An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

-The kinematics of the Eocene episode of compression between the Iberian and European plates is examined. It is p r o p d that the boundary between the two plates extended West of the Pyrenees, dong the Spanish marginal trench to end West of King's trough at a triple point junction. The pole of relative rotation computed within this hypothesis lies near5g0N; 62"W and the resulting shortening al...

In the wake of meltdowns at WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron, enormous attention has been focused on the companies' boards. It seems inconceivable that business disasters of such magnitude could happen without gross or even criminal negligence on the part of board members. And yet a close examination of those boards reveals no broad pattern of incompetence or corruption. In fact, they followed most of...

The rapid Arab-Islamic conquest during the early Middle Ages led to major political and cultural changes in the Mediterranean world. Although the early medieval Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula is now well documented, based in the evaluation of archeological and historical sources, the Muslim expansion in the area north of the Pyrenees has only been documented so far through textual sou...

The “SIG Pyrénées” is a socio-economic observatory of the Pyrenees Mountains. It has been gradually established over the last ten years by the Pyrenees Association for Mountain Economics (Assemblée Pyrénéenne d'Economie Montagnarde or APEM), an association created by the different consular structures of the Pyrenees Mountains. We will analyse it in its capacity as a territorial observatory, tha...

The landscape pattern in the high-mountains is significantly more complex than in the lowlands. Theories, models and methods which are usually applied in landscape studies (such as the geo-complex model and the patch-corridor-matrix model) are inadequate or insufficient in regard to high-mountains. The altitude is the main factor determining the multi-dimensionality of the high-mountain landsca...

We investigate the sources of changes in GDP volatility observed from 1966 to 2018. develop a general equilibrium model and calibrate it US data characterize contribution micro level productivity shocks, inter-sectoral linkages households' behavior aggregate volatility. Our results show that sectoral played an important role shaping asymmetries economy had different impact on over time. Moreove...