Sovereign-debt Renegotiations: A Strategic Analysis

The process of debt-rescheduling between a creditor and a sovereign (LDC) debtor is modeled as a noncooperative game built on a one-sector growth model. The creditor's threat to impose default penalties is ignored here as inherently incredible; instead, the debtor's motivation for repayment is to reap benefits from attaining an improved credit standing in international capital markets. The creditor can forgive portions of the outstanding debt so that a real-time bargaining process results with concessions being in the form of debt-service payments by the debtor and debt forgiveness by the creditor. Subgame-perfect equilibria of the game are characterized the main finding is that these all result in Pareto optima in which the creditor extracts all the surplus.

Children Are Constitutionally Different, But Life Without Parole and De Facto Life Sentences Are Not: Extending \u3ci\u3eGraham\u3c/i\u3e and \u3ci\u3eMiller\u3c/i\u3e to De Facto Life Sentences

Under the U.S. Supreme Court’s current juvenile sentencing jurisprudence, a juvenile may legally receive a prison sentence of hundreds of years without parole in instances in which a sentence of life without parole would be unconstitutional. This illogical state of affairs is the result of the Court’s silence on whether its holdings in Graham v. Florida and Miller v. Alabama, which together limit the availability of juvenile life without parole sentences, also apply to so-called de facto life sentences. De facto life sentences are lengthy term-of-years sentences that confine offenders to prison for the majority, if not the entirety, of their lives. Whether Graham and Miller apply to such sentences has been the subject of staunch disagreement among various federal courts of appeals, leaving some juvenile defendants’ hopes for eventual life out of prison up to the interpretive whims of the judges in their jurisdiction. This Note contends that although the Supreme Court has taken important steps toward protecting juveniles from receiving cruel life without parole sentences, its decisions mean little if sentencing judges are allowed to impose term-of-years sentences that are functionally equivalent. This Note argues that to close this sentencing loophole, Graham and Miller should apply equally to life without parole and de facto life sentences. Given the Supreme Court’s apparent unwillingness to clarify this issue, this Note posits that it is incumbent upon state courts to step in. By extending Graham and Miller to bar de facto life sentences under their state constitutions, state judges would not only protect juveniles from cruel and unusual punishment, but also create the basis for more expansive Supreme Court juvenile sentencing jurisprudence in the future

Derivative-free methods for mixed-integer nonsmooth constrained optimization

In this paper, we consider mixed-integer nonsmooth constrained optimization problems whose objective/constraint functions are available only as the output of a black-box zeroth-order oracle (i.e., an oracle that does not provide derivative information) and we propose a new derivative-free linesearch-based algorithmic framework to suitably handle those problems. We first describe a scheme for bound constrained problems that combines a dense sequence of directions (to handle the nonsmoothness of the objective function) with primitive directions (to handle discrete variables). Then, we embed an exact penalty approach in the scheme to suitably manage nonlinear (possibly nonsmooth) constraints. We analyze the global convergence properties of the proposed algorithms toward stationary points and we report the results of an extensive numerical experience on a set of mixed-integer test problems