Courts and Banks: Effects of Judicial Enforcement on Credit Markets

The costs of enforcing contracts is a key determinant of market performance. We document this point with reference to the credit market. We start by presenting a model of opportunistic debtors and inefficient courts. According to the model, improvements in judicial efficiency reduce credit rationing and increase lending, while have an ambiguous effect on interest rates, depending on banking competition and on the type of judicial reform. These predictions are supported by panel data on Italian provinces and by cross-country evidence. In Italian provinces with longer trials or large backlogs of pending trials, credit is less widely available than elsewhere. International evidence also shows that the depth of mortgage markets is inversely related to costs of mortgage foreclosure and other proxies for judicial inefficiency.enforcement, judicial efficiency, credit market, lending, interest rates

NetCluster: a Clustering-Based Framework for Internet Tomography

Abstract — In this paper, Internet data collected via passive measurement are analyzed to obtain localization information on nodes by clustering (i.e., grouping together) nodes that exhibit similar network path properties. Since traditional clustering algorithms fail to correctly identify clusters of homogeneous nodes, we propose a novel framework, named “NetCluster”, suited to analyze Internet measurement datasets. We show that the proposed framework correctly analyzes synthetically generated traces. Finally, we apply it to real traces collected at the access link of our campus LAN and discuss the network characteristics as seen at the vantage point. I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATIONS The Internet is a complex distributed system which continues to grow and evolve. The unregulated and heterogeneous structure of the current Internet makes it challenging to obtai

Web User Session Characterization via Clustering Techniques

We focus on the identification and definition of "Web user-sessions", an aggregation of several TCP connections generated by the same source host on the basis of TCP connection opening time. The identification of a user session is non trivial; traditional approaches rely on threshold based mechanisms, which are very sensitive to the value assumed for the threshold and may be difficult to correctly set. By applying clustering techniques, we define a novel methodology to identify Web user-sessions without requiring an a priori definition of threshold values. We analyze the characteristics of user sessions extracted from real traces, studying the statistical properties of the identified sessions. From the study it emerges that Web user-sessions tend to be Poisson, but correlation may arise during periods of network/hosts anomalous functioning

Minisuperspace dynamics in a generalized uncertainty principle framework

The minisuperspace dynamics of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) and of the Taub Universes in the context of a Generalized Uncertainty Principle is analyzed in detail. In particular, the motion of the wave packets is investigated and, in both the models, the classical singularity appear to be probabilistic suppressed. Moreover, the FRW wave packets approach the Planckian region in a stationary way and no evidences for a Big-Bounce, as predicted in Loop Quantum Cosmology, appear. On the other hand, the Taub wave packets provide the right behavior in predicting an isotropic Universe.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; to appear in the proceedings of the 4th Italian-Sino Workshop on Relativistic Astrophysics, AIP Conference Serie