Assessing Judicial Efficiency of Egyptian First Instance Courts: A DEA Analysis

Egypt started a recent judicial reform program in 2007, which can be considered the first ever since the establishment of the National Egyptian Judicial System in 1952. It focuses mainly on solving organizational problems within First Instance Courts (FIC), as they form the active cell of the Egyptian judicial system. However the efficiency of FICs is still doubtable to a large extent. This paper provides for the first time an efficiency analysis of 22 FICs in Egypt using the technique of Data Envelop Analysis (DEA). The main strength of this study is to consider the number of computers per court, as none of the previous papers on court efficiency has included a capital variable when defining their court production function before. Our results show that there are no significant differences observed in terms of management efficiency between the civil and criminal FICs, however criminal FICs districts are superior with respect to their corresponding civil districts in terms of program efficiency.Egyptian Judicial System; Efficiency; Data envelopment analysis

ASSET PRICING AND SYSTEMATIC LIQUIDITY RISK: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE SPANISH STOCK MARKET

It seems reasonable to expect systematic liquidity shocks to affect the optimal behavior of agents in financial markets. Indeed, fluctuations in various measures of liquidity are significantly correlated across common stocks(Chordia, Roll and Subrahmanyam (2000)). Thus, this paper empirically analyzes whether Spanish expected returns during the nineties are associated cross-sectionally to betas estimated relative to two competing liquidity risk factors. On one hand, we propose a new market-wide liquidity factor which is defined as the difference between returns of stocks highly sensitive to changes in the relative bid-ask spread less returns from stocks with low sensitivities to those changes. We argue that stocks with positive covariability between returns and this factor are assets whose returns tend to go down when aggregate liquidity is low, and hence do not hedge a potential liquidity crisis. Consequently, investors will require a premium to hold these assets. Similarly, note that in the case of assets that covary negatively with the liquidity factor, investors may be willing to pay a premium rather than to require an additional compensation. On the other hand, Pastor and Stambaugh (2002) suggest that a reasonable liquidity risk factor should be associated with the strength of volume-related return reversals since order flow induces greater return reversals when liquidity is lower. Our empirical results show that neither of these proxies for systematic liquidity risk carries a premium in the Spanish stock market.

Performance and ownership in the governance of urban water

In this paper the differences in terms of performance between public and the private governance in urban water management are investigated. A statistical ranking is implemented to determine programmatic efficiency differences in DEA, using an incomplete panel data that gathers information on 20 water utilities in Andalusia, in Southern Spain. In the model, labour and operational costs are considered as inputs. The volume of revenue water, the number of connections and the network length are used as outputs. The analysis indicates that private management is more efficient. The efficiency indicators adjusted by a variable related to quality are estimated and demonstrate that privatization of the service does not mean any loss in terms of quality. However, there are no significant differences between both types of management including as a desirable input hydraulic yield as a proxy of the degree of network renovation. A lower hydraulic efficiency in private management would suggest that the need to make significant investments could be an important factor when making the decision to privatize the management of the urban water service: Water supply; Management; Local government;

The cyclical trend of local public service governance: evidence from urban water management in Spain

The level of public and private involvement in economic activity in societies has changed over time. One may talk about the existence of a cyclical trend in which the most important periods of public governance are replaced by periods in which private management dominates the situation. This phenomenon may also be observed in local areas. Some authors have pointed out the existence of an alternation in the provision of municipal services, resulting in periods dominated by governance compared to other stages dominated by private management. In order to illustrate this cyclical trend at local level, this paper intends to analyze the evolution of the governance of the Spanish water supply since the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Recent evidence from the industry suggests the possibility that we may currently be witnessing a further change in the trend.: Local Government, urban water supply, privatization, municipalization

A Hemispherical Contact Model for Simplifying 3D Occlusal Surfaces

Statement of problem Currently, dental articulators can recreate mandibular movements and occlusal contacts. However, whether virtual articulators can also provide information about occluding dental surfaces, functional movements, and the mandibular condyles is unclear. Purpose The purpose of this in vitro study was to evaluate the occluding surfaces on dental casts obtained from a patient and approximate them to a hemispherical contact model. Both models were tested by digitizing the Dentatus ARL dental articulator. Material and methods A combination of photogrammetry and structure from motion methods were used to scan a Dentatus ARL articulator and representative dental casts. Using computer-aided engineering and finite element analysis, contact points and action vectors to the forces on occluding surfaces and condyles were obtained for cast and hemispherical models. This experiment was performed using centric occlusion and 3 different condylar inclinations. The Kruskal-Wallis 1-way analysis of variance on ranks test was used to allow all pairwise comparisons between condylar inclination and mechanical action vector values in each location (α=.05). Results Action vectors from the cast model and each location of the hemispherical model were calculated to show the mechanical consequences and the similarity among models. Overall, no significant differences were observed for action vectors (A20 versus A40 versus A60) at each location (dental cast/hemisphere, right condylar, and left condylar) in the analysis of dental casts and the hemisphere model (.382≤P≤.999). Conclusions This study provided graphical information that may assist the dental professional in determining which occlusal contacts should be modified to attain condylar and balanced centric occlusion

On the use of Neumann's principle for the calculation of the polarizability tensor of nanostructures

The polarizability measures how the system responds to an applied electrical field. Computationally, there are many different ways to evaluate this tensorial quantity, some of which rely on the explicit use of the external perturbation and require several individual calculations to obtain the full tensor. In this work, we present some considerations about symmetry that allow us to take full advantage of Neumann's principle and decrease the number of calculations required by these methods. We illustrate the approach with two examples, the use of the symmetries in real space and in spin space in the calculation of the electrical or the spin response.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the Journal of Nanoscience and Nanotechnolog