Legal Penalty for Unfair Competition Unfair competition law has quite a long tradition in the Czech Republic. After the recodification of private law, the basis of the legal regulation of unfair competition is contained in the Civil Code, which is a fundamental code of the general civil law. Other legal remedies are based in the Civil Procedure Code. In the last decades some elements of the public law also infiltrated the system of legal penalties for unfair competition. The aim of this diploma thesis is to introduce the system of legal penalties for unfair competition in the Czech Republic. The main emphasis is put on the private law regulation, i.e. the regulation contained in the Civil Code and the Civil Procedure Code. The text of this thesis focuses on the comparison of the particular remedies under the Civil Code with the remedies that used to be anchored in the Commercial Code as well as on the alterations put on the unfair competition law in connection with enacting the new Civil Code. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter One first of all briefly introduces unfair competition law and sets it in the context of international law and European law. Additionally, the meaning of the general clause of unfair competition and its relationship with the special statutory clauses of unfair...

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Economics / William F. Blankenau / The first essay considers how the timing of government education spending influences the intergenerational persistence of income. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early and late childhood. Both families and the government can increase the human capital of young agents by investing in education at each stage of childhood. Ability in each dynasty follows a stochastic process. Different abilities and resultant spending histories generate a stochastic steady state distribution of income. We calibrate our model to match aggregate statistics in terms of education expenditures, income persistence and inequality. We show that increasing government spending in early childhood education is effective in lowering intergenerational earnings elasticity. An increase in government funding of early childhood education equivalent to 0.8 percent of GDP reduces income persistence by 8.4 percent. We find that this relatively large effect is due to the weakening relationship between family income and education investment. Since this link is already weak in late childhood, allocating more public resources to late childhood education does not improve the intergenerational mobility of economic status. Furthermore, focusing more on late childhood may raise intergenerational persistence by amplifying the gap in human capital developed in early childhood. The second essay considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and explores the impact of early education policies on labor supply and human capital. I develop a five-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multi-stage process. An agent's human capital is accumulated through early and late childhood. Parents make income and time allocation decisions in response to government expenditures and parental leave policies. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy so that the generated data matches the Gini index and parental participation in education expenditures. The general equilibrium environment shows that subsidizing private education spending and adopting paid parental leave are both effective at increasing human capital. These two policies give parents incentives to increase physical and time investment, respectively. Labor supply decreases due to the introduction of paid parental leave as intended. In addition, low-wage earners are most responsive to parental leave by working less and spending more time with children. The third essay is on the motherhood wage penalty. There is substantial evidence that women with children bear a wage penalty of 5 to 10 percent due to their motherhood status. This wage gap is usually estimated by comparing the wages of working mothers to childless women after controlling for human capital and individual characteristics. This method runs into the problem of selection bias by excluding non-working women. This paper addresses the issue in two ways. First, I develop a simple model of fertility and labor participation decisions to examine the relationships among fertility, employment, and wages. The model implies that mothers face different reservation wages due to variance in preference over child care, while non-mothers face the same reservation wage. Thus, a mother with a relatively high wage may choose not to work because of her strong preference for time with children. In contrast, a childless woman who is not working must face a relatively low wage. For this reason, empirical analysis that focuses only on employed women may result in a biased estimate of the motherhood wage penalty. Second, to test the predictions of the model, I use 2004-2009 data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and include non-working women in the two-stage Heckman selection model. The empirical results from OLS and the fixed effects model are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the child penalty becomes smaller and insignificant after non-working women are included. It implies that the observed wage gap in the labor market appears to overstate the child wage penalty due to the sample selection bias.

1 Death Penalty - Summary As the theme of my thesis, I've chosen the death sentence. Such sentence has accompanied the human society from the early times. From the history to these days, it helped to maintain the public order and the law enforcement. The public order was seen differently in each society and every historical stage. However, there was always one thing in common, it intended to protect life, safety, law enforcement and community rules. During the period of economic growth, abundance and prosperity, the society tends to treat law and public order intruders more liberally. The "western part" of civilization is currently at this evolution stage. Our country is firmly integrated into the European Union. There is a straightforward common understanding. The death penalty is prohibited and it has to be respected. The world tends away from the death penalty in general. I've outlined the questions to be addressed at the introduction part of the thesis. I structured the dissertation into ten chapters. Further supplements are attached to the material, including the photographic documentation provided on my own, deeds and other documents related to the topic. I explain the definition of the death sentence and its purpose in the first chapter. I introduce different theories about the purpose of the death...

My dissertation will seek to explain the voting behavior of judges in state courts of last resort in death penalty appeals cases. To do this, I have constructed a dataset that encompasses all death penalty appeals cases in 30 states during the period 2000-2006. The dependent variable in my quantitative analyses is the vote rendered by each judge in each case, and can take on two values: a vote to uphold the sentence of death, or a vote to reverse or vacate the sentence of death. Drawing from the judicial literature, my independent variables will include personal factors, institutional factors, and environmental factors. Personal factors include the gender and race of the judge, which the literature suggests are related to differences in judicial behavior. I will also use ideology scores developed by Brace et al. (2000), but only for a subset of cases for which those scores are available. Institutional factors include the party identification of the governor at the time the judge was appointed or elected, the party identification of the governor at the time the case was decided, and the party composition of the state House and Senate at the time the case was decided. Environmental factors include the state murder rate, the number of executions since 1976, and the number of inmates on death row at the time of the decision. The theoretical underpinning of this research is derived from the new institutionalism, which posits that judges’ decisions are shaped not only by judicial attitudes and strategic considerations, but by a variety of institutional and environmental factors. I hypothesize that the institutional and environmental factors previously enumerated will have a significant impact on the voting behavior of state high court judges in death penalty appeals. To test my hypotheses, I will use logistic regression to construct models incorporating all of the previously mentioned variables.

With increased demand for bandwidth-hungry applications such as video-on-demand, wavelength-division-multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) has become a strong contender in overcoming the last mile bottle neck. However, the wide-scale deployment of WDM-PONs has been delayed mainly due to the high cost of wavelength-specific optical components. To realize cost-effective WDM-PONs, various wavelength-independent, so called colorless architectures, have been developed so that all the subscribers can have identical optical network units (ONUs). In such WDM-PONs, however, single-fiber bidirectional transmission results in degradation of system performance caused by interference between the signals and backreflections. This thesis investigates the impact of backreflections on single-fiber bidirectional WDM-PONs. A WDM-PON with various optical line terminals (OLTs) and colorless ONU configurations is presented. The dependence of the power penalty, caused by backreflections, on a variety of parameters is investigated. This includes parameters such as the source linewidths, receiver bandwidth, transmission line loss (TLL), ONU gain, chirp effect at the ONU and optical return loss (ORL), in various WDM-PON configurations. The WDM-PON with continuous wave (CW) seed light and remodulation schemes are both presented and studied experimentally. The impacts of the backreflections on the single-fiber bidirectional WDM-PON with various OLT and ONU configurations are compared and analyzed accordingly.

Pipelining is the major organizational technique by which computers can execute several instructions simultaneously to reach higher single-processor performance. Branches are recognized as a major impediment to achieve the maximum performance of pipelining and superscalar processors due to stalls caused by unresolved branches. Branch prediction is an effective strategy to reduce the branch penalty via predicting, prefetching and executing the speculative instructions before the branch is resolved. A branch target buffer (BTB)[13] can reduce the performance caused by branches via predicting the direction of the branch and caching information about the branch. While prediction is incorrect, the processor requires flushing the speculative instructions, undoing the effects of the improperly initiated speculative execution and resuming on the correct path. These flushing and refilling degrade significantly processor performance. In this thesis we propose a mechanism, Double Level Branch Buffer, which can reduce the branch penalty and performance loss caused from incorrect prediction. We try to cache the information of branch about both taken and not taken direction. The pipeline will degrade the dependence upon branch prediction accuracy by utilizing this mechanism.

A European option is a contract in which the seller of the option grants the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to purchase from or sell to the seller the underlying asset at pre-specified price at maturity date. Herewith the buyer should pay out a premium for the value of flexibility that he was granted. Such premium as the compensation to the seller was provides in close form by Black and Scholes (1973) and Merton (1973). Even since then the option pricing methodology, or otherwise known as ¡§contingent claim analysis¡¨ has found its application in many prospects. Otherwise known as the real option analysis first induced by Myers (1977) and the structure form model of the credit risk analysis first induced by Merton (1974). In the thesis, we consider the application of the optional pricing methodology to the rationality and valuation of penalty in a contract and extent the penalty to the money back guarantee. In the former, we provide the general form solution to illustrate the both parties all hold the right to default the contract, and prove the existence of the optimal penalty is a policy to protect the disadvantaged minority such as to make the trade contract to be fair. In the latter, we prove the suitable way to evaluate that the consumer buy a good and long a MBG is the call option but the put by reviewing the final cash flow of the replicated strategy and the put-call parity at firstly, and then we find out the better way to grant the consumer to return the good to the vendor is penalty if the good is normal and the utility function of the consumer is concave. In sum, we integrate the penalty and in the MBG with the contingent claim analysis in this thesis, we find out we can use the uncomplicated model to explain the real world. Herewith we consider the option pricing model as another methodology to illustrate the social environment.

This dissertation explores public attitudes towards criminal punishment in Western societies and seeks to explain why some individuals are more punitive than others. A model of punitiveness with several domains of focus for explaining variation in punitiveness including objective risk of crime, conservative climate, and population diversity at the country level and demographics, conservative worldview and perceptions of crime, law and order at the individual level is tested with data on punitiveness from two multinational surveys using hierarchical logistic regression techniques. Analyses reveal that males, married individuals, and those who are concerned about crime are more punitive. The rest of the findings are specific to the way punitiveness is measured. Individuals younger than age 45, individuals who perceive the police as ineffective and individuals who have been victims of violent crime tend to prefer incarceration for a recidivist burglar. Those who believe in a personal God are more supportive of the death penalty while individuals with higher levels of religiosity are less in favor of the death penalty. Further, individuals who live in societies with more religious heterogeneity and where public belief in a literal hell is more prominent are most likely prefer a prison sentence for a recidivist burglar and individuals who live in countries with higher levels of lethal violence are more in favor of the death penalty. Religious heterogeneity and public belief in hell account for 42% of the variation across Western societies in preference for prison for a repeat burglar while homicide rate accounts for over 75% of the variation in support for capital punishment across Western societies. Conservative religious belief at the contextual level appears to be positively related to support for capital punishment indirectly through the homicide rate suggesting that support for the death penalty may be influenced by the normality of lethal violence in society dependent in part on contextual levels of conservative religious belief. This dissertation enhances the understanding of punitiveness by providing the most comprehensive multi-level study of public punitiveness to date and proves that religious factors, both personal and contextual, are central to understanding variation in attitudes toward punishment. / text

This dissertation analyzes social and legal influences on Texas death-sentenced prisoners who hastened their own execution. Using variables derived from research on other types of decisions to hasten death, I compare these prisoners with other similarly-situated condemned prisoners who did not seek to hasten execution, and develop a theoretical model for their decisions. In addition, I examine both how these prisoners explain their decisions, and how court proceedings can shape these explanations. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the sociolegal construction of different rights to die. / text

Savo darbe mes nagrinėjame Gerber-Shiu baudos funkciją klasikiniame rizikos modelyje atveju, kai žalų dydžiai pasiskirstę pagal Pareto dėsnį. Pagrindinis uždavinys yra susikonstruoti algoritmą funkcijos reikšmių gavimui. Tiriamas Gerber-Shiu diskontuotos baudos funkcijos atvejis, kada vidinė baudos funkcija w tapačiai lygi vienetui. Dėl sudėtingos transformuoto Pareto skirstinio formos analitiškai paskaičiuoti sąsūkų nepavyko. Tam tikslui naudojamas interpoliavimas kubiniu splainu. N kartų kartodami sukonstruotą algoritmą gauname pirmąsias n sąsūkas laisvai pasirinktiems pradiniams parametrams: Pareto skirstinio laipsnio rodikliui α, pradiniam kapitalui u, santykinei draudimo priemokai θ, diskontavimo parametrui (palūkanų normai) δ ir Puasono proceso parametrui λ. Lentelių pagalba parodome funkcijos priklausomybę nuo skirtingų modeliuojančių parametrų reikšmių. Išvadose teigiame jog pasiūlytas metodas skaičiuoti Gerber-Shiu diskontuotos baudos funkciją nors ir išpildomas tačiau yra neefektyvus. Kai kuriais pradinių parametrų pasirinkimo atvejais susiduriama su tikslumo problema. Norint tiksliai paskaičiuoti funkcijos reikšmes reikia didesnių eilių transformuoto Pareto skirstinio sąsūkų, o tam reikalingi dideli resursai. Kita vertus, pradinio kapitalo u reikšmėms didėjant tikslumas didėja ženkliai. / In this paper we consider Gerber-Shiu discounted penalty function in the classical risk model for Pareto claims. Our main goal is to construct an algorithm for obtaining values of the discounted penalty function (considering penalty function w=1). Due to the complicated form of the transformed Pareto distribution function we cannot obtain its convolutions analiticaly. We use numerical methods provided by Maple (cube spline) to find interpolating functions instead. Continuously applying recursive formulas we obtain first 5 interpolated convolutions. Then we calculate values of Gerber-Shiu discounted penalty function for certain arbitrary parameters: α – degree of Pareto distribution function, initial surplus u, security loading θ, discounting parameter δ and Poison process parameter λ. We present data tables and graphs of the discounted penalty function for some variations of parameters in later sections. Finally we state that the method that we use is quite complicated. For better accuracy of the discounted penalty function values one may require to get many convolutions of the transformed Pareto distribution function and that may require too great of the resources. However the quantity of the convolutions needed rapidly decreases for large values of the initial surplus u.