Rethinking the Role of Recourse in the Sale of Financial Assets

The presence of recourse in the sale of a financial asset is generally thought to jeopardize the true sale treatment of the sale, especially in the event of the seller\u27s bankruptcy. This article examines the existing law and concludes that a transfer that qualifies as a sale under state law should be treated as a sale even if the buyer retains recourse to the seller, so long as recourse is limited to warranting that the asset will perform in accordance with its terms

The Immigrant Earnings Disadvantage across the Earnings and Skills Distributions: The Case of Immigrants from the EU’s New Member States in Ireland

As the movement of population from the New Member States (NMS) of the EU to the older members is a relatively new flow, it is important to build up our knowledge of who is moving within Europe and how they are performing in their destinations. In this paper, we analyse the earnings of immigrants in Ireland from the NMS using a new large-scale dataset on employees in Ireland. In so doing, we add to the emerging strand in the literature on immigrant earnings that looks beyond average earnings differentials and considers variations in such differentials across the earnings and skills distributions. We do this partly by using quantile regressions and also by analyzing earnings differentials within educational categories. We find that the average earnings difference between immigrants from the NMS and natives is between 10 percent and 18 percent, depending on the controls used. However, the difference is found to be either non-existent or low for people with low skill levels and for people at the lower end of the earnings distribution. The difference is higher for those at the upper ends of the skills and earnings distributions. This suggests that the transferability of human capital is a crucial determinant of the immigrant-native earnings gap for NMS immigrants in Ireland.new member states, Ireland, immigrant earnings, quantile regression

‘Yes-in-my-backyard’: Spatial differences in the valuation of forest services and local co-benefits for carbon markets in México

Forests provide many and large benefits, including cost-efficient climate change mitigation. However international carbon markets have not stimulated the demand for forestry offsets. Domestic market-mechanisms are emerging inmany countries and forests could be highly valued through these policies asmost of the benefits produced by forests are enjoyed locally. Here, a choice experiment explores drivers of valuation and willingness to pay for forest carbon services in voluntary markets in Mexico by comparing the valuation of citizens from four regions to test geographical preference for projects (n = 645). Findings from multinomial-logit models show valuation of forest carbon services is transferable and citizens would pay more for offsets from projects closer to their homes. Proximate forests provide a range of co-benefits to local users, including environmental services and opportunities for recreation. Factors related to valuation include sense of responsibility, previous knowledge of carbon emissions, previous visits to the sites, regional identification and the valuation of local environmental services (e.g. improvements in local air quality). Knowledge of spatial heterogeneity in valuation of the use of forest services can help to design market-based instruments by identifying highly valued areas for environmental services programs and carbon markets

Performance payments for carnivore conservation in Sweden

Solving carnivore-livestock conflicts is essential if goals to preserve biodiversity conservation are taken seriously and livelihoods especially of poor livestock owners are to be safeguarded. This paper presents an innovative performance payment approach for carnivore conservation, that has been successfully implemented in Sweden. Performance payments are made to reindeer herding Sami villages for certified carnivore offspring on the villages’ territories. First results support the assumption that this approach has the potential to solve many problems inherent to conventional compensation schemes. A well designed common pool regime is deemed necessary to direct the incentives set by the internal distribution of the performance payments toward collective action in carnivore conservation.Performance payments, Carnivore conservation, Sweden, Collective action, Environmental Economics and Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q2, Q57,

Sex Ratios, Divorce Laws and the Marriage Market

We show how an interaction between the skewness of the sex ratio and the jump in divorce rates after a liberalization in divorce laws can obtain in a model of marriage market matching with non-transferable utility. This model is partly motivated by a significant cross-country correlation between these two variables. We also find that men’s hopes or fears about women’s marriage market odds are self-confirming under mutual consent, resulting in multiple equilibria. The multiplicity vanishes with a more skewed sex ratio or a liberalization of divorce laws. Our work sheds some light on the possible implications of divorce liberalization and pro-marriage policies.Divorce, sex ratios, marriage, skewness, matching, non-transferable utility.

On Conditional Cryptocurrency With Privacy

In this paper, we present the design and imple-mentation of a conditional cryptocurrency system with privacy protection. Unlike the existing approaches that often depend on smart contracts where cryptocurrencies are first locked in a vault, and then released according to event triggers, the conditional cryptocurrency system encodes event outcome as part of a cryptocurrency note in a UTXO based system. Without relying on any triggering mechanism, the proposed system separates event processing from conditional coin transaction processing where conditional cryptocurrency notes can be transferred freely in an asynchronous manner, only with their asset values conditional to the linked event outcomes. The main advantage of such design is that it enables free trade of conditional assets and prevents assets from being locked. In this work, we demonstrate a method of confidential conditional coin by extending the Zerocoin data model and protocol. The system is implemented and evaluated using xJsnark

Multi-Attribute Choice Modeling of Australia’s Rivers and Wetlands: A Meta-Analysis of Ten Years of Research

A meta-analysis is presented of the empirical findings of 10 years of choice experiment applications to water and wetland management issues in Australia. A random effects Tobit model is estimated to investigate the suitability of using existing willingness to pay (WTP) values derived from estimated choice models for the purpose of benefits transfer. The random effects model outperforms the fixed effects model in terms of predictive power. An analysis of variance reveals that the survey method, sample size, and statistical model are important determinants of estimation precision and error. The use of different attributes, measurement units and levels in choice experiments makes it hard to compare WTP values for environmental attributes from different studies. The benefits associated with current and possible future use of the water resources are valued significantly higher than the nonuse benefits. Except for the systematically lower values for the Fitzroy, WTP values are more or less transferable across catchments. Other important control variables when transferring the results from choice models across water and wetland policy contexts include income levels of the population of beneficiaries and methodological study characteristics such as the number of choice tasks in the choice experiment.choice experiments, stated preferences, value transfer, validity

Endogenous games and mechanisms: Side payments among players

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of examples, including voluntary contribution public good games, Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly, principal–agent problems, and commons games, among others