the quality of service both with multilateral and bilateral peering; under bilateral peering the inefficiency is less severe. Because of under-investment, welfare may be lower when the market is more competitive. We also show that asymmetries between backbones, which can take the form of uneven content distribution or product differentiation, may reduce under-investment and improve the quality of service. The introduction of an "inverse capacity interconnection fee" where providers pay each other a fee which is negatively correlated with their installed capacity may play the role of a coordinating mechanism towards a Pareto superior outcome.Internet, peering, congestion, QoS, capacity investment, interconnection