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

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

How Falling Exchange Rates 2000-2007 Have Affected the U.S. Economy and Trade Deficit (Evaluated Using the Federal Reserve's Nominal Broad Exchange Rate)

Falling exchange rates reduce the purchasing power of the dollar, increasing import prices. Higher import prices have two effects. (1) A substitution effect that shifts demand from imported to domestically produced goods. (2) An income effect that reduces the total amount of real income available for spending on domestic goods and foreign goods. Based on U.S. 1960 - 2000 data, this paper estimates an econometric model that finds that the income effects of falling exchange rates overwhelms the substitution effects, causing a net negative influence on the GDP and income. Results indicate demand for both imported and domestic consumer and investment goods is adversely affected because the income effect is so dominant.. For investment goods, there was a 2.52 billion substitution effect out of imported goods when import prices rose due to a one point drop in the nominal Broad exchange rate. Declining real income also caused decreased demand for domestically produced investment goods. For consumer goods, the substitution effect stimulated domestic demand, but was more than offset by the negative effect of declining income. The decrease in demand for domestic goods and services was 2.0 times as large as the decrease in demand for imports. Therefore, the trade deficit fell less in dollars ($198B) than the GDP ($321B) in real dollars. The study estimates that, other things equal, the trade deficit would fall from 4.3% to 2.3% of the GDP as a result of a large 16.1 percent drop in the nominal Broad exchange rate index, such as occurred 2000-07. Had the exchange rate not fallen during this period, we estimate the average annual growth rate of the U.S. economy would have been 3.2%, not the 2.7% it has actually averaged, assuming sufficient capital and labor availability to do so. Finally, we find that a falling trade deficit induced by falling exchange rates ($12.31B per point drop in the rate), reduces the size of the annual transfer of U.S. assets to foreigners needed to finance the deficit by the same amount, but does not result in an equally large change upward by the end of the period in U.S. ownership of assets, because about 2/3 of this gain is offset by an income – decline related drop in savings ($8.28B per point decline in the index) during the same period.

Does the Exchange Rate Really Affect Consumer Spending?

This paper examines the extent to which changes in imports or exports of U.S. consumer goods and services occurs in response to a change in the exchange rate, 1960 -2000. The data used are taken from the Economic Report of the President, 2002. The findings indicate that an increase in the trade weighted exchange rate of about one percent is associated with an increase in imports of consumer goods of approximately $1 billion dollars the year after the change. The same level increase seems associated with a decline in con-sumer goods exports of about$0.75 billion dollars.

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

How Falling Exchange Rates 2000-2007 Have Affected the U.S. Economy and Trade Deficit (Evaluated Using the Federal Reserve's G-10 Exchange Rate)

Falling exchange rates reduce the purchasing power of the dollar, increasing import prices. Higher import prices have two effects. (1) A substitution effect that shifts demand from imported to domestically produced goods. (2) An income effect that reduces the total amount of real income available for spending on domestic goods and foreign goods. Based on U.S. 1960 - 2000 data, this paper estimates an econometric model that finds that the income effects of falling exchange rates overwhelms the substitution effects, causing a net negative influence on the GDP and income. Results indicate demand for both imported and domestic consumer and investment goods is adversely affected because the income effect is so dominant.. For investment goods, there was virtually no substitution effect out of imported goods when import prices rose due to a falling exchange rate. Declining real income also caused decreased demand for domestically produced investment goods. For consumer goods, the substitution effect stimulated domestic demand, but was more than offset by the negative effect of declining income. The decrease in demand for domestic goods and services was 3.6 times as large as the decrease in demand for imports. Therefore, the trade deficit fell far less in dollars than the GDP. The study estimates that, other things equal, the trade deficit would fall from 4.3% to 2.1% of the GDP as a result of a large twenty percent weakening of the dollar, such as occurred 2000-07. Had the exchange rate not fallen during this period, we estimate the average annual growth rate of the U.S. economy would have been 3.7%, not the 2.7% it has actually averaged, assuming sufficient capital and labor availability to do so. Finally, we find that a falling trade deficit induced by falling exchange rates, reduces the size of the annual transfer of U.S. assets to foreigners needed to finance the deficit, but does not result in a faster rate of net growth for U.S. assets, because declining income also reduces domestic savings by a comparable amount.