Some Determinants of Intermediate Local Governments' Spending Efficiency: The Case of French Départements

Efforts undertaken by France to restructure the allocation of governmental competencies increased the importance of subnational governments by transferring additional tasks. This paper analyzes the efficiency of public spending on an intermediate government level for a sample of 96 départements in metropolitan France in 2008. Spending efficiency is measured using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). Results indicate significant room for improvements and detect spending inefficiencies averaging between 10 and 22 percent, depending on model specification. To explain efficiency, a bootstrapped truncated regression, following Simar and Wilson (2007), is applied. The second-stage regression shows that efficiency is also determined by exogenous factors and identifies the distance to the national capital, inhabitants' income and the share of inhabitants of an age over 65 as significant determinants of efficiency.Intermediate government spending efficiency, nonparametric efficiency analysis, bootstrapped truncated regression

on the efficiency of team-based meritocracies

According to theory a pure meritocracy is efficient because individual members are competitively rewarded according to their individual contributions to society. However, purely individually based meritocracies seldom occur. We introduce a new model of social production called “team-based meritocracy” (TBM) in which individual members are rewarded based on their team membership. We demonstrate that as long as such team membership is both mobile and competitively based on contributions, individuals are able to tacitly coordinate a complex and counterintuitive asymmetric equilibrium that is close to Pareto-optimal, possibly indicating that such a group-based meritocracy could be a social structure to which humans respond with particular ease. Our findings are relevant to many contemporary societies in which rewards are at least in part determined via membership in organizations such as for example firms, and organizational membership is increasingly determined by contribution rather than privilege.social stratification, meritocracies, mechanism design, non-cooperative games, experiment, team production

Auctioning Greenhouse Gas Emissions Permits in Australia

The allocation of permits is an important design aspect of an emissions trading scheme. Traditionally, governments have favoured the free allocation of greenhouse gas permits based on individual historical emissions (‘grandfathering’) or industry benchmark data. Particularly in the EU, the free allocation of permits has proven complex and inefficient and the distributional implications are politically difficult to justify; auctioning emissions permits has therefore become more popular. The EU is now moving to auction more than 50 per cent of all permits in 2013, and in the US the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) has begun auctioning more than 90 per cent of total allowances. Another case in point is the Australian proposal for a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), which provides for auctioning a significant share of total permits. This paper discusses the proposed Australian CPRS’s auction design. A major difference to other emissions trading schemes is that the CPRS plans to auction multiple vintages of emissions permits simultaneously.Auctions, carbon auctions, greenhouse gas auctions

Communications Regulation in the Age of Digital Convergence : Legal and Economic Perspectives

This book brings together contributions of a distinguished panel of regulators as well as lawyers and economists from both academia and industry to present their insights on the digital convergence phenomenon in the telecommunications industry. The contributions cover a great deal of the relevant topics in communications regulation, such as technological and network neutrality, distribution of the digital dividend, and incentives for investment and innovation

Lokale Arbeitsmärkte für ausländische Arbeitskräfte in Deutschland : berufliche Veränderungsprozesse am Beispiel dreier idealtypischer Arbeitsmarktregionen (Local labour markets for foreign workers in Germany : occupational processes of change, taking as an example three ideal-typical labour market regions)

"This article examines the extent to which the structure of foreign workers in three different types of local labour market adapted to the respective structure of indigenous workers between 1980 and 1990. The Ruhr district is examined as an example of a traditional industrial region, Frankfurt as an example of a service region and Stuttgart as an example of 'high-tech production' and quality production in engineering. The report takes as a starting point the thesis that the patterns of employment of the foreign workers is gradually adapting to the demand pattern of the labour markets. Corresponding alignment processes are expected to take place more quickly in regions with a low rate of unemployment. Accordingly foreigners should be employed as skilled workers more often in Stuttgart than in the Ruhr district and more foreigners should be found in the services sector in Frankfurt. The analyses of the IAB employment sample, however, do not confirm these assumptions overall. Although a higher proportion of foreign workers can be found in services in the Frankfurt region, in Stuttgart foreign workers are employed disproportionately often as unskilled or semi-skilled workers, and in the Ruhr district on the other hand foreign workers can be found increasingly in skilled worker positions. In the Ruhr district less favourable working conditions, lower wages and less secure employment prospects even in qualified employment fields have led to them being unattractive for indigenous workers. The gaps arising in these employment fields have been filled by foreign workers." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))ausländische Arbeitnehmer - Struktur, Beschäftigtenstatistik, Beschäftigtenstruktur, Stellung im Beruf, regionale Mobilität, regionaler Arbeitsmarkt, sektorale Verteilung, berufliche Mobilität, Ruhrgebiet, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Frankfurt/Main, Hessen, Stuttgart, Baden-Württemberg, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

Mechanised Pine Thinning Harvesting Simulation: Productivity and Cost Improvements as a Result of Changes in Planting Geometry

Traditionally, the removal of entire rows at regular intervals through thinning compartments has been applied to facilitate access to mechanised timber harvesting operations in South Africa. These row thinnings have essentially involved the removal of every 7th row in a standard 2.7×2.7 m planting regime, resulting in a machine trail width of 5.4 m and a theoretical distance to the furthest tree of 8.1 m. A simulation study, based on alternative planting geometries, investigated the effect on harvesting in terms of harvesting productivity, system costs and impact on stand structure. Compartments of different planting geometries ranging from 2.7×2.7 m to 2.5×2.9 m, 2.4×3 m and 2.3×3.1 m at two thinning reference ages were simulator generated. These compartments were then simulator thinned and harvested in the simulation. Results showed that the boom reach of the harvester is optimised by extending row removal from the 7th to the 9th row. At the same time, machine trail length per hectare was reduced by 20%. This creates more productive area for tree growth, potentially reduced residual stand impacts, and increases the proportion of selectively harvested trees per hectare. The increased distance between row thinning removals enhanced the potential volume harvested trail length (m3/m) and in turn led up to a 8% increase in harvesting productivity, up to a 21% increase in forwarding productivity and a reduction in total costs of up to 7% when changing planting geometry from 2.7×2.7 m to 2.3×3.1 m and 2.4×3.0 m, for first and second thinning

Competition effects in an afrotemperate forest

Background Information about competition responses is mainly available for monospecific stands or mixed stands with a small number of species. Studies on complex multi-species and highly structured forest ecosystems are scarce. Accordingly, the objective of this study was to quantify competition effects and analyse competition responses in a species-diverse afrotemperate forest in South Africa, based on an observational study with mapped tree positions and long-term diameter increment records. Methods The sensitivity to competition was analysed for individual species and involved the calculation of the slope of the linear relation between the value of a competition index (CI) and diameter growth as a measure of sensitivity. In a next step different competition indices were combined and tree diameters were grouped in three classes as surrogates for canopy status and ontogenetic stage. Results Five competition indices were found to be effective in showing sensitivity to competition for a number of canopy and sub-canopy species. Significant linear regressions were fitted for 18 of a total of 25 species. Species reactions varied significantly in their sensitivity to the different CIs. The indices were classified as belonging to two groups, those that responded more to local crowding and those that are more sensitive to overtopping, which revealed species-specific sensitivities to both factors. The analysis based on diameter classes revealed that species clearly changed their sensitivity to crowding or overtopping depending on diameter. Canopy and sub-canopy species showed distinct differences in their reactions. Conclusions The application of multiple CIs brought novel insights relating to the dynamics of afrotemperate forests. The response patterns to different competition indices that focus on crowding and overtopping are varied and tree diameter dependent, indicating that oversimplified assumptions are not warranted in the interpretation of CI- growth relations

Diffusing proteins on a fluctuating membrane: Analytical theory and simulations

Using analytical calculations and computer simulations we consider both the lateral diffusion of a membrane protein and the fluctuation spectrum of the membrane in which the protein is embedded. The membrane protein interacts with the membrane shape through its spontaneous curvature and bending rigidity. The lateral motion of the protein may be viewed as diffusion in an effective potential, hence, the effective mobility is always reduced compared to the case of free diffusion. Using a rigorous path-integral approach we derive an analytical expression for the effective diffusion coefficient for small ratios of temperature and bending rigidity, which is the biologically relevant limit. Simulations show very good quantitative agreement with our analytical result. The analysis of the correlation functions contributing to the diffusion coefficient shows that the correlations between the stochastic force of the protein and the response in the membrane shape are responsible for the reduction. Our quantitative analysis of the membrane height correlation spectrum shows an influence of the protein-membrane interaction causing a distinctly altered wave-vector dependence compared to a free membrane. Furthermore, the time correlations exhibit the two relevant timescales of the system: that of membrane fluctuations and that of lateral protein diffusion with the latter typically much longer than the former. We argue that the analysis of the long-time decay of membrane height correlations can thus provide a new means to determine the effective diffusion coefficient of proteins in the membrane.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Search-based Entity Disambiguation with Document-Centric Knowledge Bases

Entity disambiguation is the task of mapping ambiguous terms in natural-language text to its entities in a knowledge base. One possibility to describe these entities within a knowledge base is via entity-annotated documents (document-centric knowledge base). It has been shown that entity disambiguation with search-based algorithms that use document-centric knowledge bases perform well on the biomedical domain. In this context, the question remains how the quantity of annotated entities within documents and the document count used for entity classification influence disambiguation results. Another open question is whether disambiguation results hold true on more general knowledge data sets (e.g. Wikipedia). In our work we implement a search-based, document-centric disambiguation system and explicitly evaluate the mentioned issues on the biomedical data set CALBC and general knowledge data set Wikipedia, respectively. We show that the number of documents used for classification and the amount of annotations within these documents must be well-matched to attain the best result. Additionally, we reveal that disambiguation accuracy is poor on Wikipedia. We show that disambiguation results significantly improve when using shorter but more documents (e.g. Wikipedia paragraphs). Our results indicate that search-based, document-centric disambiguation systems must be carefully adapted with reference to the underlying domain and availability of user dat

Environmental factors in frontier estimation - A Monte Carlo analysis

We compare three recently developed frontier estimators, namely the conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005; 2007b), the latent class SFA (Greene, 2005; Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004), and the StoNEZD approach (Johnson and Kuosmanen, 2011) by means of Monte Carlo simulation. We focus on their ability to identify production frontiers and efficiency rankings in the presence of environmental factors. Our simulations match features of real life datasets and cover a wide range of scenarios with variations in sample size, distribution of noise and inefficiency, as well as in distributions, intensity, and number of environmental variables. Our results provide insight in the finite sample properties of the estimators, while also identifying estimator-specific characteristics. Overall, the latent class approach is found to perform best, although in many cases StoNEZD shows a similar performance. Performance of cDEA is most often inferior