Consequences of Vertical Separation and Monopoly: Evidence from the Telecom Privatizations

Two common policy instruments used by governments around the world to increase the availability of basic telephony (i.e., local, long distance, and international service) have been: (1) award monopoly rights on basic services to cross-subsidize residential local telephony; and (2) separate vertically (i.e., structural separation) the owner of the local fixed network from the provider of long distance or international telephone services. I use data from a panel of 67 countries during the seven years following the privatization of the telephone monopoly and find that contrary to wide spread beliefs: (1) monopoly on basic services is not associated with lower residential telephony prices; quite the opposite, monopoly increases residential local prices; (2) monopoly does not help universal service provision and lowers the use of international telephony; and (3) mandatory vertical separation reduces international telephony usage and the number of fixed lines in service. In summary, monopoly and vertical separation harm those consumers that were precisely designed to help: the downstream (business) users of international telephony and the upstream users of residential local telephony.

Non-Decreasing Sequences

Non-decreasing sequences are a generalization of binary covering arrays, which has made research on non-decreasing sequences important in both math and computer science. A non-decreasing sequence of subsets of a finite set S of size s, {S1, S2,.... St}, length t, and strength d, is a sequence of non-empty subsets where the union of any d previous subsets in the sequence does not contain any subsequent subset. The goal of this research is to find properties of these non-decreasing sequences as the variables d, s, and t change. We also explored methods for creating a maximum length for a non-decreasing sequence given d and s. Through our research, we discovered and proved basic properties of these non-decreasing sequences. In addition to this, we can describe a method we used while trying to find the maximum length of a sequence. In the future, research can be conducted to find an exact formula that will generate a maximum length sequence given a non-decreasing sequence of strength d

Legislators v. Regulators: The Case of Low Power FM Radio

The recent Federal Communications Commission rule making for low power FM radio has been widely reported as an instance where Congress sharply rebuked the Commission for enacting rules too favorable to entrants. Because rival policy optima are quantifiable in this case, the preferences of consumers, Congress and the Commission can be directly compared. While differences in policy preferences of Congress and the regulatory agency were visible to interest groups, they appear extremely modest when compared to the open entry (welfare maximizing) policy alternative. A financial event study reveals that incumbent broadcast station equity values were neither threatened by the Commission's low power FM rules, nor materially enhanced by their reversal in Congress. This lends empirical support to the Congressional Dominance view of regulation, and illustrates the margins on which blame- and credit-shifting strategies are utilized by policy makers.

Tax reform for dirty intermediate goods: Theory and an application to the taxation of freight transport.

Tax reform; Theory; Transport; Working;

Transverse mass distributions of strange particles produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV/c

Experiment NA57 has collected high statistics, high purity samples of $K^0_s$, $\Lambda$, $\Xi$ and $\Omega$ produced in Pb-Pb collisions at 158 $A$ GeV/$c$. In this paper we present a study of the transverse mass spectra of these particles for a sample of events corresponding to about the most central 55% of the inelastic Pb-Pb cross section. We analyse the transverse mass distributions in the framework of the blast-wave model for the full sample under consideration and, for the first time at the SPS, as a function of the event centrality.Comment: Contribution to the International Workshop on QCD: QCD@Work 2003 - Conversano (Italy) 14-18 June 2003 (eConf C030614

Transition from viscous to inertial regime in dense suspensions

Non-Brownian suspensions present a transition from Newtonian behavior in the zero-shear limit to a shear thickening behaviour at a large shear rate, none of which is clearly understood so far. Here, we carry out numerical simulations of such an athermal dense suspension under shear, at an imposed confining pressure. This set-up is conceptually identical to the recent experiments of Boyer and co-workers [Phys. Rev. Lett. 107,188301 (2011)]. Varying the interstitial fluid viscosities, we recover the Newtonian and Bagnoldian regimes and show that they correspond to a dissipation dominated by viscous and contact forces respectively. We show that the two rheological regimes can be unified as a function of a single dimensionless number, by adding the contributions to the dissipation at a given volume fraction.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

Best Management Practices to Enhance Water Quality: Who is Adopting Them?

This study investigates the determinants affecting producers’ adoption of some Best Management Practices (BMPs). Priors about the signs of certain variables are explicitly accounted for by testing for inequality restrictions through importance sampling. Education, gender, age, and on-farm residence are found to have significant effects on the adoption of some BMPs. Farms with larger animal production are more apt to implement manure management practices, crop rotation, and riparian buffer strips. Also, farms with larger cultivated acres are more inclined to implement herbicide control practices, crop rotation, and riparian buffer strips. Belonging to an agro-environment club has a positive impact for most BMPs.adoption, Bayesian analysis, best management practices, priors, runoff, water quality, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, Q12, Q25, C11,