The Quantification of Damages caused by breach of the European Union Competition Law and Private Enforcement of its Compensation Abstract Effective competition is key issue for achieving the economic prosperity of the internal market, improving the quality of production and maximizing employment. On the contrary restriction of the competition can lead to inefficient allocation of resources, loss of economic welfare and damages to both competitors and consumers. Achieving and maintaining of the effective competition is therefore one of the main objectives of the European Union. This can be achieved through means of public and private enforcement. While pubic enforcement has, in particular, punitive and deterring function, private enforcement has, in particular, compensatory function. Despite these differences both categories complement each other. That is why this thesis deals with the relationship between private and public enforcement. On 26 November 2014, the European Union adopted Directive 2014/104/EU, which partially harmonises private enforcement in relation to the right to compensation for damages caused by a breach of competition law. The aim of this work is to analyze the positives and negatives of this harmonization. The dissertation also deals with the comparison of two reference transpositional...

In both Kenya and Botswana, wildlife is a valuable natural resource in terms of its economic value, nutritional value, ecological value, medicinal value, educational and scientific value, as well as recreational and socio-cultural value. Despite this beneficial value, however, wild animals in both countries also cause damage and impose heavy losses on society. They also disrupt peaceful existence in local communities living in close proximity to wildlife areas. The damage they cause includes attacks on people and livestock, destruction of crops and other property as well as infrastructure. This has resulted in a human-wildlife conflict, with people having negative attitudes towards wildlife. Initially people seem to be the victims when wild animals attack them or destroy their property. Later, the animals are the real victims when people in retaliation start attacking, ensnaring or poisoning them. Contrary to the belief that it contributes to poverty alleviation, many people in the local communities in wildlife areas strongly believe wildlife has contributed to their poverty. Unless the governments of both Kenya and Botswana maintain efficient legal and institutional arrangements for wildlife damage, the future of wildlife conservation in both countries is bleak. These arrangements, if effectively enforced, have the potential to: reduce retaliatory killing of wildlife; ensure incidents of wildlife damage are reported; alleviate the losses and suffering associated with wildlife damage; and bolster public support for conservation programmes. It is encouraging that both countries recognize wildlife damage as a major problem and have put in place legal and institutional arrangements to address this problem. This study evaluated the legal and institutional arrangements in Kenya and Botswana on wildlife damage, assessing their suitability, adequacy as well as their effectiveness. While several studies have been conducted on wildlife damage, most of them mainly focus on institutional arrangements and the actual abatement measures adopted, few of them approach the subject from a legal standpoint, in the way this study does. Those studies do not, for instance, discuss the legal basis of the need for legal arrangements for wildlife damage alleviation and the various approaches and actual forms of legal intervention. This author through the use of semi-structured interviews, self-administered questionnaires, focus group discussions, and literature survey investigated the problem of ii wildlife damage in Kenya and Botswana. A central part of this investigation was on the types of damage, the animals involved, whether and how this problem has influenced public attitudes towards wildlife conservation, and suggestions for solution. Research for this study was conducted in the Laikipia region of Kenya and the Okavango delta region of Botswana between January and December 2006. This researcher interviewed 44 respondents from each country, comprising households from the local communities within wildlife areas, senior ranking government officials, leaders of NGOs that actually work on wildlife issues, experts in natural resource management as well as eminent scholars in environmental and natural resources law and policy. Research for this study established that while the governments of both Kenya and Botswana have established certain legal and institutional frameworks on wildlife damage, there are factors that hamper their efficient operation. These factors include the relevance and suitability of the existing laws, as well as their acceptability to stakeholders; lack of appropriate policy framewoks and dispute resolution mechanisms to support the regulatory regime; institutional problems such as overlapping responsibilities, lack of adequate resources and lack of motivation among staff. These factors together with others have continued to be a major challenge to the quest for appropriate and effective legal and institutional response to the problem of wildlife damage in both countries. The study found that in both countries the law vests in the state the power to manage wildlife wherever it occurs within the national boundaries. Botswana’s community-based wildlife management model, however, offers more incentives for conservation to local communities than Kenya’s state-centered system which largely disregards the role of local communities in wildlife matters. This author has argued that local communities are critical stakeholders and the success of any conservation programmes will depend on their goodwill. Besides, while the state has a duty to protect wildlife from harm by humans, it also has a corresponding duty to protect humans and their property from damage by wild animals and to ensure that wildlife does not undermine the people’s livelihoods and development. This is, however, not usually the case as in practice the state in both countries, and especially in Kenya, iii seems to favour wild animals at the expense of the people. The study has recommended certain reforms which need to be undertaken if Kenya and Botswana have to maintain appropriate and efficient legal and institutional arrangements on wildlife damage.

L'évolution de la transmission des données par fibre optique s'est accélérée ces dernières années. Le besoin de transmettre des débits plus élevés (aujourd'hui supérieurs ou égaux à 40 Gb/s) sur des longueurs de transmission de plus en plus grandes ne cesse de croître. Malheureusement la sensibilité aux défauts de propagation augmente avec le débit, que ce soit pour les effets linéaires dus à la dispersion chromatique (CD) et à la dispersion de mode de polarisation (PMD - polarization- mode dispersion) de la fibre, ou les effets non linéaires essentiellement induits par l'effet Kerr (variation de l'indice de réfraction en fonction de l'intensité lumineuse). Dans ce contexte, ce travail de thèse rapporte l'étude des effets de la CD et de la PMD sur les transmissions hauts débits. En outre, la PMD est identifiée aujourd'hui comme la principale source de limitation de la bande passante et de la capacité de transmission autorisées sur une fibre. Par ailleurs, la biréfringence dans les fibres optiques représente la cause principale de la dispersion de mode de polarisation (PMD).Dans ce travail, nous nous sommes focalisés plus particulièrement sur l'étude des effets de la température sur la PMD dans les fibres monomodes standards (SMF) correspondant à la spécification ITU-G.652 utilisées dans les réseaux de transmission longues distances. En tenant compte de l'ellipticité du cœur de la fibre, la variation de la PMD en fonction de la température est étudiée à travers l'évolution de la biréfringence en fonction du paramètre V de la fibre pour différentes températures. Ce travail de thèse ouvre la voie pour développer une architecture permettant de compenser la PMD par traitement numérique du signal. L'idée sous jacente est de remplacer une technologie coûteuse (composants optiques) par une architecture numérique à faible coût, et plus universelle. Les travaux en cours sur la compensation de la PMD par voie électronique sont encourageants et semblent très prometteurs à court terme / The evolution of optical fibre transmissions accelerated these last years. The need to transmit high bit rates (today equal to or higher than 40 Gb/s) over increasingly large lengths of transmission is constantly growing. Unfortunately, the sensitivity of propagation to defects increases with the bit rate. These effects are related to chromatic dispersion CD, polarization mode dispersion PMD, or to nonlinear effects primarily induced by the effect Kerr (dependence of the index of refraction of fibre of the light intensity). In this context, this work focuses on the study of the effects of CD and the PMD on the optical transmissions. Moreover, the PMD is identified today as the principal source of limitation in high bit rate transmissions. In addition to that, birefringence in optical fibres represents the principal cause of PMD. In this work, we particularly focused on the study of the effects of the temperature on the PMD in monomode standards fibres (SMF) corresponding to specification ITU-G.652 used in the optical networks. By taking into account of the ellipticity of the fibre, the variation of the PMD according to the temperature is studied through the evolution of birefringence according to the parameter V of fibre for various temperatures. This work of thesis opens the way to develop an architecture making it possible to compensate for the PMD by digital signal processing. The main idea is to replace an expensive technology (optical components) by a numerical architecture at low cost, and more universal. The works in progress on the compensation of the PMD by electronic way are encouraging and seem very promising at short-term

Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is an imaging technique used in conjunction with radiation therapy. CBCT is used to verify the position of tumours just prior to radiation treatment session. The accuracy of the radiation treatment of thoracic and upper abdominal tumours is heavily affected by respiratory movement. Blurring artefacts, due to the movement during a CBCT scanning, cause misregistration between the CBCT image and the planning image. There has been growing interest in the use of motion-compensated CBCT for correcting the breathing-induced artefacts. A wide range of iterative reconstruction methods have been developed for CBCT imaging. The direct motion compensation technique has been applied to algebraic reconstruction technique (ART), simultaneous ART (SART), ordered-subset SART (OS-SART) and conjugate gradient least squares (CGLS). In this thesis a dual modality imaging of electrical impedance tomography (EIT) and CBCT is proposed for the first time. This novel dual modality imaging uses the advantages of high temporal resolution of EIT imaging and high spatial resolution of the CBCT method. The main objective of this study is to combine CBCT with EIT imaging system for motion-compensated CBCT using experimental and computational phantoms. The EIT images were used for extracting motion for a motion-compensated CBCT imaging system. A simple motion extraction technique is used for extracting motion data from the low spatial resolution EIT images. This motion data is suitable for input into the direct motion-compensated CBCT. The performance of iterative algorithms for motion compensation was also studied. The dual modality CBCT-EIT is verified using experimental EIT system and computational CBCT phantom data.

This thesis seeks to examine the status of retail investors’ protection in the Hellenic legal order, under the light of EU law; focusing on investment firm failure as a result of tort, it investigates whether the EU and Hellenic normative systems aim at and achieve effective protection of retail investors. It explores in particular the issue of ex lege liability of compensation schemes and the issue of non-contractual liability of supervisory authorities. In case of intermediary failure the minimum protection is awarded by EU law in the form of ex lege compensation does not establish a coherent system, and the legal status of retail investors vis-à-vis depositors remains uncertain in many respects. The ECJ has denied application of the acquis on individual protection to depositors in Peter Paul, with regard to non-contractual liability of supervisors, but the application of its reasoning in the area of investment services is doubtful. The new EU finance law and architecture does not fundamentally affect these conclusions. On the other hand, retail investor protection may validly be considered as an autonomous aim of finance law in the Hellenic legal order. Despite inefficiencies connected also to the structure of relevant EU rules transposed, and despite the incoherence of the various national rules on the liquidation of financial intermediaries and the operation of compensation schemes –in particular with regard to claim verification– yet effective protection of retail investors may a priori be achieved through the existing national judicial mechanism. This dynamic is demonstrated by recent case-law on protection of retail investors in the context of ex lege compensation; yet it seems to lessen in the area of non-contractual liability of supervisors. Even though ex lege immunity of supervisors has been denied by case-law, the effectiveness of protection has been mitigated by the strict substantive criteria formulated.

Widespread losses during the recent financial crisis have raised concerns that equitybased CEO compensation (stocks and stock options) causes risky bank policies. This has led to the need to understand whether CEO pay can be re-structured such that it dampens risk-taking incentives. Against this background, this thesis analyses if debtbased compensation (also known as inside debt and consisting of pension benefits and deferred compensation) motivates CEOs to pursue risk-reducing bank policies. Over three decades of research into executive compensation has not explored the impact of inside debt, primarily due to lack of detailed data on inside debt which only became available after 2006 in the United States (US). The paucity of empirical work on inside debt is particularly unfortunate, given that the value of inside debt is often substantial. This dissertation provides one of the first empirical investigations into the impact of inside debt on bank risk-taking by determining whether CEO inside debt leads to less risky behaviour, through three policy decisions that are capable of increasing the overall risk of the bank. First, this thesis focuses on the payout policies of banks. Bank payouts divert cash to shareholders, while leaving behind riskier and less liquid assets to repay creditors in the future. Payouts, thus, constitute a type of risk-taking that benefits shareholders at the expense of creditors. The results presented in this thesis indicate that higher inside debt results in more conservative bank payout policies. Specifically, CEOs paid with more inside debt are more likely to cut payouts and to cut payouts by a larger amount. Reductions in payouts occur through a decrease in both dividends and repurchases. The results also hold over a sub-sample of banks which received government support in the form of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) where the link between risk-taking and payouts is of particular relevance because it involves wealth transfers from the taxpayer to shareholders. Second, this thesis tests the impact of inside debt on the risk implications of bank acquisitions. Bank acquisitions are large scale investment decisions that can affect bank risk. To this end, this thesis shows that higher inside debt holdings motivate CEOs to pursue acquisitions that result in lower bank default risk. It also prevents CEOs from using acquisitions to shift risk to the financial safety-net. Since the safety net is underwritten by the taxpayer, the results show that CEO inside debt has a measurable impact on the subsidy which bank shareholders obtain from taxpayers. Third, the thesis shows that inside debt plays a critical role in influencing bank capital holdings. Higher equity capital provides creditors with a larger loss-absorbing equity buffer to protect the value of their claims on bank cash flows. Ceteris paribus, higher equity protects creditors from losses. To this end, this thesis shows that higher inside debt results in motivating banks to hold higher capital, whether defined using regulatory or economic terms. Higher inside debt also results in reducing the estimated value of the taxpayer losses. Furthermore, banks with higher inside debt are at a lower risk of facing capital shortfalls. Taken together, the study provides insights on how incentives stemming from inside debt impact bank policies in a manner that protects creditor interests. Inside debt can help in addressing excessive risk-taking concerns by aligning the interests of CEOs with those of creditors, regulators, and the taxpayer. This thesis makes a novel contribution to the banking literature by providing evidence on the implications of inside debt in the US banking industry. This work should be interpreted as part of a wider body of research which demonstrates that inside debt matters for bank risk-taking and that this role of inside debt should be recognized more widely in ongoing discussions on compensation incentives in banking.

acase@tulane.edu / Despite the recent advocates for lengthening executive compensation duration to curb short-termism and promote long-term value creation, there is no study investigating whether long pay duration induces better investment decisions in the long run. Using a comprehensive measure of compensation duration, we find that CEOs with long pay duration are more likely to engage in large acquisitions. These acquisitions receive a significantly worse market reaction, and experience lower post-acquisition abnormal operating and stock performance compared with deals conducted by CEOs with short pay duration. Further analysis suggests that negative association between compensation duration and acquisition performance is driven by the use of time-vesting compensation plan. Duration of performance-vesting plans has no significant effect on M&A performance. Lastly, we find that CEOs are likely to engage in more risk-decreasing M&As, as long pay duration plans impose a higher firm risk to executives. The results highlight the complex nature of compensation duration and suggest that focusing on one dimension of compensation design is insufficient to create long-term shareholder value. / 1 / Qi-Yuan Peng

This dissertation describes and interprets the effects of the significant changes to the workers compensation, industrial and related laws that occurred in the early 1990s in Western Australia. These could be characterised as motivated by a desire by the then Coalition Government to reduce access to legal representation in compensation claims, limit the potential of workers to claim damages for negligence and reduce the use of collective bargaining mechanisms to resolve industrial disputes. Arguably, the common philosophical themes were to individualise the relationship between employer and employee and to reduce the bargaining strength of workers. In general terms, these themes were presented under the guise of flexible workplace relations. Whether these outcomes were achieved is not the subject of this analysis, rather, the aim is to show that one (perhaps unintended) consequence of the legislative changes of the early 1990s was to create significant areas of overlap in various employment related laws. These areas of overlap have led to some difficulties within the various tribunals involved in the resolution of employment related disputes. Over the last decade, the issues arising from the 1990s amendments have crystallized into important principles, which are discussed in this work. The thesis of this dissertation is that an examination of the development of the industrial and workers compensation laws in Western Australia in the 1990s establishes sufficient commonality between the industrial relations and compensation systems to warrant the rationalisation of these two jurisdictions.

The work in this thesis explore the DWT based video coding by the introduction of a novel DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) / MC (Motion Compensation) / DPCM (Differential Pulse Code Modulation) video coding framework, which adopts the EBCOT as the coding engine for both the intra- and the inter-frame coder. The adaptive switching mechanism between the frame/field coding modes is investigated for this coding framework. The Low-Band-Shift (LBS) is employed for the MC in the DWT domain. The LBS based MC is proven to provide consistent improvement on the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of the coded video over the simple Wavelet Tree (WT) based MC. The Adaptive Arithmetic Coding (AAC) is adopted to code the motion information. The context set of the Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (ABAC) for the inter-frame data is redesigned based on the statistical analysis. To further improve the perceived picture quality, a Perceptual Distortion Measure (PDM) based on human vi sion model is used for the EBCOT of the intra-frame coder. A visibility assessment of the quantization error of various subbands in the DWT domain is performed through subjective tests. In summary, all these findings have solved the issues originated from the proposed perceptual video coding framework. They include: a working DWT/MC/DPCM video coding framework with superior coding efficiency on sequences with translational or head-shoulder motion; an adaptive switching mechanism between frame and field coding mode; an effective LBS based MC scheme in the DWT domain; a methodology of the context design for entropy coding of the inter-frame data; a PDM which replaces the MSE inside the EBCOT coding engine for the intra-frame coder, which provides improvement on the perceived quality of intra-frames; a visibility assessment to the quantization errors in the DWT domain.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Law. / There are different notions of justice that support different reasons for compensating people injured in automobile accidents. The' traditional' method of compensating such persons is the tort system, which involves accident victim proving that fault of some other person caused their injury. This system is not a compensation scheme per se, but a means of shifting losses in accordance with community expectations. This system was criticised during the 20th-century for its inequity, expense and delay. Alternative compensation systems developed which supplement or replace tort as a means of access to compensation. These are divided into 'hybrid' systems - add-on, threshold and choice no-fault - and 'pure' no-fault. There are numerous arguments for and against each system and no one scheme has emerged as the system of choice internationally. In Australia, which is a Federation of states and territories, each jurisdiction has a separate scheme. The majority are fault based but with variations in benefit structures. There is also an add-on no-fault system in Tasmania, a threshold no-fault system in Victoria and a pure no-fault scheme covering residents of the Northern Territory. This pattern of diversity could be expected because of reluctance to embrace change when alternatives are not universally viewed as superior. Chapman and Trebilcock argue that the diversity signifies political instability that is not seen in other areas of law such as workplace injuries, products liability and medical malpractice. They hypothesise that because appreciation of facts surrounding automobile accidents and core values within communities across a Federation such as Australia should be similar, the probable reason for diversity is the existence of majority voting cycles and sequence dependent outcomes. A critical analysis of Chapman and Trebilcock's reasoning shows that their basic premise is faulty. An examination of the evidence from the structure of each Australian scheme, and the scheme reviews and debates on points of change during the period from 1970 to date, demonstrates that in relation to Australian automobile accident compensation schemes, Chapman and Trebilcock's theory is probably wrong, and the diversity is a result of rational democratic political processes.