Prospects for discovering new gauge bosons, extra dimensions and contact interaction at the LHC

This talk is a review of possible discoveries of exotic not Standard Model Physics in the early stage of LHC (first two years), with the ATLAS and CMS experiments. LHC will be the first experiment ever to explore the TeV region and new exotic particles could be discovered at early stages of the LHC running if their masses are not too large. This talk is focused on three main search topics: new vector bosons, contact interaction and extra dimensions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 fig, 1 tab; version 2: cosmetic changes due to ICHEP conference template change

Boson Gauge Couplings at LEP

The review of the measurements of the gauge couplings in the boson sector at LEP is presented. The measurements of the charged triple gauge couplings (cTGC) parameters from the four LEP experiments are combined and the results are in good agreement with the Standard Model predictions, proving the non-abelian structure of the SU(2)_L x U(1)_Y gauge simmetry. Different measurements of these parameters are reviewed and all possible fit methods discussed. The current limits on the anomalous neutral triple gauge couplings (nTGC) and the quartic gauge coplings (QGC) are also presented.Comment: 7 pag, 5 fig, conf Moriond 0

Leniency Policies and Illegal Transactions

Forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics. We study the consequences of leniency – reduced legal sanctions for wrongdoers who spontaneously self-report to law enforcers – on sequential, bilateral, illegal transactions, such as corruption, manager-auditor collusion, or drug deals. It is known that leniency helps deterring illegal relationships sustained by repeated interaction. Here we find that - when not properly designed - leniency may simultaneously provide an effective governance mechanism for occasional sequential illegal transactions that would not be feasible in its absence

Leniency Policies and Illegal Transactions

Forthcoming in the Journal of Public Economics. We study the consequences of leniency – reduced legal sanctions for wrongdoers who spontaneously self-report to law enforcers – on sequential, bilateral, illegal transactions, such as corruption, manager-auditor collusion, or drug deals. It is known that leniency helps deterring illegal relationships sustained by repeated interaction. Here we find that - when not properly designed - leniency may simultaneously provide an effective governance mechanism for occasional sequential illegal transactions that would not be feasible in its absence.amnesty; corruption; collusion; financial fraud; governance; hold up; hostages; illegal trade; immunity; law enforcement; leniency; organized crime; self-reporting; whistleblowers

Constitutions and central-bank independence: An objection to McCallum's second fallacy

Most of the literature on monetary policy delegation assumes that the government can credibly commit to the delegation contract, an assumption criticized by McCallum. This paper provides foundations for the assumption that renegotiating a delegation contract can be costly by illustrating how political institutions can generate inertia in recontracting, reduce the gains from it or prevent it altogether. Once the nature of renegotiation costs has been clarified, it is easier to see why certain institutions can mitigate or solve dynamic inconsistencies better than others. The paper points to institutions which give Western democracies the technology to make credible delegation commitments, and argues that the ECB is an example of credible delegation

Competition Policy and Productivity Growth: An Empirical Assessment

This paper empirically investigates the effectiveness of competition policy by estimating its impact on Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth for 22 industries in 12 OECD countries over the period 1995-2005. We ?nd a robust positive and signi?cant effect of competition policy asmeasured by newly created indexes. We provide several arguments and results based on instrumental variables estimators as well as non-linearities to support the claim that the established link can be interpreted in a causal way. At a disaggregated level, the effect on TFP growth is particularly strong for speci?c aspects of competition policy related to its institutional setup and antitrust activities (rather than merger control). The effect is strengthened by good legal systems, suggesting complementarities between competition policy and the ef?ciency of law enforcement institutions

The effects of leniency on illegal transactions: How (not) to fight corruption

We study the consequences of 'leniency' - reduced legal sanctions for wrongdoers who spontaneously self-report to law enforcers - on corruption, drug dealing, and other forms of sequential, bilateral, illegal trade. We find that when not properly designed, leniency may be highly counterproductive. In reality leniency is typically moderate, in the sense of only reducing, or at best cancelling the sanctions for the self-reporting party. Moderate leniency may greatly facilitate the enforcement of long-term illegal trade relations, and may even provide an effective enforcement mechanism for occasional (one-shot) illegal transactions, which would not be enforceable otherwise

Measuring the deterrence properties of competition policy: the Competition Policy Indexes

The aim of this paper is to describe in detail a set of newly developed indicators of the quality of competition policy, Competition Policy Indexes, or CPIs. The CPIs measure the deterrence properties of a competition policy in a jurisdiction, where for competition policy we mean the antitrust legislation, including the merger control provisions, and its enforcement. The CPIs incorporate data on how the key features of a competition policy regime score against a benchmark of generally-agreed best practices and summarise them so as to allow cross-country and cross-time comparisons. The CPIs have been calculated for a sample of 13 OECD jurisdictions over the period 1995-2005

Deterrence in Competition Law

This paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the deterrence properties of a competition policy regime. On the basis of the economic theory of law enforcement we identify several factors that are likely to affect its degree of deterrence: 1) sanctions and damages; 2) financial and human resources; 3) powers during the investigation; 4) quality of the law; 5) independence; and 6) separation of power. We then discuss how to measure deterrence. We review the literature that use surveys to solicit direct information on changes in the behavior of firms due to the threats posed by the enforcement of antitrust rules, and the literature based on the analysis of hard data. We finally argue that the most challenging task, both theoretically and empirically, is how to distinguish between “good” deterrence and “bad” deterrence