New firm performance and territorial driving forces.

We study post entry performance of manufactuirng firms in 3 municipalities of Buenos Aires province, borned between 1990 and 1999. The aim of the paper is to identify main factors explaining firm growth. The focus is directed to endogenous determinants of firm performance, individual or local as well, taking into account the growing interest those elements are receiving in recent literature about local development. The results show that firm tradability grade is the key variable explaining performance. This factor is strongly influenced by entrepreneur´s profile but also by macroeconomic context.local development, new firms, firm performance, tradability

¡Basta de fracasos! : Propuestas para un desarrollo económico con equidad e inclusión social

¡Basta de fracasos! : Propuestas para un desarrollo económico con equidad e inclusión socia

Seguro obligatorio de responsabilidad civil. Ensayo sobre instituciones en mercados imperfectos

The study of mandatory insurance systems may be carried out on two different levels. On the one hand, it is possible to analyze theoretical relations between some properties or elements belonging to that class of systems. On the other, given a set of relevant conditions, empirical outcomes of individual systems can be foreseen. This work studies a few theoretical relations between some fine-grained elements of mandatory insurance systems underlying the obligation to purchase coverage, from a transaction costs perspective. We conclude that, in relation to a set of empirical conditions typically related to developing societies, it is possible to find relatively preferable an individual system including that kind of obligation. However, this statement does not mean that every individual systems imposing mandatory insurance are adequate for that type of real realms, or that the duty of insuring should be discarded for societies of a different kind.El estudio de los sistemas de seguros obligatorios se puede desarrollar en dos niveles. Por un lado es posible analizar las relaciones teóricas entre propiedades que pertenecen a esa clase de sistemas. Por el otro, dado un conjunto de condiciones relevantes se pueden considerar resultados empíricos de sistemas individuales. Este trabajo analiza algunas relaciones teóricas refinadas de los sistemas de seguros obligatorios desde la perspectiva de los costos de transacción. Se concluye que la diferencia de contextos reales, es lo que determina la preferibilidad de cierto diseño institucional por sobre otro. Así, no parece razonable pensar en evaluar instituciones, como el seguro obligatorio de responsabilidad, sin considerar el contexto real y las particulares condiciones de imperfección del mismo

New firm performance and territorial driving forces

The article analyses recent approaches on entry and post-entry performance by new firms, with particular focus on its applicability to small manufacturing firms recently borned in Argentina. The analysis is based on a sample of small firms created in the period 1990-2000 in three intermediate cities in Buenos Aires province (Argentina) in manufacturing sector. The survey collected data about microeconomic and mesoeconomic elements influencing firm performance. Results indicate that tradability is a key factor influencing firm performance. New firms entering markets where the spatial markets are reduced face limited perspectives on expansion. In turn, tradability is also affected by entrepeneurial motivation and, especially in underveloped regions, macroeconomic variables.new firms, post-entry performance, transability

Personal Property Security Law: International Ambitions and Local Realities

Personal property security law is a key element of “access to credit” and “financial inclusion”. The prevailing view is that a legal framework enabling the effective use of personal property as collateral markedly benefits both lenders and borrowers. Lenders can offer financing at a lower cost thanks to reduced credit risk; borrowers can access funding by leveraging the otherwise unavailable value of the assets integral to their operations.Over the past century, the priorities of personal property security law have evolved fundamentally. As small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and individual entrepreneurs have become the growth engine of both developed and developing economies, legislators have grown sensitive to the financing needs of these entities. In parallel, the advent of the information society has demanded that lawmakers address squarely the rules governing the use as collateral of intangibles such as “receivables”, “intermediated securities”, “non-intermediated securities”, and “intellectual property rights”, rather than confine their gaze to tangibles such as industrial machinery, mobile equipment and inventory. Concurrently, the increasingly transnational nature of both economic development policies and commercial activity have engendered the need for global principles and standards for asset-based lending.To address these novel priorities and promote a healthy and vibrant credit ecosystem, international and regional organizations have undertaken projects aimed at modernizing and harmonizing personal property security law. Over time, these efforts have yielded a panoply of legal instruments. Binding conventions have been adopted to unify the rules of discrete facets of personal property security law, while soft-law texts, such as model laws and legislative guides, have been formulated to supply comprehensive legal templates to lawmakers keen to revise their domestic legal regimes. Nevertheless, states have struggled to assimilate these international efforts into their domestic legal systems. Common law jurisdictions have been loath to abandon the familiarity and safety of the path paved by centuries of case law; in similar vein, civil law jurisdictions have resisted inducements to renovate the normative infrastructure erected by the codifications of the 19th century.This Chapter explores the tension between international ambitions and local realities, with a special focus on the issues encountered in civil law jurisdictions. To this end, the case of Italy is examined as a living experiment in comparative personal property security law. In this jurisdiction, the recent enactment of a non-possessory security device, absent a comprehensive reform of the country’s civil code affords important lessons for any civil law system which might be pondering personal property security law reforms. More profoundly, it epitomizes the gap that separates the aspirations of international legal instruments from their effective implementation in domestic contexts. This analysis is divided into two parts. The first reviews international and regional legal initiatives that have shaped the personal property law landscape and then identifies a set of core tenets shared among them. In the second part, attention shifts to Italy, scrutinizing both the personal property security legal edifice originally constructed in this jurisdiction and the attempts to overhaul it that have taken place over the past three decades. This is followed by a critical appraisal of the current state of the law, by reference to the aforementioned core tenets of personal property law reform

Commercial Law Intersections

Commercial law is not a single, monolithic entity. It has grown into a dense thicket of subject-specific branches that govern a broad range of transactions and corporate actions. When one of such dealings or activities falls concurrently within the purview of two or more of these commercial law branches—such as corporate law, intellectual property law, secured transactions law, conduct and prudential regulation—an overlap materializes. We refer to this legal phenomenon as a commercial law intersection (CLI). CLIs are ubiquitous. Notable examples include traditional commercial transactions, such as bank loans secured by shares, supply chain financing, or patent cross-licensing agreements, as well as nascent FinTech arrangements, such as blockchain-based initial coin offerings and other dealings in digital tokens. CLIs present a multi-faceted challenge. The unharmonious convergence of commercial law branches generates failures in coordination that both increase transaction costs and distort incentives for market participants. Crucially, in the most severe cases, this affliction deters business actors from entering into the affected transactions altogether. The cries of scholars, judges, and practitioners lamenting these issues have grown ever louder; yet methodical, comprehensive solutions remain elusive. This Article endeavors to fill this void. First, it provides a comprehensive analysis of CLIs and the dynamics that give rise to coordination failures. Drawing from systems theory and jurisprudence, it then identifies the deficiencies of the most common approaches used to reconcile tensions between commercial law branches, before advancing the concepts of “legal coherence” and “unity of purpose” as the key to addressing such shortcomings. Finally, leveraging these insights, it formulates a normative blueprint, comprising a two-step method which aims to assist lawmakers, regulators, and courts in untangling the Gordian knot created by CLI coordination failures

Critical Exponents of the KPZ Equation via Multi-Surface Coding Numerical Simulations

We study the KPZ equation (in D = 2, 3 and 4 spatial dimensions) by using a RSOS discretization of the surface. We measure the critical exponents very precisely, and we show that the rational guess is not appropriate, and that 4D is not the upper critical dimension. We are also able to determine very precisely the exponent of the sub-leading scaling corrections, that turns out to be close to 1 in all cases. We introduce and use a {\em multi-surface coding} technique, that allow a gain of order 30 over usual numerical simulations.Comment: 10 pages, 8 eps figures (2 figures added). Published versio

Voter models on weighted networks

We study the dynamics of the voter and Moran processes running on top of complex network substrates where each edge has a weight depending on the degree of the nodes it connects. For each elementary dynamical step the first node is chosen at random and the second is selected with probability proportional to the weight of the connecting edge. We present a heterogeneous mean-field approach allowing to identify conservation laws and to calculate exit probabilities along with consensus times. In the specific case when the weight is given by the product of nodes' degree raised to a power theta, we derive a rich phase-diagram, with the consensus time exhibiting various scaling laws depending on theta and on the exponent of the degree distribution gamma. Numerical simulations give very good agreement for small values of |theta|. An additional analytical treatment (heterogeneous pair approximation) improves the agreement with numerics, but the theoretical understanding of the behavior in the limit of large |theta| remains an open challenge.Comment: 21 double-spaced pages, 6 figure

Emergence of polarization in a voter model with personalized information

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically tractable voter model with personalized information, in which an external field tends to align the agent opinion with the one she held more frequently in the past. Our model shows a surprisingly rich dynamics despite its simplicity. An analytical mean-field approach, confirmed by numerical simulations, allows us to build a phase diagram and to predict if and how consensus is reached. Remarkably, polarization can be avoided only for weak interaction with the personalized information and if the number of agents is below a threshold. We analytically compute this critical size, which depends on the interaction probability in a strongly non linear way.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure