Economía Aplicada I

Antitrust Laws consider cartel formation to be one of the most serious infractions. A cartel is an agreement among competitors of the same market, illegal and, therefore, secrete, generally complex and continued in the time, which gets for object to impose to the market similar conditions to those that a monopolist would establish (or at least to those of a dominant operator), with the consequent effects on the quantity and the price equilibrium, and carrying the reduction of the general well-being. Empirical literature, which has studied cartels formation and development, has underlined an approach of causality based on the profitability and the duration of cartels as factors of their success. As regards the determinants of profitability, its importance is related to the level of market concentration, the homogeneity of the product or the similarity in the competitor’s structure costs, besides more or less low rates of growth in the sales or falls of profits they appraise. As for t...

The idea and some evidence that university degrees no longer serve as an effective instrument of the social elevator is spreading. On the contrary, a scenario is gaining ground in which the social, political and economic elites are  perpetuated through a very select group of universities that clearly differ from the rest of the universities. Knowing if this is a phenomenon applicable to the Spanish university is the object of this study. For this, the employability of university degrees will be used as a relevant variable. This basic information comes from the 2010 database of university graduates of the Ministry of Education and tells us what their employability was in the following years. In this work, employability will be used in 2011, that is, one year after the university graduate leaves. From these data, employability, is classified into three levels, by quartiles, with high employability (AE) being the fourth quartile, low employability (BE) being the first quartile and leav...

It is widely accepted that the distribution of financial returns has heavy tails. In this context it is important to understand the frequency and importance of extreme events in financial markets. Extreme Value Theory is the appropriate framework for studying the tail ...

Mutual fund managers' ability to generate continuous positive value in excess to a relevant benchmark index is a crucial aspect for its evaluation. Focusing on the German market, in this research we apply several simulation methods that avoid statistical problems related to multiple hypothesis testing in traditional financial techniques. By doing so we obtain a threshold value that delimits what is considered the true null hypothesis. Our main result is that managers' action are of little significance with only a small part of them adding excess value to mutual funds they run.

Se suele pensar que las decisiones políticas serán inmediatamente adoptadas sin ningún costo y sin distorsionar el proceso de mercado. Un ejemplo de ello es la reciente Ley 29461, que regula el servicio de estacionamiento vehicular. En este artículo pretendemos mostrar como una correcta reflexión teórica sobre el funcionamiento del mercado pone en evidencia que la demanda por seguridad no es homogénea, y que su descubrimiento y satisfacción dependen de un delicado proceso de ensayo y error impulsado constantemente por la perspicacia empresarial. En base a ello, nos proponemos comentar algunos de los principales efectos no intencionados que la ley en cuestión generará, lo que demostraría no solo que la coacción institucional que ésta impone necesariamente distorsiona el proceso de mercado, sino también que se fundamenta en la errónea creencia de que todos demandamos lo mismo.