How can European competition law address market distortions caused by state-owned enterprises? Bruegel Policy Contribution Issue No. 18 | December 2019

This Policy Contribution assesses whether European competition law could be applied more directly to state-owned enterprises that create an unlevel playing field in Europe because of the support they receive from their home governments. This issue has become a priority for many European Union countries and for the European Commission, given its impact on European economic autonomy. Competition law may not be the appropriate tool for addressing the granting of illegal subsidies or other forms of support in third countries, but it could be more effective than previously thought in dealing with the distortive effect of stateowned entities on the EU internal market. If State-Owned Enterprises are not resource-constrained or even profit maximising, they might be unconstrained by competitive pressures, therefore possessing a de-facto level of market power. By adapting existing antitrust theories of harm, such as predatory pricing, to fit the specific nature of SOEs, this Policy Contribution argues that it should be possible to add further tools to the EU’s toolbox. In any event, as part of its efforts to address the distortive effects on the internal market of foreign state ownership and subsidies, the European Commission should develop a coherent and proactive competition policy to provide guidance to the market

Maass Spezialschar of level N

In this paper the image of the Saito-Kurokawa lift of level $N$ with Dirichlet character is studied. We give a new characterization of this so called Maass Spezialschar of level $N$ by symmetries involving Hecke operators related to $\Gamma_0(N)$. We finally obtain for all prime numbers $p$ local Maass relations. This generalizes known results for level $N=1$

Battle for the People: Ideological Conflict between Soviet Partisans, the German Military, and Ukrainian Nationalists in Nazi-Occupied Ukraine

Soviet historiography discusses the People’s War during the Second World War, the idea that all of the Soviet people rallied to the cause and fought off the Nazi invaders, but this is far from the truth. Within the western borderlands of the Soviet Union multiple conflicting groups fought for control of and support from the people. This was especially true in Ukraine where the German Army, Soviet Partisans and Ukrainian nationalists all fought ‘for the people’ and for their own ideologies. This paper is an attempt to discuss the ideological conflict between the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Ukrainian nationalists, and how the failure or success of these policies led to the legitimizing of policies of mass murder of the local Ukrainian, Jewish, and Polish populations, and how the tension from the partisan struggle continues to this day

Learning from Outside the Viability Kernel: Why we Should Build Robots that can Fall with Grace

Despite impressive results using reinforcement learning to solve complex problems from scratch, in robotics this has still been largely limited to model-based learning with very informative reward functions. One of the major challenges is that the reward landscape often has large patches with no gradient, making it difficult to sample gradients effectively. We show here that the robot state-initialization can have a more important effect on the reward landscape than is generally expected. In particular, we show the counter-intuitive benefit of including initializations that are unviable, in other words initializing in states that are doomed to fail.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on SImulation, Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), Brisbane, Australia, 16-19 201

Polynominals related to powers of the Dedekind eta function

The vanishing properties of Fourier coefficients of integral powers of the Dedekind eta function correspond to the existence of integral roots of integer-valued polynomials Pn(x) introduced by M. Newman. In this paper we study the derivatives of these polynomials. We obtain non-vanishing results at integral points. As an application we prove that integral roots are simple if the index n of the polynomial is equal to a prime power pm or to pm + 1. We obtain a formula for the derivative of Pn(x) involving the polynomials of lower degree

Which Interest Rate Seems Most Related to Business Investment? A Few Preliminary Findings from an Ongoing Study

This paper examines (econometrically) which interest rates seem most systematically related to investment and the GDP and how long the lag time is before changes in these interest rates affect the GDP. We conclude that the Prime interest rate has the most important and systematic influence on these variables and that it affects investment and the GDP after a two year lag due to the lengthy periods required to design, bid and build new factories, commercial facilities and some machinery. Other rates examined, but not found related to investment - triggered GDP growth, include the Aaa and Baa corporate bond rates, the Mortgage interest rate and the 10 year Treasury bond rate. Our results also suggest the magnitude of the effect of interest rate changes on the economy is relatively modest, and that therefore the Federal Reserve's ability to influence the economy by changing rates may also be somewhat constrained.

Which Interest Rate Should We Use In The Is Curve?

Do interest rates effect investment and the GDP? If so, which ones, and by how much? Research on this topic over 5 decades has produced conflicting results. Yet, this question is of critical importance to the viability of Keynesian macroeconomics. This paper attempts to explain why results have been conflicting. It also attempts to determine with some finality which rate(s), if any, are related to GDP through the standard Keynesian mechanism: the IS curve. The paper tests exhaustively (1) a variety of real and nominal rates, (2) different hypotheses about how businesses calculate “real” interest rates (3) how the number of lags used affects results, (4) whether small sample size inherent in annual time series data adversely affects results, and (5) whether lack of hetroskedasticity and autocorrelation controls in earlier studies influenced their findings. This paper concludes only the real prime or Federal funds rates, lagged two years and the nominal current mortgage rate are significantly related to variation in the GDP, and running the prime rate alone picks up most of the variation in both. The prime rate was found to be twice as important as the mortgage rate. It also finds relatively small size (40 observation) annual data sets do not lead to problems achieving statistical significance, at least in simple IS curve models. It also finds that post - 1980 White and Newey - West correction methods for hetroskedasticity make it far more likely that any of a wide variety of interest rates and lags will be found statistically significant than was the case in earlier studies, but that correcting for multicollinearity between rates again leaves only the real prime and Federal funds rate lagged two periods and perhaps the current nominal mortgage rate significant. The effect of changes in the prime rate and mortgage rates on the GDP, though systematic, appears to be small, implying the IS curve may be nearly vertical and the Fed’s interest rate policy of little significance unless rate changes are draconian. We estimate that even a five percentage - point change in the real Federal funds and prime rates changes GDP only 2.4%, and employment only 1.2% maximally (using Okun’s law). Other findings were that nominal interest rates deflated by adaptive expectations models of inflation using the past two year’s inflation seem to best describe how businesses calculate real rates. Rational expectations models were least successful. Other rates examined include the ten year treasury rate, the Aaa and Baa corporate rates. They were seldom found statistically significant, but the mortgage rate’s estimated marginal effect seems to also capture these rates’ effect on the economy.

Is Crowd Out A Problem In Recessions?

The crowd out effects of the government deficit is tested by adding it to consumption and investment models which control extensively for other factors. Effects are calculated for recession and non-recession periods, and compared to models with average crowd out, and models without crowd out. Test results indicate 1) deficits crowd out private consumption and investment, are statistically significant, and add substantially to explained variance. They also predict “IS” curve coefficients better than no crowd out models. Crowd out was found to have roughly equal effects in recessions and non-recession periods. Government spending deficits were found to result in complete crowd out, tax cut deficits resulted in more than complete crowd out. Both findings consistent with crowd out theory. Increases in M2, especially it’s saving (Non-M1) components, in the three years prior to a deficit, were found to offset the crowd out effects of government spending deficits, but not the effects of tax cut deficits. M1 increases were not found effective in eliminating crowd out effects. Foreign borrowing can be used to supplement domestic saving, reducing the possibility of crowd out when deficits occur. This paper uses a one variable definition of the deficit (T-G). This implies marginal effects of spending and tax deficits are the same. In working Paper 1104 of this series, these two kinds of deficits are tested separately to determine if they have separate effects.