The U.S. apparel manufacturing industry includes many reputable firms, but is also believed to include many sweatshop operations. Sweatshop workers often work under sub-minimum wages, excessively long hours, and abusive management. Sweatshop establishments in the United States typically violate several U.S. labor laws. Two they commonly violate are the minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and the ban on hiring illegal immigrants under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. The purpose of the present research was to estimate minimum penalties that would provide no monetary incentive for the average U.S. apparel manufacturing firm to violate the minimum wage and the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. The minimum per-violation penalties that were estimated to deter violation of the minimum wage are 8 to 28 times the current maximum penalty of $1,000 per violation, and those estimated to deter the hiring of illegal immigrants are 3 to 10 times the current maximum penalty of $10,000 per violation. The estimated penalties are associated with annual probabilities of prosecution ranging from 5% to 15%. The estimated penalties primarily depend on the difference between legal and illegal wage rates. A sensitivity analysis indicated that the estimated penalties are insensitive to the value of the own-price elasticity of production labor demand, which is one of the variables used to calculate the penalties. The results suggest that current federal penalties for violating the minimum wage or the ban on hiring illegal immigrants do not deter infraction of these laws by U.S. apparel manufacturers. / Master of Science

University of Macau / Faculty of Law

No description available.

Thesis (MAcc)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Leases are common phenomena in the South African and international business arena. Leasing is a popular and often cheaper method to obtain the use of property without the property being acquired. Included in property is immovable, movable, tangible and intangible property. The premature termination of lease agreements are also a common phenomenon in the South African and international business arena. When a lease is terminated prematurely, it is currently the practice that the person who terminates the lease agreement has to pay a termination penalty to the other party of the lease agreement. A lease agreement can however be terminated by either the lessee or the lessor. When both the paying and receiving parties assess their income tax liabilities, they may be confronted with the issue of how the payment or receipt of the termination penalty should be treated for income tax purposes. In practice there currently exists uncertainty whether the penalty should be treated as revenue- or capital in nature. The nature of this penalty depends on the background facts and must be judged individually on the basis of the guidelines approved by the courts laid down with respect to the issue of income versus capital. For this issue to be satisfactorily answered, the income tax treatments of lease termination penalties in Australia, Canada and the United States of America are investigated. The purpose of this study is to find guidelines, tools and principles to be used in a South African context, which may lead to the efficient and careful handling of lease termination penalties for South African tax purposes. The treatment of a lease termination penalty under current South African tax legislation is also studied. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Huurooreenkomste is alledaagse verskynsels in die Suid-Afrikaanse en internasionale sakesektor. Dit is gewilder en dikwels goedkoper vir besighede om eiendom te huur, eerder as om dit te koop, om sodoende die gebruik van die eiendom te bekom. Ingesluit by eiendom wat gehuur word is onroerende-, roerende-, tasbare- en ontasbare eiendom. Die voortydige beëindiging van huurooreenkomste is ook „n alledaagse verskynsel in die Suid-Afrikaanse en internasionale sakesektor. Waar ‟n huurooreenkoms voortydig beëindig word, is dit tans die praktyk dat die persoon wat die huurooreenkoms beëindig „n beëindigingsboete moet betaal aan die ander party in die huurooreenkoms. Die huurooreenkoms kan egter deur óf die huurder óf die verhuurder beëindig word. Wanneer beide die betalende party en die ontvangende party se inkomste-belastingaanspreeklikhede bereken word, kan hulle gekonfronteer word met die vraag oor hoe om die betaling of ontvangste van die beëindigingsboete vir inkomstebelasting-doeleindes te hanteer. Daar bestaan tans in die praktyk onsekerheid of die betaling of die ontvangste van hierdie beëindigingsboete kapitaal of inkomste van aard is. Die vraag of die betaling of ontvangste inkomste of kapitaal van aard is, hang dikwels af van die agtergrondfeite en moet elkeen individueel beoordeel word aan die hand van die riglyne wat reeds deur die howe neergelê is rondom inkomste teenoor kapitaal. Ten einde die vraagstuk bevredigend te beantwoord, word ondersoek ingestel na die inkomstebelastinghantering van beëindigingsboetes in Australië, Kanada en die Verenigde State van Amerika. Die doel van hierdie ondersoek is om potensiële riglyne, hulpmiddels of beginsels te identifiseer wat binne ‟n Suid-Afrikaanse konteks toegepas kan word en wat kan lei tot die effektiewe en deurdagte hantering van beëindigingsboetes vir Suid-Afrikaanse inkomstebelastingdoeleindes. Verder word die inkomstebelastinghantering van beëindigingsboetes ingevolge huidige bestaande Suid-Afrikaanse inkomstebelasting-wetgewing ondersoek.

In clinical experiments, the evolution of a product concentration in tissue over time is often under study. Different products and tissues may be considered. For instance, one could analyse the evolution of drug concentration in plasma over time, by performing successive blood sampling from the subjects participating to the clinical study. One could also observe the evolution of radioactivity uptakes in different regions of the brain during a PET scan (Positron Emission Tomography). The global objective of this thesis is the modelling of such evolutions, which will be called, generically, pharmacokinetic curves (PK curves). Some clinical measures of interest are derived from PK curves. For instance, when analysing the evolution of drug concentration in plasma, PK parameters such as the area under the curve (AUC), the maximal concentration (Cmax) and the time at which it occurs (tmax) are usually reported. In a PET study, one could measure Receptor Occupancy (RO) in some regions of the brain, i.e. the percentage of specific receptors to which the drug is bound. Such clinical measures may be badly estimated if the PK curves are noisy. Our objective is to provide statistical tools to get better estimations of the clinical measures of interest from appropriately smoothed PK curves. Plenty of literature addresses the problem of PK curves fitting using parametric models. It usually relies on a compartmental approach to describe the kinetic of the product under study. The use of parametric models to fit PK curves can lead to problems in some specific cases. Firstly, the estimation procedures rely on algorithms which convergence can be hard to attain with sparse and/or noisy data. Secondly, it may be difficult to choose the adequate underlying compartmental model, especially when a new drug is under study and its kinetic is not well known. The method that we advocate to fit such PK curves is based on Bayesian Penalized splines (P-splines): it provides good results both in terms of PK curves fitting and clinical measures estimations. It avoids the difficult choice of a compartmental model and is more robust than parametric models to a small sample size or a low signal to noise ratio. Working in a Bayesian context provides several advantages: prior information can be injected, models can easily be generalized and extended to hierarchical settings, and uncertainty for associated clinical parameters are straightforwardly derived from credible intervals obtained by MCMC methods. These are major advantages over traditional frequentist approaches.

This diploma thesis concern with the legal penalty for unfair competition from the perspective of private law. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the respective private law means of protection against unfair competition, which are governed by Act no. 89/2012 Coll., The Civil Code and the Law no. 99/1963 Coll., The Civil Procedure Code. Attention is also paid to the legitimation of subjects in disputes arising from unfair competition and private law protection against unfair competition on the social network. Thesis is divided into the four chapters. Introduction of the first chapter is dedicated to law against unfair competition in general. The first subchapter sets out in detail general clause governed by § 2976 of the Civil Code, especially its historical development. The second subchapter deals with the new merits of the intrusive harassment, which was included due to the recodification of private law in the Czech Republic among the special facts of unfair competition provided by the Civil Code. The second chapter of this thesis is focused on the legitimation of the subjects in disputes arising from unfair competition. This chapter deals with actively and passively legitimized subjects that arising in disputes from unfair competition and trying to specified these individual entities in...

The diploma thesis is divided into three chapters; the first chapter namely presents general theoretical foundation. This leads to clarification of the position of law against unfair completion in Czech legal system with special emphasis given to the general clause as fundamental assumption of unfair competition acting. The second chapter focuses on legal entities that take part in disputes arising from unfair competition. In accordance with main aims of this diploma thesis the attention to entities which have the capacity to bring proceedings is payed rather than to entities that appear in unfair competition disputes as defendants. Finally the third and main chapter analyses individual legal means of protections and claims arising from unfair competition. Besides traditional unfair competition claims exhaustively provided in Sec. 2988 of the Civil Code, described are also legal instruments of the Civil Code and of the Civil Procedure Code of more general character which's use is applicable in terms of unfair competition. In fine selected procedural specifications related to enforcement of law from unfair competition are discussed.

Legal penalties for unfair competition This diploma thesis analyzes private law penalties for unfair competition, focusing on the means of protection provided by private law statutes. This thesis also deals with the questions of active and passive legitimacy in lawsuits concerning unfair competition and procedural specifics of these lawsuits. The thesis is divided into six chapters. The first charter offers an introduction to unfair competition law by presenting its substantive law provisions: the general clause and the special case clauses. The aim of this chapter is to outline the issue of unfair competition and define actions against which it is possible to use means of protection described in the following chapters. The second chapter focuses on subjects of unfair competition disputes: subjects actively legitimated but also subjects passively legitimated. This chapter also aims to define each of these individual subjects, such as competitors and consumers. The third chapter presents the essential means of protection against unfair competition provided by the Commercial Code. These are namely the claim to refrain from unfair competition practices, the claim to remove unfair competition situation, also the claim to provide damages for material losses, the claim to hand over unjustified enrichment...

The purpose of this thesis is to examine both the conditions for levying tax penalties in transfer pricing and the sustainability of the Swedish tax penalty framework in regard to transfer pricing in a post-BEPS world. This question is of relevance as BEPS has resulted in more extensive documentation requirements, affecting both the tax payer’s tax assessment procedure and the Swedish Tax Agency’s auditing practice. Tax penalties were introduced in order to incentivize the tax payer to disclose relevant information for the tax assessment. The scope of relevant information is relative to the correction rule, which has a significant connection to the OECD and BEPS. This thesis concludes that in a post-BEPS world, relevant information relates to domestic developments of the correction rule produced by the legislator, case law and the Swedish Tax Agency. Furthermore, this thesis concludes that transfer pricing documentation in full compliance with the Swedish content requirements should greatly mitigate a tax payer’s risk of being subjected to tax penalties. Court rulings from the lower administrative courts regarding tax penalties in transfer pricing demonstrate contradictory views to that of statutory law, case law and preparatory works. These opposing views constitute the current framework of tax penalties in transfer pricing, which is neither sustainable nor appropriate. For this reason, the Swedish tax system requires either extensive case law or statutory reform on the subject. This thesis concludes that statutory reform would perhaps be the most appropriate development in light of certain aspects of the principle of legality. Proceeding from that conclusion, this thesis therefore presents two amendments to the Swedish tax penalty framework in regard to transfer pricing.

Esta dissertação busca aproveitar os métodos de penalidades exatas diferenciáveis de programação não-linear para resolver problemas de desigualdades variacionais. Problemas desse tipo têm recebido grande atenção na literatura recentemente e possuem aplicações em diversas áreas como Engenharia, Física e Economia. Métodos de penalidades exatas diferenciáveis foram desenvolvidos nos anos 70 e 80 para resolver problemas de otimização com restrições por meio da solução de problemas irrestritos. Esses problemas são tais que, com uma escolha apropriada do parâmetro de penalização, uma solução do problema original é recuperada após a resolução de um único problema irrestrito. A função a ser minimizada é semelhante a um lagrangiano aumentado clássico, porém uma estimativa do multiplicador é automaticamente calculada a partir do ponto primal. Nesse trabalho, mostramos como acoplar a estimativa de multiplicadores sugerida por Glad e Polak [27] ao lagrangiano aumentado clássico para desigualdades variacionais sugerido por Auslender e Teboulle. Obtivemos assim uma penalidade exata para problemas de desigualdades variacionais. Os resultados mais finos de exatidão foram obtidos no caso de problemas de complementaridade não-linear. Uma característica importante da penalidade proposta é que ela não envolve informações de segunda ordem das funções que definem a desigualdade variacional. Além desses resultados, que formam o núcleo da dissertação, apresentamos uma breve revisão de penalidades não-exatas diferenciáveis , exatas não-diferenciáveis e exatas diferenciáveis em otimização. / This work intends to build upon differentiable exact penalty methods for nonlinear programming, using them to solve variational inequality problems. Such problems have been given a lot of attention in the literature lately and have applications to diverse areas of knowledge such as Engineering, Physics and Economics. Differentiable exact penalty methods were developed during the 70s and 80s to solve constrained optimization problems by means of the solution of unconstrained problems. Those problems are such that, with an appropriate choice of the penalty parameter, one finds a solution of the original constrained problem by solving only one unconstrained problem. The function which is minimized is similar to the classic augmented lagrangian, but an estimate of the multiplier is automatically calculated from the primal point. In this thesis we show how to couple Glad and Polak?s multiplier estimate, with the classic augmented lagrangian of a variational inequality developed by Auslender and Teboulle. This allowed us to obtain an exact penalty function for variational inequality problems. The best exactness results were obtained in the particular case of nonlinear complementarity problems. An important characteristic of the proposed penalty is that it doesn?t involve second order information of any of the functions which compose the variational inequality. In addition to those results, which are the core of this work, we also present a brief review of inexact differentiable penalties, exact nondifferentiable penalties and differentiable exact penalties in optimization.