Ciclos de reforma y contra-reforma en la política de competencia en España

Las políticas e instituciones están sometidas a ciclos de reforma y contra-reforma. Éstas pueden impulsar periodos de auge o declive en la efectividad de las políticas públicas. Estos ciclos son especialmente volátiles y amplios en los países que tienen problemas de estabilidad institucional. En España, la política de competencia ilustra estos ciclos volátiles y amplios en la efectividad de las políticas públicas como pocas otras. En los últimos 20 años (1995-2014), España ha vivido dos ciclos completos de intensos auges y declives en la efectividad de la política de competencia, con una ganancia media de efectividad del 14 por 100. El último ciclo de diez años (2005-2014) ha recogido un aumento destacable y posterior caída en la efectividad de la política de competencia, saldándose sin ganancia significativa en la misma: un inane y desgastante ciclo completo de reforma y contra-reforma. La comparación de resultados con un conjunto de 54 países del mundo muestra que esta volatilidad cíclica en la efectividad de la política de competencia en España es una anormalidad estadística. Dada la relevancia del marco institucional y el enforcement, nuestros resultados apuntan a la necesidad de estabilizar la calidad institucional en materia de competencia como garante de una mayor efectividad de la misma

Evaluating antitrust leniency programs

This article identifies and then quantifies econometrically the impact of leniency programs on the perception of the effectiveness of antitrust policies in the business community using panel data for as many as 59 countries during a 14-year span. We use the dynamics of the gradual diffusion of leniency programs across countries and over time to evaluate the impact of the program, taking care of the bias caused by self-selection into the program. We find that leniency programs increase the perception of effectiveness by an order of magnitude ranging from 10 percent to 21 percent. Leniency programs have become weapons of mass dissuasion in the hands of antitrust enforcers against the more damaging forms of explicit collusion among rival firms in the market place

Análisis forense de los cárteles descubiertos en España

El presente trabajo realiza un análisis forense de los cárteles sancionados por las distintas autoridades españolas de la competencia durante los últimos 25 años. Los resultados muestran cómo se ha producido un cambio sustancial tanto en el número como en las características de cárteles detectados por la autoridad de competencia en España desde la aprobación de la última Ley de Defensa de la Competencia de 2007. En los últimos ocho años (2007-2015) se han descubierto no solo más cárteles, sino también cárteles más estables y persistentes. Esto ha sido posible gracias a la entrada en vigor del programa de clemencia y de otros efectivos instrumentos de inspección, análisis, vigilancia y sanción. En los próximos años, la autoridad de competencia se enfrenta al reto de mantener el impulso de la política anticárteles tras las recientes sentencias judiciales que modifican algunos de los instrumentos a disposición de la autoridad de la competencia en la persecución efectiva de los cárteles

The leniency programme: obstacles on the way to collude

There is no honour among thieves. This aphorism concisely expresses why the leniency programmes in competition policy have become one of the most effective instruments in the fight against the cartels. In this work we describe the dissemination, evolution, and effects of the aforementioned programmes in the two decades since its implementation around the world, paying special attention to what is being done at the European Union level and in Spain. The empirical regularities obtained from the descriptive analysis of leniency decisions adopted by the European Commission and by the Spanish Competition Authority provide relevant information about the effectiveness of their corresponding programmes, as well as information about the underlying reasons why companies, in this context, submit applications for sanction exemption or reductions in the penalty amount. We conclude that still there is scope to increase substantially the dissemination and implementation of the leniency programme in Spain, and if the reforms are handled correctly, the programme is set to catch up and to be the main source of detecting and sanctioning of Spanish cartels in the next decad

Redefiniendo los incentivos a la colusión: el programa de clemencia

Los programas de clemencia se han convertido en uno de los instrumentos más efectivos en la lucha contra los cárteles. En este trabajo describimos la difusión, evolución y efectos de tales programas en las dos décadas de su aplicación alrededor del mundo. De las regularidades empíricas extraídas del análisis de todas las decisiones de clemencia adoptadas en la Unión Europea y en España, concluimos que hay margen para ampliar la difusión y aplicación del programa de clemencia en España, y que si se acierta en las reformas, será la fuente principal de detección y sanción de cárteles en la próxima década

On extracting user-centric knowledge for personalised quality of service in 5G networks

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This paper aims to improve the user Quality of Service (QoS) in 5G networks by introducing a user-centric view that exploits the predictability of the user’s daily motifs. An agglomerative clustering is used to identify these motifs according to the cells in which the user is camping during the day. Then, a technique to extract the personalised QoS observed by the user is proposed. The methodology is illustrated with an example that makes use of real measurements obtained from a specific customer of a 3G/4G operator. The presented results illustrate that the proposed user-centric approach is able to identify situations with poor user perceived QoS which could not be identified by a classical network-centric approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Power-efficient resource allocation in a heterogeneous network with cellular and D2D capabilities

This paper focuses on a heterogeneous scenario in which cellular and wireless local area technologies coexist and in which mobile devices are enabled with device-to-device communication capabilities. In this context, this paper assumes a network architecture in which a given user equipment (UE) can receive mobile service either by connecting directly to a cellular base station or by connecting through another UE that acts as an access point and relays the traffic from a cellular base station. The paper investigates the optimization of the connectivity of different UEs with the target to minimize the total transmission power. An optimization framework is presented, and a distributed strategy based on Q-learning and softmax decision making is proposed as a means to solve the considered problem with reduced complexity. The proposed strategy is evaluated under different conditions, and it is shown that the strategy achieves a performance very close to the optimum. Moreover, significant transmission power reductions of approximately 40% are obtained with respect to the classical approach, in which all UEs are connected to the cellular infrastructure. For multi-cell scenarios, in which the optimum solution cannot be easily known a priori, the proposed approach is compared against a centralized genetic algorithm. The proposed approach achieves similar performance in terms of total transmitted power, while exhibiting much lower computational requirements.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Monitoring falls in gastric cancer mortality in Europe

We have considered trends in age-standardized mortality from gastric cancer in 25 individual European countries, as well as in the European Union (EU) as a whole, in six selected central-eastern European countries and in the Russian Federation over the period 1950-1999. Steady and persisting falls in rates were observed, and the fall between 1980 and 1999 was approximately 50% in the EU, 45% in eastern Europe and 40% in Russia. However, the declines were greater in Russia and eastern Europe, since rates were much higher, in absolute terms. Joinpoint regression analysis indicated that the falls were proportionally greater in the last decade for men (-3.83% per year in the EU) and in the last 25 years for women (-3.67% per year in the EU) than in previous calendar years. Moreover, steady declines in gastric cancer mortality were observed in the middle-aged and the young population as well, suggesting that they are likely to persist in the near future. In terms of number of deaths avoided, however, the impact of the decline in gastric cancer mortality will be smaller, particularly in the EU. [Authors]]]> Mortality ; Stomach Neoplasms ; Europe ; Russia https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_9936EEFA2B5C.P001/REF.pdf http://nbn-resolving.org/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:ch:serval-BIB_9936EEFA2B5C8 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/urn/urn:nbn:ch:serval-BIB_9936EEFA2B5C8 info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Copying allowed only for non-profit organizations https://serval.unil.ch/disclaimer application/pdf oai:serval.unil.ch:BIB_99293AD0C5E5 2022-05-07T01:23:27Z <oai_dc:dc xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:oai_dc="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc/ http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/oai_dc.xsd"> https://serval.unil.ch/notice/serval:BIB_99293AD0C5E5 Training During the COVID-19 Lockdown: Knowledge, Beliefs, and Practices of 12,526 Athletes from 142 Countries and Six Continents. info:doi:10.1007/s40279-021-01573-z info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1007/s40279-021-01573-z info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/34687439 Washif, J.A. Farooq, A. Krug, I. Pyne, D.B. Verhagen, E. Taylor, L. Wong, D.P. Mujika, I. Cortis, C. Haddad, M. Ahmadian, O. Al Jufaili, M. Al-Horani, R.A. Al-Mohannadi, A.S. Aloui, A. Ammar, A. Arifi, F. Aziz, A.R. Batuev, M. Beaven, C.M. Beneke, R. Bici, A. Bishnoi, P. Bogwasi, L. Bok, D. Boukhris, O. Boullosa, D. Bragazzi, N. Brito, J. Cartagena, RPP Chaouachi, A. Cheung, S.S. Chtourou, H. Cosma, G. Debevec, T. DeLang, M.D. Dellal, A. Dönmez, G. Driss, T. Peña Duque, J.D. Eirale, C. Elloumi, M. Foster, C. Franchini, E. Fusco, A. Galy, O. Gastin, P.B. Gill, N. Girard, O. Gregov, C. Halson, S. Hammouda, O. Hanzlíková, I. Hassanmirzaei, B. Haugen, T. Hébert-Losier, K. Muñoz Helú, H. Herrera-Valenzuela, T. Hettinga, F.J. Holtzhausen, L. Hue, O. Dello Iacono, A. Ihalainen, J.K. James, C. Janse van Rensburg, D.C. Joseph, S. Kamoun, K. Khaled, M. Khalladi, K. Kim, K.J. Kok, L.Y. MacMillan, L. Mataruna-Dos-Santos, L.J. Matsunaga, R. Memishi, S. Millet, G.P. Moussa-Chamari, I. Musa, D.I. Nguyen, HMT Nikolaidis, P.T. Owen, A. Padulo, J. Pagaduan, J.C. Perera, N.P. Pérez-Gómez, J. Pillay, L. Popa, A. Pudasaini, A. Rabbani, A. Rahayu, T. Romdhani, M. Salamh, P. Sarkar, A.S. Schillinger, A. Seiler, S. Setyawati, H. Shrestha, N. Suraya, F. Tabben, M. Trabelsi, K. Urhausen, A. Valtonen, M. Weber, J. Whiteley, R. Zrane, A. Zerguini, Y. Zmijewski, P. Sandbakk, Ø. Ben Saad, H. Chamari, K. info:eu-repo/semantics/article article 2022-04 Sports medicine, vol. 52, no. 4, pp. 933-948 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/eissn/1179-2035 urn:issn:0112-1642 <![CDATA[Our objective was to explore the training-related knowledge, beliefs, and practices of athletes and the influence of lockdowns in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Athletes (n = 12,526, comprising 13% world class, 21% international, 36% national, 24% state, and 6% recreational) completed an online survey that was available from 17 May to 5 July 2020 and explored their training behaviors (training knowledge, beliefs/attitudes, and practices), including specific questions on their training intensity, frequency, and session duration before and during lockdown (March-June 2020). Overall, 85% of athletes wanted to "maintain training," and 79% disagreed with the statement that it is "okay to not train during lockdown," with a greater prevalence for both in higher-level athletes. In total, 60% of athletes considered "coaching by correspondence (remote coaching)" to be sufficient (highest amongst world-class athletes). During lockdown, &lt; 40% were able to maintain sport-specific training (e.g., long endurance [39%], interval training [35%], weightlifting [33%], plyometric exercise [30%]) at pre-lockdown levels (higher among world-class, international, and national athletes), with most (83%) training for "general fitness and health maintenance" during lockdown. Athletes trained alone (80%) and focused on bodyweight (65%) and cardiovascular (59%) exercise/training during lockdown. Compared with before lockdown, most athletes reported reduced training frequency (from between five and seven sessions per week to four or fewer), shorter training sessions (from ≥ 60 to &lt; 60 min), and lower sport-specific intensity (~ 38% reduction), irrespective of athlete classification. COVID-19-related lockdowns saw marked reductions in athletic training specificity, intensity, frequency, and duration, with notable within-sample differences (by athlete classification). Higher classification athletes had the strongest desire to "maintain" training and the greatest opposition to "not training" during lockdowns. These higher classification athletes retained training specificity to a greater degree than others, probably because of preferential access to limited training resources. More higher classification athletes considered "coaching by correspondence" as sufficient than did lower classification athletes. These lockdown-mediated changes in training were not conducive to maintenance or progression of athletes' physical capacities and were also likely detrimental to athletes' mental health. These data can be used by policy makers, athletes, and their multidisciplinary teams to modulate their practice, with a degree of individualization, in the current and continued pandemic-related scenario. Furthermore, the data may drive training-related educational resources for athletes and their multidisciplinary teams. Such upskilling would provide athletes with evidence to inform their training modifications in response to germane situations (e.g., COVID related, injury, and illness)

Fast and accurate SER estimation for large combinational blocks in early stages of the design

Soft Error Rate (SER) estimation is an important challenge for integrated circuits because of the increased vulnerability brought by technology scaling. This paper presents a methodology to estimate in early stages of the design the susceptibility of combinational circuits to particle strikes. In the core of the framework lies MASkIt , a novel approach that combines signal probabilities with technology characterization to swiftly compute the logical, electrical, and timing masking effects of the circuit under study taking into account all input combinations and pulse widths at once. Signal probabilities are estimated applying a new hybrid approach that integrates heuristics along with selective simulation of reconvergent subnetworks. The experimental results validate our proposed technique, showing a speedup of two orders of magnitude in comparison with traditional fault injection estimation with an average estimation error of 5 percent. Finally, we analyze the vulnerability of the Decoder, Scheduler, ALU, and FPU of an out-of-order, superscalar processor design.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and Feder Funds under grant TIN2013-44375-R, by the Generalitat de Catalunya under grant FI-DGR 2016, and by the FP7 program of the EU under contract FP7-611404 (CLERECO).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

When are Cartels more likely to be formed or broken? The role of business cycles

The literature presents mixed contributions about the economic conditions under which cartels form and collapse, and about how stable they are across firm-specific and industry-wide business cycles. The relationship between cartel life cycles and business cycles has not been sufficiently analyzed to date. In this paper, we study in depth whether collusion is pro-cyclical or counter-cyclical. We analyze the relationship between cartel startups/breakups and economic cycles using a dataset of sanctioned cartels by the European Commission that were active between 1997 and 2012, after the leniency program had already been introduced. We also double check whether this relationship has changed with respect to the pre-leniency period from 1991 to 1996. Our results show that cartels are more likely to be formed in upturns, but that cartels tend to breakup also in booms. Upturns in economic cycles appear to cause cartel turnovers: existing cartels die while new ones are set up. Collusion appears to be pro-cyclical with respect to cartel creation, while it seems to be counter-cyclical with regard to cartel demise