Price Regulation and Public Service Obligations under International Arbitrage

National regulation generates price differentials between countries stimulating arbitrage by international distributors. Harmed manufacturers counteract using vertical price-squeeze or non-price discrimination. We show that: (i) either under regulatory commitment or discretion, there are non-linear relationships between technology/market conditions and the first-movers pricing strategy; (ii) public service obligations on distributors allow regulators to manipulate parallel exports so as to improve national welfare; (iii) to prevent sabotage, regulation should provide manufacturers with adequate countervailing incentives; (iv) coordinating national agencies alleviates negative regulatory and market externalities. Therefore, static and dynamic efficiency concerns may arise within a regional exhaustion regime of intellectual property rights.We are grateful to the Editor Michael A. Crew, an anonymous referee, and Luigi Buzzacchi for valuable comments and suggestions. We have benefited from financial support granted by MIUR-FIRB Project MAIS.     

Independent courts and administrative agencies: an empirical analysis of the states

This article explores the hypothesis that state administrativeagencies spend more time and effort attempting to protect theiractions from judicial review in states with more independentappointed courts (as opposed to less independent elected courts).This is because more independent courts are (by definition)less influenced by the political/electoral forces that underlieagency - policymaking - as rational actors, agencies may thereforebe expected to recognize the degree of judicial independenceand respond to it. Three state agencies subject to substantialjudicial review in the 1970s are examined: utility commissions,insurance commissions, and the public education bureaucracy.Controlling for relevant political factors, each is found tohave significantly larger staffing for a given regulatory workloadin states with more independent appointed courts, consistentwith the hypothesis.     

发达国家的电信管制机构及其启示

电信管制机构改革直接影响管制效率,从而影响电信产业的改革与发展。本文探讨了发达国家电信管制机构的主要模式,分析了电信管制机构的发展趋势,提出了我国电信管制机构设置与运行中值得借鉴的经验和启示。     

State Intervention and the Role of History - state and private actors in Swedish network industries

Three main theoretical positions towards state intervention and regulation are discussed in relation to the case of Swedish infrastructure. The positive, the normative, and the political transaction cost approaches are examined in relation to the historic development of regulatory systems in civil aviation, railroads, and telecommunications. The authors show that governance regimes have historical roots, and develop differently due to policies implemented by state agencies. Three points are illuminated with a view to the interaction between state and private actors in the transport and communication sector. First, the role and function of the state agencies as well as the political system itself point to the need for a more refined analysis of state action. The active role of state agencies is also discussed emphasizing the difference between political decisions and the implementation of such decisions. Second, the role of a historical perspective is discussed, arguing that it makes possible a better understanding of the reasons behind choices of particular strategies. Finally, there might be good reason to expect the state either to act solely as a rent seeker, or as a promoter of optimal solutions.     

Interpellative Sociology of Pharmaceuticals: Problems and Challenges for Innovation and Regulation in the 21st Century

This paper develops a framework with which to interrogate how well pharmaceutical innovation and regulation are performing to produce drugs that improve health. That framework comprises five key dimensions: therapeutic advance of drug product innovations; safety standards in drug testing; use of surrogate measures of clinical benefit; independence of regulatory agencies; and public access to regulatory science. It is concluded that: more demanding regulatory intervention is required in order to increase the proportion of drug innovation that actually offers therapeutic benefits over existing products; drug regulatory agencies need much greater independence from the pharmaceutical industry; the erosion of safety standards since 1990 needs to be reversed; accelerated approvals of drugs based on surrogate, rather than clinical endpoints, require much greater critical attention; and much more extensive public access to regulatory science is required in order for regulatory decision-making to be thoroughly accountable to the public and the wider scientific community.     

Delegation and the Regulation of Risk

Political principals typically use low-cost “fire-alarm” signals transmitted by the media, interest groups, and disaffected constituents to monitor the activities of regulatory agencies. We argue that regulatory decision making is biased and inconsistent if the instruments of political oversight are simple and the information flows to the principal are coarse relative to the complexity of the regulatory environment.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D72, L51.     

RESTORING PREDICTABILITY TO MERGER GUIDELINE ANALYSIS

Two recent developments reduce predictability and accountability in merger analysis. First, the 1984 Merger Guidelines adopt a multifactor method of analysis that focuses upon market structure, other market factors, financial trends, and efficiencies. Little guidance is given concerning the relative importance of these factors or how they will be measured and balanced. Second, current enforcement agencies appear to take a “regulatory” approach to merger enforcement. They issue “no-action” decisions in 90–95 percent of the mergers reviewed and reach “fix-it-first” consent settlements before complaints are filed in most remaining cases. These developments provide mixed blessings. Enforcement agencies gain flexibility and discretion. However, the business community suffers a reduction in predictability in merger analysis, which makes planning more difficult. Congress loses ability to carry out its oversight responsibilities, and the public's understanding of the government's policies is impaired. Systematic, regular reports of information used by the government analyzing significant “second-request” mergers should replace the present system of providing either no information or, at best, only selected information through ad hoc press releases and official speeches. Reporting on these transactions would not be burdensome, because their number is relatively small and the information already has been produced by the investigating enforcement agency. This information could easily be incorporated into the annual Hart-Scott-Rodino Act reports. For each of these mergers, the information reported should include the government's views concerning the relevant market and the degree of concentration in that market. It also should specify the type and magnitude of other market factors, efficiencies, and/or defenses that might have played a role in reaching a decision not to prosecute the merger or a fix-it-first settlement. This information could be provided without infringing on confidentiality.     

Discretionary enforcement and strategic interactions between enforcement agencies and firms: a theoretical and laboratory investigation

This paper presents a game theoretic morphological analysis of the strategic interactions between environmental enforcement authorities and polluting firms. The models explore the role of discretion that such authorities enjoy, either in deciding how to pursue environmental violations (investigative and prosecutorial discretion) or in judging them (judicial discretion). The purpose is to identify both the optimal firms’ behaviour in terms of compliance, and the enforcement authorities’ optimal strategies in terms of enforcement actions to undertake. Consistent with the setting of the game theoretic models, the role of the enforcement agencies in deterring firms from polluting is, then, empirically tested by means of laboratory experiments. Laboratory evidence on compliance behaviour of firms when faced with enforcement conditions predicted by the theoretical models set up is discussed for the different experimental treatments performed. Overall, we suggest that making environmental enforcement less predictable for the firms, and thus creating a degree of uncertainty for the violators, can actually encourage deterrence and, thus, improve compliance. Thus, a partly unpredictable enforcement strategy may generate more compliance than an environmental policy that is known with certainty in advance.     

Exploring the impact of economic integration agreements through extreme bounds analysis

This article provides an empirical strategy guided by the data to estimate the effects of Economic Integration Agreements (EIAs) on trade flows and their transitional dynamics. The strategy uses Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) to guide the choice of lags and leads in the effects without researchers' discretion involved. We show that arbitrarily selected year intervals and starting year can result in non-robust estimates of transitional dynamics of the effects of EIAs on trade flows. The empirical strategy follows two steps: EBA first sifts lags and leads of EIAs robustly related to trade flows from candidates, then these are included in the gravity equation to estimate the effects of EIAs on trade. We find that various lags and leads are robustly and positively related to trade flows, and the lag and lead structure depends on the level of integration. Our results show that EIAs have a long-term effect of 63% on trade flows. Under the richer lag and lead structure, deep-integration agreements beyond the level of free trade agreements have a much higher impact on trade flows than free trade agreements do (132% vs 31%). The estimates of effects of EIAs obtained from EBA-based estimation have a smaller contemporaneous effect and larger phased-in effects compared to previous studies relying on the subjective choices of year intervals while similar results are observed with the decomposed EIAs.     

TRACING PRICE CHANGES THROUGH STAGES OF PRODUCTION: AUSTRALIA, 1968 TO 19771

This study is concerned with an effort to analyze changes in costs and prices in the Australian economy by tracing the effects of changes in wages and import prices through the stages of production, using a disaggregated input-output model with lags. The object of constructing the model was to improve, by introducing lags, the accuracy of predictions of the effect of cost changes on prices, and to show the lag structures. Data problems encountered are discussed, and the need for integration of price statistics to enhance their usefulness for analyses such as this is emphasized. Concepts and sources of data are discussed in some detail in an appendix.     

电信广电应分业规制还是统一规制——基于跨国数据的实证研究

针对三网融合进程中规制机构应采取分业规制还是统一规制的问题,利用国际电联的规制机构问卷调查数据,建立规制机构设置模式的Probit选择模型。实证结果表明,产业技术经济特征和国家制度环境是影响规制体制设计的关键因素,同时经济和社会因素也对此有重要影响,这验证了规制制度设计需满足技术理性和制度理性的基本原则。基于基准比较方法得出的选择概率预测结果,得到我国应该对电信与广电业实施统一规制的政策结论。     

Households’ Willingness to Pay for Water Service Attributes

Water consumption and disposal are often taken for granted as essential services with required levels of service quality, yet little is known about how much consumers are willing to pay for specific service levels. As customers in many countries face changing levels of water availability (especially shortages linked possibly to climate change and limited catchment capacity), the need to assess the value (and hence benefit) to society of varying service levels and prices in an effort to secure the provision of and disposal of water has risen on public agendas. In an attempt to establish how much customers are willing to pay for specific levels of service, we use a series of stated choice experiments and mixed logit models to establish the willingness to pay to avoid interruptions in water service and overflows of wastewater, differentiated by the frequency, timing and duration of these events. The empirical evidence is an important input into the regulatory process for establishing service levels and tariffs, as well as useful planning information for agencies charged with finding cost effective ways of delivering services at prices that customers deem to be value for money.     

Making Sense of Safeguards

The ASG was negotiated in response to the use of extralegal measures and inappropriate use of legal measures to restrict imports. More effective disciplines regarding implementation of Article XIX was recognized as an important unilateralism deterrent in policy implementation. These disciplines are subjective and objective. Disciplines that are quantifiable are more effective. Utilizing both balances rules and discretion. A home and foreign producer are used to assess SG in the context of adverse shocks. This framework entails a novel feature appropriate to SG. Firms are permitted to select optimal levels of downward flexibility in output in response to a possible shock. The extent of adjustment is directly related to the cost incurred. Firms choose flexibility in stage one and output in stage two. Without SG, firms will not insulate themselves completely from the conditional expectation of an adverse shock. Introducing the ASG increases the relative adjustment burden for the foreign firm.     

The ‘Twin Peaks’ model of post-crisis banking supervision

This article examines the effectiveness of the ‘Twin Peaks’ supervision model, in which consumer protection and prudential regulation are carried out by two separate regulatory agencies. We use a dataset from 143 countries for the period of 2004–2011 to find that the Twin Peaks model is associated with a higher quality of banking supervision in terms of the efficiency and stability of financial institutions.     

规制权力配置、下游垄断与中国电力产业的接入歧视-理论分析与初步的实证检验

本文构建了一个"上游竞争、下游垄断"结构下接入歧视的简化模型,分析了部分纵向一体化的买方垄断者对独立发电企业实施接入价格和数量歧视的动机和条件。在揭示歧视行为与规制重建滞后之间的特征性事实的基础上,我们利用500多家发电企业和区域电网的相关数据,从统计描述和回归分析两个方面对理论假设进行了初步的检验,结果证明了两类接入歧视,特别是价格歧视的存在。     

Resourcing evidence-based practice in ambulatory care nursing

Ambulatory care nurses may benefit from not only developing knowledge and skills in evidence-based practice (EBP), but also in identifying and providing sufficient resources for EBP to be implemented and sustained. Organizations should select one of the five conceptual models available in the literature to guide development and implementation of EBP. Costs of implementing and sustaining EBP include expert consultation, facilitators, staff time, informatician time, and data management. Benefits of EBP include improvements in patient care quality and safety, as well as regulatory compliance and risk management. Resources supporting EBP include professional literature available via the Internet and databases or agencies, such as ARHQ, professional organizations, and funding through grants.     

The determinants of federal and state enforcement of workplace safety regulations: OSHA inspections 1990–2010

We explore the determinants of inspection outcomes across 1.6 million Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) audits from 1990 through 2010. We find that discretion in enforcement differs in state and federally conducted inspections. State agencies are more sensitive to local economic conditions, finding fewer standard violations and fewer serious violations as unemployment increases. Larger companies receive greater lenience in multiple dimensions. Inspector issued fines and final fines, after negotiated reductions, are both smaller during Republican presidencies. Quantile regression analysis reveals that Presidential and Congressional party affiliations have their greatest impact on the largest negotiated reductions in fines.     

The macroeconomic effects of fiscal rules in the US states

Fiscal policy restrictions are often criticized for limiting the ability of governments to react to business cycle fluctuations and, consequently, the adoption of quantitative restrictions is viewed as inevitably leading to increased macroeconomic volatility. In this paper, we use data from 48 US states to investigate how budget rules affect fiscal policy outcomes. Our key findings are that (1) strict budgetary restrictions lead to lower policy volatility (i.e. less aggressive use of discretion in conducting fiscal policy) and (2) fiscal restrictions reduce the responsiveness of fiscal policy to output shocks. These two results should have opposite effects on output volatility. While less discretion should reduce volatility, less responsiveness of fiscal policy might amplify business cycles. We provide empirical support for the first effect: restrictions, by reducing discretion in fiscal policy, can reduce macroeconomic volatility.