Opportunistic competition law enforcement

We analyse the interplay between investigation policies, deterrence and desistance in a model where a competition authority monitors multiple sectors and faces a budget constraint that prevents it from deterring cartels in all sectors simultaneously. Most studies of competition law enforcement treat competition authorities as all-knowing, unwavering and benevolent. They do not behave opportunistically, do not face asymmetric information and choose their actions to optimize social welfare. In this paper, we drop one of these assumptions, and study a competition authority that can not commit to a particular investigation strategy. As a consequence, a competition authority’s decisions to investigate will be driven by the (ex-post) desistance effect instead of the (ex ante) deterrence effect of an investigation policy. The resulting opportunistic behaviour may lead to a suboptimal investigation strategy. We find that, in the absence of commitment, developing a sector specific reward scheme based on the number of captured cartels can improve welfare.

True Fire, Noble Flame: Friendship Poetry by Katharina Lescailje, Cornelia van der Veer, and Katherine Philips

This essay examines early modern friendship poetry by women writers from England and the Dutch Republic, including Katherine Philips, Cornelia van der Veer, Catharina Questiers, and Katharina Lescailje. It argues that women used this genre to comment on the shifting definitions of public and private and especially to how these shifts affected them as women

'Before she ends up in a brothel': Public Femininity and the First Actresses in England and the Low Countries

This essay explores the first appearance of actresses on the public stage in England and the Dutch Republic. It considers the cultural climate, the theaters, and the plays selected for these early performances, particularly from the perspective of public femininity. In both countries antitheatricalists denounced female acting as a form of prostitution and evidence of inner corruption. In England, theaters were commercial institutions with intimate spaces that capitalized on the staging of privacy as theatrical. By contrast, the Schouwburg, the only public playhouse in Amsterdam, was an institution with a more civic character, in which the actress could be treated as unequivocally a public figure. I explain these differences in the light of changing conceptions of public and private and suggest that the treatment of the actress shows a stronger public- private division in the Dutch Republic than in England

Digital Editions of Early Modern Women’s Writing

A review of Mary Wroth’s Poetry: An Electronic Edition (http:// wroth.latrobe.edu.au/index. html); The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making (http://pulterproject. northwestern.edu/); and Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies: A Digital Critical Edition (http:// library2.utm.utoronto.ca/ poemsandfancies/)

“This sympathizèd one day’s error”: Genre, Representation, and Subjectivity in The Comedy of Errors

This essay reexamines the mixtures of genres in The Comedy of Errors to argue that Shakespeare's play encourages reflection on genre as a mode of representation. In particular, the genres of romance and farce each offer specific approaches to subjectivity, which would have been especially meaningful to early modern urban playgoers grappling with the period's many cultural, economic, and social transitions. While The Comedy of Errors emphasizes romance in the frame and farce in the middle of the play, Shakespeare has the two genres overlap with, address, and incorporate each other, creating not only a generic rivalry but also striking instances of generic merger. These moments allow the audience to contemplate the nature of the world view presented in each genre and to determine its own position in the debate on subjectivity that emerges from the confrontation of the two. Romance and farce present identity as made up of the same components, but they judge these components in opposing ways. The same aspects of selfhood that point to an unchanging, essential core to the self in romance suggest the randomness of subjectivity in farce. Shakespeare's idealist version of romance overcomes the challenges posed by the secularism of farce by making materiality an integral part of collective harmony and individual subjectivity. All the same, the vast transformation that must take place to arrive at closure in the play suggests the broad differences between the two genres and their respective world views

Did the 2006 covenants reduce school dropout in the Netherlands?

Early school-leaving is considered to be one of the major problems in Dutch education. In order to reduce the number of dropouts in the school year 2006-2007 the Dutch government has offered a financial incentive scheme to 14 out of 39 regions. This scheme provides a reward of 2000 euro per school dropout less in 2006-07. The target of the scheme was a reduction of the total number of school dropouts by at least 10 percent in one year. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of this school dropout policy by comparing the change in school dropout in these 14 regions with the change in the remaining 25 regions before and after the introduction of the policy. We observe a modest decline in the probability of dropping out in the 14 covenants regions. However, the decline in the non-covenant regions was equally large. We therefore find no significant effect on the probability of dropping out in the post-covenant year. In both regions, the number of dropouts has fallen by 3 percent in the year after the covenants. This nationwide decline can be largely assigned to changes in the student populations among the pre- and post-covenant year. The covenants also gave a reward to regions for a successful reintegration of dropouts in order to reduce school dropout in that way. However, estimates for the effect on the re-enrolment of previous dropouts are statistically insignificant as well. We conclude that 2006 covenant policy has not been effective in reducing early school-leaving.

Modelling health care expenditures; overview of the literature and evidence from a panel time series model

The first purpose of this paper is to give an up to date overview of the literature on health care expenditures. Secondly, this paper contributes to the existing literature by investigating the impact of several factors on health care expenditures in an empirical analysis using an error-correction model. Health care expenditures in industrial countries have been growing rapidly over the past forty years. This rapid growth jeopardizes the sustainability of public budgets and causes an increasing interest in the determinants of health care expenditures. Additional to the 'usual suspects' for rising health care expenditures, we pay attention to a somewhat neglected driving factor, which is the increase in the relative price of health care compared to other goods and services. We find that the increasing price of health care helps to explain the increase in real health care expenditures. However, the use of health care in volume terms is negatively affected by the increasing price. This effect seems to be stronger in periods of cost containment policy. Consistent with most recent findings in the literature, we find that income and ageing are important drivers of health care expenditures.

What’s in a name? Asymmetries in the evaluation of religiously motivated terrorism and right-wing motivated violence in the context of the “refugee crisis”

In the course of 2015, Germany was confronted with ever increasing immigration flows which resulted in the so-called “refugee crisis”. This sudden political and societal challenge brought about feelings of fear, anxiety and insecurity in many people. As a result, the right-wing Populist Party AFD and the populist movement PEGIDA steadily gained more support. Furthermore, the number of right-wing motivated crimes reached a total of 13 846 by the end of December 2015, of which 4183 were declared as motivated by “anti-migrant” or xenophobic sentiments. However, it appears as if the German government has difficulties reacting appropriately to those developments. This paper argues that the asymmetry between the moral and political evaluation of transnational religiously motivated terrorist violence and domestic right-wing extremist violence is untenable. Consequently, the emphasis on safeguarding national security against the risk of this kind of terrorist violence denies the importance of dealing with the right-wing risk “from within”. It is argued, that the increasing right-wing motivated violence shares certain dynamics with religiously motivated terrorism, even though both phenomena differ in fatality. The choice to call one form of violence terrorism and another form, in this case right-wing extremist violence, is not considered as terrorism, is not as neutral as is often presumed and is certainly not exclusively attributable to the differing character or fatality of the violence. It will be shown that instead, it reveals a lot about certain prejudices, a priori assumptions about the nature of terrorism, prevailing resentment and political interest.

The effect of early tracking on participation in higher education

This paper examines the impact of early tracking on enrollment in and completion of higher education. We compare pupils that are directly tracked in lower general secondary education (ââ¬Ëmavoââ¬â¢) to pupils that postpone their choice of education level by entering secondary education in a combined first-grade class. Potential self-selection problems are addressed in two ways. First of all, using micro data allows us to control for a large set of individual background characteristics including tests of cognitive ability. Second, we exploit differences in regional supply of particular school types. The estimates show that early tracking has a detrimental effect on enrollment in and completion of higher education for pupils who leave primary education with a mavo advice. In addition, we find no evidence that pupils who leave primary education with a higher general secondary education (‘havo’) advice would be negatively affected by being in a comprehensive class together with the mavo advice pupils. Enrollment in and completion of higher education can be increased by stimulating participation in combined first-grade classes that keep pupils with a mavo or havo advice together for an additional one or two years.

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Nanosized drug delivery systems are developed to improve the therapeutic efficacy and to reduce unwanted side effects of existing drugs as well as drug candidates. Liposomes are the most intensively studied drug delivery systems and a number of studies showed that encapsulation of doxorubicin (DOX) in liposomes resulted in an increased therapeutic index particularly due to a significant reduction in unwanted side effects. Nevertheless, the concentration of free drug in the tumor is relatively low due to the slow and uncontrolled release of the drug from the liposomes and as a consequence, cytotoxic free drug concentrations are not always obtained in the tumor. In order to optimize the free drug concentration in the tumor, liposomes should be capable of releasing drugs at the target site in response to a specific stimulus. Therefore, in this thesis temperature sensitive drug delivery systems were explored that release their content in a fast manner at mild hyperthermia while remaining stable at body temperature. Temperature sensitive liposomes with tunable release characteristics were developed that release their content at elevated temperatures. Temperature-sensitive N-(2-hydroxypropyl)methacrylamide mono/dilactate polymers were incorporated into liposomes via a cholesterol anchor (chol-pHPMAlac). The onset-temperature of the DOX release was dependent on the characteristics (copolymer composition and molecular weight) of the chol-pHPMAlac used. It was also shown that these liposomes released their DOX content quantitatively upon exposure to High Intensity Focused Ultrasound. The results of different in vitro assays suggested that chol-pHPMAlac liposomes are not cleared rapidly from the blood circulation after i.v. administration and these liposomes do most likely not generate serious complications e.g. the formation of thrombi after injection. Besides nanoparticles, also micro-sized drug delivery systems are often used for local drug delivery in tumors. This thesis describes the development and characterization of alginate microspheres that combine embolization with on-demand triggered drug release. For that purpose, alginate microspheres loaded with temperature sensitive liposomes (TSL-Ba-ms) were developed, which release their payload after mild hyperthermia. These liposomes contained DOX and [Gd(HPDO3A)(H2O)], a T1 MRI contrast agent, for real time monitoring of the release by MRI. Empty alginate microspheres were crosslinked with holmium ions (T2* MRI contrast agent) to allow microsphere visualization (Ho-ms). TSL-Ba-ms had a mean diameter of 76 µm and released DOX quantitatively within 3 minutes at 42 °C in 50% serum. The deposition of the microspheres and [Gd(HPDO3A)(H2O)] release after i.a. co-administration of TSL-Ba-ms and Ho-ms was monitored in the VX2 tumor model in the auricle of a New Zealand White rabbit. Microsphere clusters appeared on the T2*-wt image after the co-administration of TSL-Ba-ms and Ho-ms and these clusters remained visible after applying mild hyperthermia. The release of [Gd(HPDO3A)(H2O)] from the TSL-Ba-ms was visualized on the T1-wt image. The location of Ho-ms overlapped with the location of [Gd(HPDO3A)(H2O)] released from TSL-Ba-ms making Ho-ms a suitable marker for TSL-Ba-ms