Search

El presente trabajo de investigación tiene como objeto delimitar la responsabilidad penal en el ámbito médico-sanitario abordando la modalidad imprudente (en la que se subsumen la gran mayoría de las conductas en esta actividad) sin desmerecer el tipo doloso desde el cual se analiza la denegación de asistencia sanitaria (artículo 196 del Código penal español). Con este propósito, el trabajo de investigación que se presenta se halla dividido en cuatro capítulos, con los que se intenta dar respuesta a cuestiones concretasen procura de conseguir una imputación jurídico-penal más eficiente acorde con los principios básicos de un Derecho Penal propio de un Estado de Derecho. Así las cosas, en el Capítulo I, el trabajo de investigación destaca las características más relevantes del tipo imprudente acotando el deber de cuidado y estableciendo en qué cosiste la lex artis médica como figura trascendente en la determinación de la responsabilidad penal. Posteriormente, el Capítulo II, establece los parámetros para delimitar la responsabilidad penal médico-sanitaria en el trabajo en equipo. Para tal cometido se hace uso del principio de división funcional de trabajo, principio de confianza y del principio de prohibición de regreso como subinstitutos de la imputación objetiva, aplicándolos a casos prácticos en el quehacer médicosanitario..., The purpose of this research work is to set the limits of criminal liability in the medical-healthcare field by addressing the reckless modality (the one with more cases) without forgetting crimes doing with intent, where the denial of health care is analyzed (article 196 of the Spanish Criminal Code). To this end, this research has four chapters, which attempt to answer specific questions that seek to achieve a more efficient legal-penal imputation under the basic principles of Criminal Law that are usual in a State under the Rule of Law. In Chapter I, this research highlights the most relevant characteristics of recklessness, delimiting the duty of care and establishing the concept of medical lex artis as a fundamental figure in the determination of criminal liability. Subsequently, Chapter II establishes parameters to set limits for the liability on the medical-health crimes made in teamwork. For this purpose, the principles of division of work, trust, and prohibition of return are sub-institutes of objective imputation, applying them to practical cases in medical-health work. Chapter III examines the authorship and reckless participation in the medical-health field, according to the level of contribution of each participant in the result. This topic is highly debated for scholars and has scarce development in case law. This chapter concludes with an extensive concept of authorship based on the theory of the objective and positive determination of the conduct...

El objetivo de este trabajo es entender los principales factores que explican el por qué las casas comerciales en Chile proveen, extensivamente, servicios financieros a sus clientes, y comparar esta situación, en términos generales, con lo que sucede en otros países. Nuestra impresión es que el éxito de las casas comerciales está basado en una suma de factores, entre otros, una fiscalización asimétrica entre la banca y casas comerciales, baja bancarización y buena gestión de negocios. Tampoco se puede descartar, tal como se explica con modelo de competencia oligopolística, que los mismos bancos hayan optado en los años iniciales, por razones de competencia, a no extender sus servicios de crédito a segmentos de menores ingresos facilitando así una más rápida expansión del negocio financiero de las casas comerciales. Es imposible, a partir de los datos disponibles, distinguir el peso individual de cada uno de los distintos factores ya que en general actúan en forma conjunta.

As with other commodity markets, markets for trading pollution permits have not been immune to market power concerns. In this paper, I survey the existing literature on market power in permit trading but also contribute with some new results and ideas. I start the survey with Hahn’s (1984) dominant-firm (static) model that I then extend to the case in which there are two or more strategic firms that may also strategically interact in the output market, to the case in which current permits can be stored for future use (as in most existing and proposed market designs), to the possibility of collusive behavior, and to the case in which permits are auctioned off instead of allocated for free to firms. I finish the paper with a review of empirical evidence on market power, if any, with particular attention to the U.S. sulfur market and the Southern California NOx market., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

This paper extends Weitzman's (1974) "Prices vs. Quantities" to allow for incomplete enforcement. Whether the regulator uses prices (e.g., taxes) or quantities (e.g., tradeable quotas), a first-best design is always inefficient in the presence of incomplete enforcement. A second-best design that incorporates incomplete enforcement, and where cost and benefit curves are known with certainty, can be implemented equally well with either instrument. If benefit and cost curves are uncertain, however, a quantity instrument performs better than a price instrument. In fact, if the slopes of the marginal cost and marginal benefit curves are equal, quantities are always preferred over prices. Results are consistent to alternative enforcement policies., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

I study the optimal design of marketable permit systems to regulate various pollutants (e.g. air pollution in urban areas) when the regulator lives in a real world of imperfect information and incomplete enforcement. I show that the regulator should have pollution markets integrated through optimal exchange rates when the marginal abatement cost curves in the different markets are steeper than the marginal benefit curves; otherwise he should keep markets separated. I also find that incomplete enforcement reduces the advantage of market integration., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

Despite growing interest in the use of emissions trading for pollution control, empirical evidence for this regulatory instrument has been confined to a few experiences in the United States. This paper broadens the empirical base by examining the "Emission-Offsets Trading Program" that has been in place since 1992 to control airborne particulate emissions in Santiago, Chile. While the program is doing well from an environmental perspective, due in part to the price-based introduction of natural gas, the market is performing poorly because of high transaction costs, uncertainty, and poor enforcement. However, the scarcity rents created by allocating grandfathered emission rights to incumbents have proved to be a very effective tool for completing the emissions inventory., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

A tradeable permits market is said to be efficient when all affected firms trade permits until their marginal costs equal the market price. Detailed firm-level data are generally required to perform such an efficiency test, yet such information is rarely available. If firms face a declining target, however, and are allowed to bank permits, as has occured recently, aggregated data such as the evolution of the permits bank is sufficient to test for either less than optimal market participation or the exercise of market power. An application to the U.S. sulfur dioxide emission permits market is provided., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the efficiency of allowance banking (i.e., abating more in early periods in order to abate less in later periods) in the nationwide market for sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances that was created by the U.S. Acid Rain Program. We develop a model of efficient banking, select appropriate parameter values, and evaluate the efficiency of observed temporal pattern of abatement based on aggregate data from the first eight years of the Acid Rain Program. Contrary to the general opinion that banking in this program has been excessive, we find that it has been reasonably efficient. We also show that this optimal banking program is robust to the errors in expectation that characterized the early years of this program; however, this property is due to design features that are unique to the U.S. Acid Rain Program., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

We consider an infinitely-repeated oligopoly in which at each period firms not only serve the spot market by either competing in prices or quantities but also have the opportunity to trade forward contracts. Contrary to the pro-competitive results of finite-horizon models, we find that the possibility of forward trading allows firms to sustain collusive profits that otherwise would not be possible. The result holds both for price and quantity competition and follows because (collusive) contracting of future sales is more effective in deterring deviations from the collusive plan than in inducing the previously identified pro-competitive effects.

I study the design of environmental policies for a regulator that has incomplete information on firms' emissions and costs of production and abatement (e.g., air pollution in cities with numerous small polluting sources). Because of incomplete information on emissions, there is no policy that can implement the first-best. Since the regulator can observe firms' abatement technologies, however, it is possible to design a quasi-emissions trading program based on this information and show that it can provide higher welfare than command-and-control regulation such as technology or emission standards. I then empirically examine this claim using evidence from a particulate quasi-emissions trading program in Santiago, Chile., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

In this paper we explore the welfare implications of voluntary compliance within an emissions trading program and derive optimal permits allocations to affected and opti-in sources when the environmental regulator has incomplete information on individual unrestricted emissions and control costs. The regulator faces a trade-off between production efficiency (minimization of control costs) and information rent extraction (reduction of excess permits allocated to opt-in sources). The first-best equilibrium can be attained if the regulator can freely allocate permits to affected and opt-in sources; otherwise a second-best equilibrium is implemented. The latter is sensitive to uncertainty in control costs and benefits, Supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through an award the the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of the temporal efficiency of the U.S. Acid Rain Program, which implemented a nationwide market for trading and banking sulfur dioxide (SO2) emission allowances. We first develop a model of efficient banking and select appropriate parameter values. Then, we use aggregate data from the first seven years of the Acid Rain Program, to assess the temporal efficiency of the observed banking behavior. We find that banking has been surprisingly efficient and we discuss why this finding disagrees with the common perception of excessive banking in this program.

The low price of allowances has been a frequently noted featured of the implementation of the sulfur dioxide emissions market of the U.S. Acid Rain Program. This paper presents theoretical and numerical analyses that explain the gap between expected and observed allowance prices. The main contributing factors appear to be expectation errors augmented by the presence of irreversible investments., Supported by the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

It has been long recognized that an exhaustible-resource monopsonist faces a commitment problem similar to that of a durable-good monopolist. Indeed, Hörner and Kamien (2004) demonstrate that the two problems are formally equivalent under full commitment. We show that there is no such equivalence in the absence of commitment. The existence of a choke price at which the monopsonist adopts the substitute (backstop) supply divides the surplus between the buyer and the sellers in a way that is unique to the resource model. Sellers receive a surplus share independently of their cost heterogeneity; a result in sharp contrast with the durable-good monopoly logic. The resource buyer can distort the equilibrium through delayed purchases, but the Coase conjecture arises under extreme patience (zero discount rate)., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

We analyze oligopolistic exhaustible-resource depletion when firms can trade forward contracts on deliveries, a market structure prevalent in many resource commodity markets. We find that this organization of trade has substantial implications for resource depletion. As firms' interactions become infinitely frequent, resource stocks become fully contracted and the symmetric oligopolistic equilibrium converges to the perfectly competitive Hotelling (1931) outcome. Asymmetries in stock holdings allow firms to partially escape the procompetitive effect of contracting: a large stock provides commitment to leave a fraction of the stock uncontracted. In contrast, a small stock provides commitment to sell early, during the most profitable part of the equilibrium.

Efficient regulation of the commons requires information about the regulated firms that is rarely available to regulators (e.g., cost of pollution abatement). Different mechanisms have been proposed for inducing firms to reveal their private information but for reasons I discuss in the paper, I find these mechanisms of limited use. I propose a much simpler mechanism that implements the first-best for any number of firms: a uniform price sealed-bid auction of an endogenous number of (transferable) licenses with a fraction of the auction revenues given back to firms. Paybacks, which decrease with the number of firms, are such that truth-telling is a dominant strategy regardless of whether firms behave non-cooperatively or collusively.

This paper presents an analysis of the reduction in SO2 emissions by electric utilities between 1985 and 1993. We find that emissions have been reduced for reasons largely unrelated to the emission reduction mandate incorporated in Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. The principal reason appears to be the change in the economics of coal choice that has resulted from the remarkable decline in rail rates for low sulfur western coal delivered to higher sulfur coal-fired plants in the Midwest. We conclude that allowance prices are lower than expected because less sulfur must be removed to meet the Title IV caps on aggregate SO2 emissions., Supported by a grant from the National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program of the US Government, and the Catholic University of Chile.