Report on parallel proceedings

Report of a Working Group considering the problems that arise from parallel proceedings, particularly in City fraud cases, within the national jurisdiction and ways in which those problems could be addressed. The Working Group was chaired by George Staple QC

Beyond Regulation

The ‘standard model’ of electricity reform has been refined in many countries but not extended to others. Government is supplanting the role of regulation. Revised calculations suggest that the benefits of UK electricity privatisation were higher than previously estimated and more widely shared with consumers. Other calculations suggest that generation market power in the US is less than previously estimated by Lerner index calculations. Unduly tight price controls explain why there has been less customer switching in some residential electricity markets. There has been significant development of fixed price contracts in Nordic markets, posing questions for regulation in the absence of retail competition. There are alternatives to regulation of network monopolies. In Australia regulated interconnectors have been less economic than merchant interconnectors. In Argentina arrangements for users to determine transmission expansions have worked well. In Florida negotiated settlements have secured a better deal for customers than regulation

Functional Characteristics of Gene Expression Motifs with Single and Dual Strategies of Regulation

Transcriptional regulation by transcription factors and post-transcriptional regulation by microRNAs constitute two major modes of regulation of gene expression. While gene expression motifs incorporating solely transcriptional regulation are well investigated, the dynamics of motifs with dual strategies of regulation, i.e., both transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation, have not been studied as extensively. In this paper, we probe the dynamics of a four-gene motif with dual strategies of regulation of gene expression. Some of the functional characteristics are compared with those of a two-gene motif, the genetic toggle, employing only transcriptional regulation. Both the motifs define positive feedback loops with the potential for bistability and hysteresis. The four-gene motif, contrary to the genetic toggle, is found to exhibit bistability even in the absence of cooperativity in the regulation of gene expression. The four-gene motif further exhibits a novel dynamical feature in which two regions of monostability with linear threshold response are separated by a region of bistability with digital response. Using the linear noise approximation (LNA), we further show that the coefficient of variation (a measure of noise), associated with the protein levels in the steady state, has a lower magnitude in the case of the four-gene motif as compared to the case of the genetic toggle. We next compare transcriptional with post-transcriptional regulation from an information theoretic perspective. We focus on two gene expression motifs, Motif 1 with transcriptional regulation and Motif 2 with post-transcriptional regulation. We show that amongst the two motifs, Motif 2 has a greater capacity for information transmission for an extended range of parameter values

Regulation of NGN: Structural Separation, Access Regulation, or No Regulation at All?

Since the introduction of Next Generation Networks (NGNs) by telecommunication network operators, national regulators have begun to adapt their access regulation regimes to the new technological conditions. The regulatory reactions gravitate towards three distinct regulatory trajectories: unregulated competition, access regulation, and structural separation. We first analyze the extent of market power in access Networks in NGNs from a technological perspective. Second, we use case studies to identify patterns between technological and market conditions and regulators' reactions in selected countries. We find that market power in the access network is likely to prevail. Regulatory reactions differ with the extent of infrastructure competition and the regulators position in the trade-off between promoting investment and protecting competition.Next Generation Network, deregulation, access regulation, structural separation

Arrests as Regulation

For some arrested individuals, the most important consequences of their arrest arise outside the criminal justice system. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in conviction—can lead to a range of consequences, including deportation, eviction, license suspension, custody disruption, or adverse employment actions. But even as courts, scholars, and others have drawn needed attention to the civil consequences of criminal convictions, they have paid relatively little attention to the consequences of arrests in their own right. This article aims to fill that gap by providing an account of how arrests are systemically used outside the criminal justice system. Noncriminal justice actors who rely on arrests—such as immigration enforcement officials, public housing authorities, employers and licensing authorities, child protective service providers, among others—routinely receive and use arrest information for their own objectives. They do so not because arrests are the best regulatory tools, but because they regard arrests as proxies for information they value, and because arrests are often easy and inexpensive to access. But when noncriminal justice actors rely on arrests, they set off a complicated and poorly understood web of interactions with the criminal justice system. Regulatory bodies and others that make decisions based on arrests can coordinate and pool resources with prosecutors and police officers, achieving a level of enforcement that neither could achieve alone, or they can make decisions that undermine important aspects of the criminal justice process. This article maps different regulatory interactions based on arrests, and illustrates the need for greater oversight over how arrests are used and disseminated outside the criminal justice system

The Growing Importance of Risk in Financial Regulation

This paper traces the developments that have contributed to the importance of risk in regulation. Not only does it consider theories associated with risk, it also discusses explanations as to why risk has become so important within regulatory and governmental circles. Two forms of risk regulation, namely risk based regulation and meta regulation are considered. As well as considering the application of both in jurisdictions such as the UK, the paper places greater focus in discussing the importance of meta regulation in jurisdictions such as Germany, Italy and the US. The preference for meta regulation is based on the premises, not only of the advantages considered in this paper but also on the application of Basel 11 in several jurisdictions. Whilst meta regulation also has its disadvantages, the impact of risk based regulation on the use of external auditors plays a part in the preference for meta regulation