Political Risk and Regulatory Risk: Issues in Emerging Markets Infrastructure Concessions

Political and regulatory risks, cause damage to countries and investors because of investment diminishing. When investments take place, those could increase services prices. Present work has as its objectives to characterize theoretically the problem, to study existent measures to face it, to know the available instruments to deal with it, and to draw some general conclusions on political and regulatory risks, and some specific conclusions referred to infrastructure concessions. The article is limited to the study of opportunistic behavior or governments.regulatory risks; Issues in Emerging Markets; Infrastructure Concessions

Kantian Dignity and Marxian Socialism

This paper offers an account of human dignity based on a discussion of Kant's moral and political philosophy and then shows its relevance for articulating and developing in a fresh way some normative dimensions of Marx’s critique of capitalism as involving exploitation, domination, and alienation, and the view of socialism as involving a combination of freedom and solidarity. What is advanced here is not Kant’s own conception of dignity, but an account that partly builds on that conception and partly criticizes it. The same is the case with the account of socialism in relation to Marx’s work. As articulated, Kantian dignity and Marxian socialism turn out to be quite appealing and mutually supportive

The conceptual structure of evolutionary biology: A framework from phenotypic plasticity

In this review, I approach the role of phenotypic plasticity as a key aspect of the conceptual framework of evolutionary biology. The concept of phenotypic plasticity is related to other relevant concepts of contemporary research in evolutionary biology, such as assimilation, genetic accommodation and canalization, evolutionary robustness, evolvability, evolutionary capacitance and niche construction. Although not always adaptive, phenotypic plasticity can promote the integration of these concepts to represent some of the dynamics of evolution, which can be visualized through the use of a conceptual map. Although the use of conceptual maps is common in areas of knowledge such as psychology and education, their application in evolutionary biology can lead to a better understanding of the processes and conceptual interactions of the complex dynamics of evolution. The conceptual map I present here includes environmental variability and variation, phenotypic plasticity and natural selection as key concepts in evolutionary biology. The evolution of phenotypic plasticity is important to ecology at all levels of organization, from morphological, physiological and behavioral adaptations that influence the distribution and abundance of populations to the structuring of assemblages and communities and the flow of energy through trophic levels. Consequently, phenotypic plasticity is important for maintaining ecological processes and interactions that influence the complexity of biological diversity. In addition, because it is a typical occurrence and manifests itself through environmental variation in conditions and resources, plasticity must be taken into account in the development of management and conservation strategies at local and global levels

Cutting the Dividends Tax…and Corporate Governance Too?

Economists tend to agree that the recent cutting of dividends taxes will encourage investment and reduce financial distress. In addition to creating these “benefits,” however, the tax cut can also increase governance costs. For example, by removing a bias for leveraged capital structures, the tax cut foregoes debt’s superiority on at least three dimensions: 1. Evaluating and monitoring demanders of financial capital; 2. Constraining managerial agents’ from opportunistically employing capital market proceeds; and 3. Encouraging non-financial stakeholders (e.g., employees, suppliers) to make firm-specific investments. Moreover, because these privately produced services contribute to the integrity of broader financial markets (i.e., a public good), competitive forces may not fully counter the tax cut’s governance consequences.Dividends Tax, Corporate Governance

Building machines that learn and think about morality

Lake et al. propose three criteria which, they argue, will bring artificial intelligence (AI) systems closer to human cognitive abilities. In this paper, we explore the application of these criteria to a particular domain of human cognition: our capacity for moral reasoning. In doing so, we explore a set of considerations relevant to the development of AI moral decision-making. Our main focus is on the relation between dual-process accounts of moral reasoning and model-free/model-based forms of machine learning. We also discuss how work in embodied and situated cognition could provide a valu- able perspective on future research

The Descent of Preferences

[A slightly revised version of this paper has been accepted by the BJPS] More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary scenarios accounting for the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values of discriminated states, available actions, or action-state pairings. The argument is an application the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected utilities can, under specified general conditions, be a powerful design solution to the problem of allocating the capacities of an agent in an efficient way. Preferences are for efficient action selection, and are a ‘fuel for success’ in the sense urged by Godfrey-Smith for true beliefs. They will tend to be favoured by selection when environments are complex in ways that matter to an organism, and when organisms have rich behavioural repertoires with heterogenous returns and costs.   The rationale suggested here is conditional, especially on contingencies in what design options are available to selection and on trade-offs associated with the costs of generating and processing representations of value. The unqualified efficiency rationale for preferences suggests that organisms should represent expected utilities in a comprehensive and consistent way, but none of them do. In the final stages of the paper I consider some of the ways in which design trade-offs compromise the implementation of preferences in organisms that have them

Integration, Cooperation and the Financing of Innovation

The purpose of this paper is to develop a joint analysis of the organizational and financial flexibility of the innovative firm. In this way, we complete by determinants linked to financing factors the choice between integration and inter-firms co-operative agreements. We deduce the superiority of co-operation to resolve the specialization-adaptability dilemma which faced the innovative firm.financing, innovation, integration, cooperation

Is managerial entrenchment always bad? A CSR approach

In this paper, we argue that managerial entrenchment may be positive when there is excessive external pressure from financial markets. In these situations, managers have more freedom to implement value-enhancing strategies, such those related to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities. This is a good-type of entrenchment. On the other hand, when the external pressure is not so high, given that the pressure is from inside the firm, managerial entrenchment is bad and the use of CSR investments may exacerbate the agency problem. We prove this claim in an empirical study conducted of 279 international firms that operate in 22 different countries for the period 2002-2005. These firms participate in two different institutional contexts: that of the Anglo-Saxon countries, where the pressure of financial markets is intensive, or that of the Continental European countries in which the corporate control mechanisms are mainly internal.