Are Public Policies Aimed In The Right Direction?: Analysis of the True Reason of Spanish Households for Have No Internet Access
Digital divide is one of the major problems of Information Society and is linked with social exclusion. This work is focus on Spain situation and its relative position in the European Union, and study the major key points of it through the household reasons for have no Internet Access, taking into account socio-economics variables, as a key point that can be help to understand the relative situation of Spain in the European Union related with ICT and to elaborate suitable public policies to reduce digital divide. Results have shown that the most important reason that Spanish households do not have access to Internet is that people feel they do not need it, because they not consider Internet useful or interesting. It is proposed the design of public policies that take into account the important lack of motivation and good attitude towards Internet in the most of Spanish households without Internet.
We study opening prices set simultaneously for German and French stocks in Frankfurt and Paris. In our model investors and traders based in the same country as the firm have better information on its value than foreign traders. Our theory implies that prices set on the domestic market differ from (and are more informationally efficient than) prices set on the foreign market. Empirically, we find significant price discrepancies between home and foreign prices, consistent with lack of integration of international financial markets. For German stocks, home prices are found to be informationally more efficient than foreign prices. The informational efficiency of French stock prices is comparable in the two markets when Frankfurt traders can observe Paris preopening prices before the opening.