Interest Groups and Trade Reform in Mexico

Mexico experienced widespread economic reform in the last two decades. From being a protectionist economy with a policy of import substitution, it has turned into an export-oriented open economy. Why was protectionism a stable policy, and how was it overturned by a reform that went against entrenched interests? I apply a game theoretic model of political influence and economic reform to answer these questions using data to calculate the payoffs for the relevant interest groups. In the underlying cooperative game, the core is empty and a protectionist coalition of import-substituting firms and the government was "stable" until the eighties. Adjusting the model's parameters to changes in the government's financing options in the late eighties and early nineties leads to a different and unique outcome. In the predicted outcome a free trade policy is adopted through cooperation between all players.Trade Reform, Mexico, Coalition Formation, Aspirations, Cooperative Games, Interest Groups

Consumer Cooperatives: An Alternative Institutional Model for Delivery of Urban Water Supply and Sanitation Services?

This paper describes the essential characteristics of consumer cooperatives engaged in the provision of basic services and discusses their applicability as a model for water supply and sanitation service provision in urban areas. A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise. The paper focuses on system-wide urban water supply cooperatives and it is thus not concerned with urban or peri-urban cooperatives that depend on either boreholes or bulk purchases of water from a utility for distribution, nor does it refer to rural water supply cooperatives that are generally small. After a general overview of cooperatives and a discussion of the main characteristics of utility cooperatives, the paper reviews the case of SAGUAPAC, a successful urban WSS cooperative in Bolivia, from which it draws some conclusions in the form of a preliminary assessment of cooperatives as a model for delivery of urban water supply and sanitation (WSS) services

Lattice Path Matroids: Structural Properties

This paper studies structural aspects of lattice path matroids, a class of transversal matroids that is closed under taking minors and duals. Among the basic topics treated are direct sums, duals, minors, circuits, and connected flats. One of the main results is a characterization of lattice path matroids in terms of fundamental flats, which are special connected flats from which one can recover the paths that define the matroid. We examine some aspects related to key topics in the literature of transversal matroids and we determine the connectivity of lattice path matroids. We also introduce notch matroids, a minor-closed, dual-closed subclass of lattice path matroids, and we find their excluded minors.Comment: 34 pages, 15 figure

Representation of Numerical Semigroups by Dyck Paths

We introduce square diagrams that represent numerical semigroups and we obtain an injection from the set of numerical semigroups into the set of Dyck paths.Comment: Short not

Communication system for a tooth-mounted RF sensor used for continuous monitoring of nutrient intake

In this Thesis, the communication system of a wearable device that monitors the user’s diet is studied. Based in a novel RF metamaterial-based mouth sensor, different decisions have to be made concerning the system’s technologies, such as the power source options for the device, the wireless technology used for communications and the method to obtain data from the sensor. These issues, along with other safety rules and regulations, are reviewed, as the first stage of development of the Food-Intake Monitoring projectOutgoin

A Theory of Political Influence and Economic Organization

I propose a cooperative game theory model of economic reform in a political environment with interest groups. Agents in a better economic position have strategic advantage in formulating economic policy. Agents bargain over policies because they are associated with different income distributions. In this context I examine the robustness of the `Coase Theorem' prediction of efficient bargaining. I use the Aspiration Core and the Aspiration Bargaining Set as solutions to the cooperative game. Even under zero transaction costs, if endogenous coalition formation is allowed, bargaining between interest groups need not result in efficient economic change because the core may be empty. Indeed, I show that there are inefficient equilibrium outcomes if and only if the core is empty.Political Economy, Interest Groups, Institutional Change, Coalition Formation, Cooperative Games, Aspiration Solution Concepts