Partial Deregulation Research Articles

HmbC, a Protein of the HMG Family, Participates in the Regulation of Carotenoid Biosynthesis in Fusarium fujikuroi.

In the fungus Fusarium fujikuroi, carotenoid production is up-regulated by light and down-regulated by the CarS RING finger protein, which modulates the mRNA levels of carotenoid pathway genes (car genes). To identify new potential regulators of car genes, we used a biotin-mediated pull-down procedure to detect proteins capable of binding to their promoters. We focused our attention on one of the proteins found in the screening, belonging to the High-Mobility Group (HMG) family that was named HmbC. The deletion of the hmbC gene resulted in increased carotenoid production due to higher mRNA levels of car biosynthetic genes. In addition, the deletion resulted in reduced carS mRNA levels, which could also explain the partial deregulation of the carotenoid pathway. The mutants exhibited other phenotypic traits, such as alterations in development under certain stress conditions, or reduced sensitivity to cell wall degrading enzymes, revealed by less efficient protoplast formation, indicating that HmbC is also involved in other cellular processes. In conclusion, we identified a protein of the HMG family that participates in the regulation of carotenoid biosynthesis. This is probably achieved through an epigenetic mechanism related to chromatin structure, as is frequent in this class of proteins.

Labor market dualism and the heterogeneous wage gap for temporary employment: a multilevel study across 30 countries

Abstract This study investigates the hourly wage gap between 25- and 55-year-old temporary and permanent employees across 30 countries worldwide based on Luxembourg Income Study data from 2000 to 2019 supplemented by other survey data. Two-stage multilevel regressions reveal wage disadvantages for temporary workers, particularly for prime-age workers and those working in medium-/high-level occupations. There is no evidence that a stronger institutional dualization in terms of stronger employment protection for permanent contracts increases the wage gap. Instead partial deregulation matters: In countries where permanent workers are strongly protected, the wage gap is larger if the use of temporary contracts is deregulated. Moreover, results suggest that the larger the size of the temporary employment segment the larger the wage gap. Thus, our findings indicate that stronger institutional and structural labor market dualism amplifies labor market inequality in terms of wage gaps between temporary and permanent workers.

THE LEGAL STATUS OF SECURITY PERSONNEL. SELECTION OF THE MOST IMPORTANT ASPECTS

By introducing detailed regulations concerning the requirements to be met by a candidate for security personnel, the legislator determined the specificity of employment for this group of professionals. The basic and fundamental question in terms of rules of employment is whether access to this profession should be regulated, or whether deregulation would be the right solution? The Polish legislator decided on partial deregulation in terms of the aforementioned group of employees. This deregulation manifests itself in the fact that a person performing tasks and duties of a security guard is not required to possess a licence for that kind of professional activities, while maintaining the qualification requirements neccesary of certain activities named by the legislator. It appears that the main reason for limited deregulation was a desire to maintain the prestige of the profession, which could have been enhanced by provisions introducing the requirement to hold a license. However, it should be emphasized that another reason for restricting access to the profession is a matter of security. The dualism of regulations in this respect, however

Treatment provider perceptions of take-home methadone regulation before and during COVID-19

BackgroundThe loosening of U.S. methadone regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic expanded calls for methadone reform. This study examines professional perceptions of methadone take-home dose regulation before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand responses to varied methadone distribution policies. MethodsFifty-nine substance use disorder treatment professionals were interviewed between 2017 and 2020 in-person or over video call. An inductive iterative coding process was used to analyze the data. Constructivist grounded theory guided the collection and analysis of in-depth interviews. ResultsTreatment professionals expressed mixed views toward methadone take-home regulations. Participants justified regulation using several arguments: 1) patient care benefitting from supervision, 2) attributing improved patient safety to take-home regulation, 3) fearing liability for methadone-related harms, and 4) relying on buprenorphine as an “escape hatch” for patients who cannot manage MMT policies. Other professionals suggested partial deregulation, while others strongly opposed pre-pandemic take-home regulation, explaining such regulations impede medication access and hinder patient-centered care. Some professionals supported the COVID-19 policy changes and saw these as a test run for broader deregulation, while others framed the changes as temporary and cautiously applied deregulation to their services, at times revoking looser rules for patients they perceived as nonadherent. ConclusionTreatment professionals working in a range of modalities, including opioid treatment programs, expressed hesitation toward expanded take-home methadone access. While some participants also supported forms of deregulation, post-pandemic efforts to extend looser methadone distribution policies will have to address apprehensive professionals if such policy changes are to be meaningfully adopted in community services.

Entry Regulation and Competition. Evidence from retail and labor markets of pharmacists.

We examine a deregulation of German pharmacists to assess its effects on retail and labor markets. From 2004 onward, the reform allowed pharmacists to expand their single-store firms and to open or acquire up to three affliated stores. This partial deregulation of multi-store prohibition reduced the cost of firm expansion substantially and provides the basis for our analysis. We develop a theoretical model that suggests that the general limitation of the total store number per firm to four is excessively restrictive. Firms with high managerial effciency will open more stores per furm and have higher labor demand. Our empirical analysis uses very rich information from the administrative panel data on the universe of pharmacies from 2002 to 2009 and their affiliated stores matched with survey data, which provide additional information on the characteristics of expanding firms before and after the reform. We find a sharp immediate increase in entry rates, which continues to be more than five-fold of its pre-reform level after five years for expanding firms. Expanding firms can double revenues but not profits after three years. We show that the increase of the number of employees by 50% after five years and the higher overall employment in the local markets, which increased by 40%, can be attributed to the deregulation.

Pass-Through of Crude-oil Price Shocks to Consumer Prices in Nigeria: Pre and Post 2008 Global Financial Crisis

This study investigates the responses of consumer price index (CPI) to crude oil price shocks in the pre- and post-2008 global financial crisis. The study used the Structural Vector Autoregressive model to analyse monthly data from 2000M01 to 2019M12. The impulse response analysis showed that for pre and post-crisis periods, oil price shocks have a positive impact on CPI. This impact was an insignificant direct momentary increase in pre-crisis CPI before dissipating. Conversely, the impact on post crisis CPI response tends to be stable and long-lasting starting from the third month. The confidence bands for the post crisis CPI are large, indicating the long-lasting positive response in the CPI pose no significant threat to price stability in the long run horizon. In conclusion, CPI response varies in terms of intensity for pre and post crisis periods. In terms of level of significance, the effect of the shocks on CPI is transient and insignificant in both periods. The post crisis oil price shock is not a significant channel that created price instability in Nigeria after the crisis and this study recommend partial deregulation of energy price should be maintained. Establishing oil price –inflation pass-through, external shocks like financial crisis should be accounted for.

Dualization, stratification, liberalization, or what? An attempt to clarify the conceptual underpinnings of the dualization debate

AbstractDespite its many contributions, a central problem in the dualization debate is conceptual overstretching, as we will argue in this short comment. The term “dualization” has been used to describe different processes, which are often subsumed under this heading: the rise of atypical employment, increasing labor market stratification in general, or the partial deregulation of welfare state policies and institutions. This multitude of usages weakens the utility of dualization as a theoretical concept. In the next section, we briefly look at the evolution of the dualization debate on the micro level before we proceed to the macro level. In the concluding section, we speculate about the future of dualization as a concept for describing welfare state transformations.

Transitions from temporary employment to permanent employment among young adults: The role of labour law and education systems

Temporary work is common across Europe, especially among young people. Whether temporary employment is a transitory stage on the road to standard employment, and whether this varies depending on institutional contexts, is controversial. This article investigates variability in transition rates from temporary to permanent employment across Europe, and how this is related to employment protection legislation (EPL) and the vocational specificity of education systems. We utilize harmonized panel data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, covering 18 European countries and including 34,088 temporary workers aged 18–30. The results show that stricter EPL is associated with lower rates of transitions to permanent employment, while partial deregulation, with strict EPL for permanent contracts but weaker EPL for temporary contracts, is associated with higher transition rates. Vocationally specific education systems have higher transition rates, on average. Moreover, the role of EPL is conditional on the degree of vocational specificity.

Partial Deregulation and Competition: Effects on Risky Mortgage Origination

We exploit the preemption of national banks from state laws against predatory lending by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) as a quasi-experiment to study the effect of deregulation and its interaction with competition on the supply of complex mortgages. Following the preemption ruling, national banks significantly increased their origination of loans with prepayment penalties relative to national banks in states without anti-predatory-lending laws. We highlight a competition channel: in counties where OCC-regulated lenders had larger market shares, non-OCC-regulated lenders responded by increasing their supply of contracts with riskier features, such as deferred amortization, which were not restricted by the state anti-predatory-lending law. Non-OCC lenders were able to lure borrowers into these higher-margin contracts by increasing their appeal with teaser rates. This paper was accepted by Tyler Shumway, finance.

Covering the private parts: the (re-)nationalisation of housing finance

Is state power or control over financial markets really withering? Most narratives/analyses of financialisation see a growing penetration of private capital into everyday life that runs parallel to the increasing power of private financial capital over state policy. Yet housing finance – mortgages – sits at the centre of banking, and banking sits at the centre of the financial system. Large-scale mortgage markets only function where the state wraps around the banking system to remove maturity risks and to limit excessive credit creation. Partial deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s created a crisis that states resolved by re-nationalising much of mortgage finance. This renewed and overwhelming state presence suggests that financialisation is a state-driven story, and that private financial power, stability and instruments require state support above and beyond contract enforcement and prudential regulation.

The untapped impact: Struggles and subsequent condition of Metro Manila taxi industry amid operations of Transport Network Companies

In 2015, Transport Network Companies (TNC) such as Grab and Uber were introduced in the Philippines. With the worsening traffic management system in the country, TNC units use the power of an application to cater the commuting needs and demands of the Filipino commuting public following a car-sharing principle. Taking into account their startup success, the conventional taxi industry has been struggling. On this basis, this phenomenological study therefore involves an in-depth understanding of the struggles and subsequent condition of the taxi industry amid operations of TNCs. With the use of snowball and convenience sampling, the study involved semi-structured interviews with drivers of conventional taxi, commuters, and the Philippines' Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) members to obtain perspectives from the regulating body. Employing Billups’(2016) qualitative data analysis method, six themes emerged including Effects of Transport Network Companies, Protests and Complaints of Taxi Drivers, Consequent Actions of Taxi Drivers due to Income Reduction, Motivations for Taxi Driving Business Continuity, Perceptions of Taxi Drivers on TNVS, and Commuter Perspective on both Transport Services. Based on the findings, it is concluded that since the TNCs introduction, the conventional taxi industry has been bombarded of varied issues relating to the quality of transport service they provide in terms of convenience, comfort and ease, affordability, and accessibility. These findings then translate to the need of a partial deregulation that involves amendments on some memorandum circulars, and the pioneered Code of Ethics for the entire Philippine Taxi Industry so as to sustain and correspondingly compete with TNCs in relation to the demands of the market.

Market reactions to auditor switches under regulatory consent and market driven regimes

We examine market reactions to announcements of auditor switches by Australian-listed companies during the ‘regulatory consent’ period (2000–2011) under which auditor resignations require consent by the corporate regulator before taking effect at annual general meetings. Overall, we find no clear evidence of significant market responses to firms announcing auditor switches, consistent with a lack of information content or potential information leakage argument. However, examination of a more recent sample in the ‘partial deregulation’ period (2015–2017), whereby timing and consent provisions have been relaxed under a more market-driven regime, uncovers univariate evidence of market reactions directionally consistent with the audit quality interpretation. Overall, these results provide support for the regulator’s recent initiative to deregulate the auditor resignation process in Australia to become more disclosure driven as in other jurisdictions.

Antitrust and the 'Filed Rate' Doctrine: Deregulation and State Action

In its Keogh decision the Supreme Court held that although the Interstate Commerce Act did not exempt railroads from antitrust liability, a private plaintiff may not recover treble damages based on an allegedly monopolistic tariff rate filed with a federal agency. Keogh very likely grew out of Justice Brandeis's own zeal for regulation and his concern for the protection of small business — in this case, mainly shippers whom he felt were protected from discrimination by filed rates. The Supreme Court's Square D decision later conceded that Keogh may have been “unwise as a matter of policy,” but reaffirmed it on the ground that Congress had had ample opportunity to overturn it but had not done so. Under the doctrine consumer overcharge actions challenging a “filed” rate will be dismissed. The rate need not have been actively reviewed for accuracy or public interest considerations — indeed, it need not have been reviewed at all in any meaningful sense. The doctrine operates as a rule against collateral attack: once filed, a rate may not be collaterally attacked in the courts. However, an objector may be able to ask the regulatory agency to review a rate within its jurisdiction. Of course, that proceeding would not be in antitrust and would not provide treble damages and attorney's fees as an inducement. The doctrine becomes more complex and even less rational under partial deregulation. Today, for example, some rates must be “filed” with the overseeing agency although the agency has little power to adjust the rates except in extraordinary circumstances. Supreme Court analysis of filed rates has focused on rates filed with federal agencies. Several lower court decisions have extended the doctrine to rates filed with state regulators, generally without distinguishing the issues. Extending the doctrine to state agencies raises the troublesome issue that rate filings may serve to confer an effective antitrust immunity in situations where antitrust’s “state action” doctrine would not apply. The filed rate doctrine does not contain anything equivalent to the “authorization” or “active supervision” requirements that the state action doctrine compels. For example, a state provision may authorize an exclusionary tariff, giving no thought to competitive consequences. The state agency in turn may approve such requests with little or no evaluation. While the provision in question would not survive scrutiny under the state action doctrine, the tariff filing itself may have effective immunity under the filed rate doctrine. The Third Circuit’s McCray decision applied the filed rate doctrine to price fixing among title insurers, expressly rejecting the argument that application required the defendant’s to show “meaningful review” by the state regulator. The filed rate doctrine should not be applied as an additional bar to antitrust enforcement. Rather, application of the antitrust laws should rest, as it usually does, on the power of the agency to immunize conduct and the extent and nature of its supervision.

CAN TOTAL DEREGULATION BE A BETTER OPTION THAN PARTIAL DEREGULATION?

This paper examines entry deregulation in an industry where natural monopoly and potential competition are vertically related. We find that the upstream fixed cost plays an important role to affect the overall welfare comparison between total and partial deregulation. When the upstream fixed cost is sufficiently large, the number of downstream firms is limited in both situations; in other words, the duplication of downstream fixed costs is relatively irrelevant so that the double markup effect dominates. Consequently, the regulator can only replicate total deregulation to maximize social welfare in the event of partial deregulation. If it is the case, we suggest that total deregulation is superior to partial deregulation since the latter suffers more regulatory cost than that of the former.

The Regulatory Determinants of Railroad Safety

The dramatic improvement in railroad safety since the 1970s has been accompanied by a substantial increase in safety regulation and a substantial reduction in economic regulation after 1980. We assess the effects of both regulatory changes on railroad safety with the use of RegData: a new data set that was developed by one of the authors that measures the amount of regulation that is imposed by specific regulatory agencies on specific industries. We find that partial economic deregulation is associated with improved safety. Safety regulation was most closely associated with improved railroad safety during the period when economic regulation curtailed railroads’ incentives to operate safely.

Food security, welfare, and partial de-regulation of parastatals

Complete de-regulation of parastatals is often advocated as a desirable reform, although it is usually opposed by vested interests and by those who perceive that the de-regulated market can be dominated by a small number of private firms. In practice, however, reform and de-regulation of parastatals is typically partial in nature. We specify a model that allows us to consider the effects of partial reform and partial de-regulation on various metrics of food security. We show that how these metrics change depends on the market structure that defines the starting point as well as the market structure that emerges after de-regulation. In this second-best world, partial de-regulation does not necessarily enhance food security and we identify the determinants of that outcome. The assessment of the desirability of de-regulation is also contingent on the food security metric used.

The infrastructure of markets: From electric power to electronic data

Following the partial deregulation of the electricity industry in the 1990s, a number of electricity markets were instituted in the United States. As relatively new experiments, electricity markets open up possibilities for anthropologists to see markets as infrastructures of information. I argue that making markets in electricity has been a project in reorganizing information relationships, transferring the burden to organize information onto market actors, making them into data processors and the markets themselves into infrastructures of information. This article is part of a yearlong multilocale ethnographic project that seeks to understand how traders, analysts, engineers, and economists make markets in electricity in the United States. It draws on 5 months of participant observation at a market intelligence company that produces data and databases and sells price forecasts to traders in the deregulated markets of electricity. It maps the work practices of data cleaning and maintenance—a kind of labor I call “database work.”

An Economically Sustainable Urban Public Transport Framework: System Dynamics Modelling Approach to Reduce Public Transport Liberalisation Impact in Harare City

Public transportation plays a key role to socio-economic development of any nation. This service enhances people’s livelihood framework by facilitating mobility and accessibility to services. Moreover, there is clear global evidence that a well performing public transport is an important enabler of sustained economic prosperity. Rapid urbanization in developing countries has resulted in transport facilities and infrastructure failing to cope with demand resulting in congestion, movement delays, high travel costs, and construction of holding bays in order to decongest the city, which will contribute to an increased usage of non-renewable energy. This prompts implementation of non-comprehensive strategies such as partial deregulation of transportation systems that caused further deterioration in economic sustainability. An economically sustainable transport system advocates for mobility, resource, and operational efficiency. This research focuses on developing a bus investment conceptual framework of a public transport system that improves mobility, resource, and operational efficiency to aid in sustaining of public transportation system for an unforeseeable future. With this in mind, a Harare bus investment system has been modelled as a policy framework model to evaluate its economic sustainability. This will help develop a long-term economically sustainable public transportation and reduce the overall impact of the earlier liberalisation of the transportation sector

The Italian middle school in a deregulation era: modernity through path-dependency and global models

In the current context of intensified moves towards educational deregulation, the configuration of the Italian middle school and its relationship to education governance is an interesting case. Historically, it represents a unique example of the successful ‘decision-making' model of the welfarist era. Despite some internal constraints, at the end of the 1970s it was considered a progressive model of schooling for its time. At present, however, internal institutional processes and path-dependencies have rendered its comprehensiveness relatively formalised and weak. A key finding of this article is that ideas, such as the ‘two people’ theory, have played a crucial role in shaping actors' strategies and goals, while references to world models, in particular the English model, have mediated the reception of global policies. Cultural factors, such as the role played by families, are deeply linked to structural issues and inequalities. An ethnographic account depicts a welfarist institution whose internal processes and links to the wider society may be seen as an example of Italian modernity that ‘speaks for itself’. Fieldwork clarifies the role of the teachers in mediating a path-dependent and cultural reproduction pattern. I argue that partial deregulation is a major source of inequalities at the middle school level, engendered by both new and old mechanisms, which further intensifies a selective path in education. This analysis will show how global deregulation trends meet local and enduring path-dependencies.

Electricity Sectors in Transition: A Transaction Cost Approach to the Albanian Electricity Reform

The analysis of electricity sector reforms is essential if not a sine qua non because this sector represents an important pillar of a nation's economic development. Reforms per se are ongoing processes where experimental models are being applied around the world, where successful and unsuccessful stories are being written. Albania is among the countries in Southeastern Europe (SEE) undergoing reforms in the public sphere, and the electricity sector is a vivid example of the challenges and obstacles that such implementation faces in the developing world. Starting in the early 2000’s, Albanian electricity reform now faces a failed distribution privatization, inability to fully secure the electricity supply from the domestic generation, and distorted market standing between regulation and liberalization. There is therefore a need to analyze this process and to question whether the reforms are headed in the right direction. Using the rationale provided by Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), I argue that the current model of partial deregulation produces high transaction costs. TCE has gained prominence in recent years for explaining utility reforms, emphasizing the idea that, in some cases, full competition and market deregulation is not the first best option.