The analysis of tort law is one of the most influential and extensively developed applications of the economic approach in the study of law. Notwithstanding the exhaustive number of contributions on tort law and economics, several open questions remain that warrant further investigation. The general aim of this research project is to refine the traditional model of tort law in order to make it more realistic, updated with the recent technological progress and in line with the experimental results concerning prosocial behavior. This book is divided into six chapters: Chapters 1 and 6 provide an introduction and conclusions, respectively, while the remaining chapters are written in the form of separate yet related articles.

Perceptual centres, or P-centres, represent the perceptual moments of occurrence of acoustic signals - the 'beat' of a sound. P-centres underlie the perception and production of rhythm in perceptually regular speech sequences. P-centres have been model ed both in speech and non speech (music) domains. The three aims of this thesis were tost out current P-centre models to determine which best accounted for the experimental data b)to identify a candidate parameter to map P-centres onto (a local approach) as opposed to the previous global models which rely upon the whole signal to determine the P-centrethe final aim was to develop a model of P-centre location which could be applied to speech and non speech signals. The first aim was investigated by a series of experiments in whicha)speech from different speakers was nvestigated to determine whether different models could account for variation between speakersb)whether rendenng the amplitude time plot of a speech signal affects the P-centre of the signa whether increasing the amplitude at the offset of a speech signal alters P-centres in the production and perception of speech. The second aim was carried out by manipulating the rise time of different speech signals to determine whether the P-centre was affected, and whether the type of speech sound ramped affected the P-centre shift1 manipulating the rise time and decay time of a synthetic vowel to determine whether the onset alteration was had more affect on P-centre than the offset manipulationnd whether the duration of a vowel affected the P-centre, if other attributes (amplitude, spectral contents) were held constant. The third aim - modelling P-centres - was based on these results. The Frequency dependent Amplitude Increase Model of P-centre location (FAIM) was developed using a modelling protocol, the APU GammaTone Flterbank and the speech from different speakers. The P-centres of the stimuli corpus were highly predicted by attributes of the increase in amplitude within one output channel of the filterbank. When this was used to make predictions of the P-centres for all the stimuli used in the thesis, 85°c of the observed variance was accounted for. The FAIM approach combines aspects of previous speech and non speech models (Gordon 1987, Marcus 1981, Vos and Rasch 1981). P-centre were thus modelled n a non speech specific, local manner.

This Ph.D. thesis consists in three research papers focused on the relationship between media industry and the financial sector. The importance of a correct understanding what is the effect of media on financial markets is becoming increasingly important as long as fully informed markets hypothesis has been challenged. Therefore, if financial markets do not have access to complete information, the importance of information professionals, the media, follows. On the other side, another challenge for economic and finance scholar is to understand how financial features are able to influence media and to condition information disclosure. The main aim of this Ph.D. dissertation is to contribute to a better comprehension for both the phenomena. The first paper analyzes the effects of owning equity shares in a newspaper- publishing firm. The main findings show how for a firm being part of the ownership structure of a media firm ends to receive more and better coverage. This confirms the view in which owning a media outlet is a source of conflicts of interest. The second paper focuses on the effect of media-delivered information on financial markets. In the framework of IPO in the U.S. market, we found empirical evidence of a significant effect of the media role in the IPO pricing. Specifically, increasing the quantity and the quality of the coverage increases the first-day returns (i.e. the underpricing). Finally the third paper tries to summarize what has been done in studying the relationship between media and financial industries, putting together contributes from economic, business, and financial scholars. The main finding of this dissertation is therefore to have underlined the importance and the effectiveness of the relationship between media industry and the financial sector, contributing to the stream of research that investigates about the media role and media effectiveness in the financial and business sectors.

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The optical properties of Mg-doped InN thin films grown on YSZ substrates have been investigated by photoluminescence (PL). A series of InN:Mg samples with various Mg cell temperatures (TMg) were produced by molecular beam epitaxy. The effect of Mg concentration on PL emission properties have been explored by various excitation power and temperature dependent measurements. The PL spectra as a function of excitation power exhibited a pronounce blueshift, indicating prominent band filling caused by the Burstein-Moss effect. Meanwhile, a typical redshift was observed as temperature increased due to bandgap shrinkage. The samples with TMg below 210 ˚C have a dominant peak at energy of 0.68 eV. In contrast, the PL peak emissions for films with a high TMg between 210~230 ˚C were centred near 0.6 eV. No PL emission was observed from the films with TMg above 230 ˚C. By fitting with an empirical Arrhenius equation, the activation energies yield approximately 20 meV and 15 meV for the lower and higher energy transitions, respectively. The fundamental optical properties of Zn doped InN were also examined. InN:Zn films were grown under In-rich conditions. The samples showed well defined PL emission spectra implying that the quality of the film has been improved over the Mg-doped series. The PL spectra of InN:Zn exhibited prominent features containing various emission peaks. The combination of excitation power and temperature dependent measurements supports a precise determination for the origins of the observed transitions. The comparison between the optical properties of Mg and Zn doped InN provide the motivation for more precise quantitative interpretation of p-type InN.

Translation and mRNA degradation are tightly regulated upon stress where protein synthesis and mRNA decay are modulated to optimize the stress response. However, the mechanisms that regulate mRNA decay and translation during stress are not fully understood. In this thesis, I show that Dcp2, a major decapping enzyme, undergoes phosphorylation by Ste20 kinase during stress and promotes stabilization of ribosomal protein mRNAs as well as Dcp2 accumulation in Processing bodies (P-bodies) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. In addition, I have analyzed the role of P-bodies by examining how alterations in P-body assembly factors affect the transcriptome. Interestingly, I observe that Edc3, a component of P-bodies that promotes their assembly, can either stabilize or destabilize specific subsets of yeast mRNAs. I also show that Lsm4, a P-body component that mediates the assembly of P-bodies along with Edc3, promotes mRNA decay via its aggregation domain. These results argue that P-bodies can function as sites of mRNA degradation and storage for a subset of mRNAs by the localized accumulation of specific factors.

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