Partnership in Pensions? Responses to the Pensions Green Paper

The government's pensions Green Paper 'a new contract for welfare: partnership in pensions' proposes fundamental changes to the UK's retirement income system. Members of CASE and the Department of Social Policy at LSE have looked at the likely implications of the reforms for pensioner poverty, income security in old age, economic growth, the National Insurance system, tax reliefs, and women. Agulnik's analysis of redistributive effects of the State Second Pension (SSP) shows that it will result in much better benefits for low earners than would have been the case under SERPS. However, financing this improved provision through National Insurance contributions will mean that the burden of paying for the new scheme will be heaviest for those close to the upper earnings limit. Barr questions the macro-economic advantages of increasing the amount of funded pension provision via Stakeholder pensions. He finds there is no particular reason to favour the proposed balance of 60% private pension provision to 40% public provision over some other ratio. He also finds that Stakeholder pensions will not offer contributors complete income security in retirement due to uncertainties about investment returns, annuity rates and future inflation. Falkingham and Rake argue that the Government's proposals have failed to incorporate fully the needs of women. Women will be underrepresented amongst Stakeholder pensioners, and the exclusion of very low earners and carers with children over 5 from eligibility for the SSP will adversely affect women. Agulnik then looks at the proposed tax relief rules for Stakeholder pensions. While there are good reasons for the proposed £3,600 limit to tax relief on contributions, the retention of the existing rules for personal and occupational schemes is anomalous.new contract for welfare, partnership in pensions, UK retirement income system

The Geography of \u3cem\u3eRevlon\u3c/em\u3e-Land

In Revlon, Inc. v. MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings, Inc., the Delaware Supreme Court explained that, when a target board of directors enters Revlon-land, the board’s role changes from that of “defenders of the corporate bastion to auctioneers charged with getting the best price for the stockholders at a sale of the company.” Unfortunately, the Court’s colorful metaphor obfuscated some serious doctrinal problems. What standards of judicial review applied to director conduct outside the borders of Revlon-land? What standard applied to director conduct falling inside Revlon-land’s borders? And when did one enter that mysterious country? By the mid-1990s, the Delaware Supreme Court had worked out a credible set of answers to those questions. The seemingly settled rules made doctrinal sense and were sound from a policy perspective. Indeed, my thesis herein is that Revlon and its progeny should be praised for having grappled—mostly successfully—with the core problem of corporation law: the tension between authority and accountability. A fully specified account of corporate law must incorporate both values. On the one hand, corporate law must implement the value of authority in developing a set of rules and procedures providing efficient decision making. U.S. corporate law does so by adopting a system of director primacy. In the director primacy (a.k.a. board-centric) form of corporate governance, control is vested not in the hands of the firm’s so-called owners—the shareholders—who exercise virtually no control over either day-to-day operations or long-term policy, but in the hands of the board of directors and their subordinate professional managers. On the other hand, the separation of ownership and control in modern public corporations obviously implicates important accountability concerns, which corporate law must also address. Academic critics of Delaware’s jurisprudence typically err because they are preoccupied with accountability at the expense of authority. In contrast, or so I will argue, Delaware’s takeover jurisprudence correctly recognizes that both authority and accountability have value. Achieving the proper mix between these competing values is a daunting—but necessary—task. Ultimately, authority and accountability cannot be reconciled. At some point, greater accountability necessarily makes the decision-making process less efficient. Making corporate law therefore requires a careful balancing of these competing values. Striking such a balance is the peculiar genius of Unocal and its progeny. In recent years, however, the Delaware Chancery Court has gotten lost in Revlon-land. A number of chancery decisions have drifted away from the doctrinal parameters laid down by the Delaware Supreme Court. In this Article, I argue that they have done so because the Chancellors have misidentified the policy basis on which Revlon rests. Accordingly, I argue that chancery should adopt a conflict of interest–based approach to invoking Revlon, which focuses on where control of the resulting corporate entity rests when the transaction is complete

Securities Regulation and Social Media

Federal securities regulation originally divided corporate finance into two neat categories, public and private. In 1933, private financing was limited to “sophisticated” investors but otherwise lightly regulated. Public financing became heavily regulated. In 1982, the SEC introduced Reg D, which introduced the concept of “general solicitation” to clarify the distinction between public and private offerings. Reg D is well understood to prohibit newspaper advertisements and permit direct solicitations to venture capital investors. This enabled great wealth consolidation in regions like Silicon Valley while effectively banning general solicitations in private offerings. Now, social media communication challenges the definition of “general solicitation.” Although social media comes in a multitude of forms, there is no guidance as to whether a single post or tweet might violate securities regulations. Confusion and fear of violating the ban on general solicitation chills online investment, even though online investment technology offers new and better means of protecting investors from fraud and undue risk. Meanwhile, society has grown wary of regulations that tend to concentrate immense wealth amid a privileged few. Movements like Occupy Wall Street demanded that ordinary Americans gain equal access to financial markets, and legislators adopted equal access to capital as the national entrepreneurship policy. In today’s interconnected age, the general solicitation ban has a disparate impact on young, rural, poor, and otherwise less established entrepreneurs. It systematically advantages established, urban, wealthy, and other well- connected businesspeople. The unintended consequence of the general solicitation ban is a disparate impact upon the members of society who could benefit the most from entrepreneurial opportunities. The general solicitation ban helps the rich and well connected get richer while excluding new entrepreneurs and diverse investors from capital markets. The ban is technologically and socially out of date. Accordingly, the ban carries the heavy burden of proving that it prevents enough fraud to be worth its cost. It has not met this heavy burden. Therefore, the general solicitation ban should be abolished

A cambrian origin for vertebrate rods

Vertebrates acquired dim light vision when an ancestral cone evolved into the rod photoreceptor at an unknown stage preceding the last common ancestor of extant jawed vertebrates (~420 million years ago Ma). The jawless lampreys provide a unique opportunity to constrain the timing of this advance, as their line diverged ~505 Ma and later displayed high morphological stability. We recorded with patch electrodes the inner segment photovoltages and with suction electrodes the outer segment photocurrents of Lampetra fluviatilis retinal photoreceptors. Several key functional features of jawed vertebrate rods are present in their phylogenetically homologous photoreceptors in lamprey: crucially, the efficient amplification of the effect of single photons, measured by multiple parameters, and the flow of rod signals into cones. These results make convergent evolution in the jawless and jawed vertebrate lines unlikely and indicate an early origin of rods, implying strong selective pressure toward dim light vision in Cambrian ecosystems

Snake Oil Salesman or Purveyors of Knowledge: Off-Label Promotions and the Commercial Speech Doctrine

The Second Circuit’s December 2012 decision in United States v. Caronia striking down the prohibition on off-label marketing of pharmaceutical drugs has profound implications for economic regulation in general, calling into question the constitutionality of restrictions on the offer and sale of securities under the Securities Act of 1933, the solicitation of shareholder proxies and periodic reporting under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, mandatory labels on food, tobacco, and pesticides, and a wide range of privacy protections. In this Article we suggest that Caronia misconstrues the Supreme Court’s holding in Sorrell v. IMS Health, which was motivated by concerns of favoring one industry participant over another rather than a desire to return to the anti-regulator fervor of the Lochner era. Reexamining the theoretical justification for limiting truthful commercial speech shows that a more nuanced approach to regulating off-label marketing with the purpose of promoting public health and safety would pass constitutional muster. We argue that as long as the government both has a rational basis for subjecting a particular industry to limits on commercial speech intended to further a legitimate public interest, rather than unfounded paternalism, and does not discriminate against disfavored industry participants, those limits should be subject to intermediate scrutiny under the Central Hudson standard. We believe that our articulation of the commercial speech doctrine post-Sorrell will help resolve the current split in the Circuits on the appropriate standard of review in cases involving both restrictions on commercial speech and mandated speech. Finally, we critique the FDA’s 2011 Guidance for Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information (draft) and present a proposal for new rules for regulating the off-label marketing of pharmaceutical drugs based on transparency, the sophistication of the listener and the type of information offered, and the requirement that the pharmaceutical company comply with ongoing duties of training, monitoring, reporting, and auditing

Two-tier Intrusion Detection System for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Nowadays, a commonly used wireless network (i.e. Wi-Fi) operates with the aid of a fixed infrastructure (i.e. an access point) to facilitate communication between nodes when they roam from one location to another. The need for such a fixed supporting infrastructure limits the adaptability of the wireless network, especially in situations where the deployment of such an infrastructure is impractical. In addition, Wi-Fi limits nodes' communication as it only provides facility for mobile nodes to send and receive information, but not reroute the information across the network. Recent advancements in computer network introduced a new wireless network, known as a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET), to overcome these limitations. MANET has a set of unique characteristics that make it different from other kind of wireless networks. Often referred as a peer to peer network, such a network does not have any fixed topology, thus nodes are free to roam anywhere, and could join or leave the network anytime they desire. Its ability to be setup without the need of any infrastructure is very useful, especially in geographically constrained environments such as in a military battlefield or a disaster relief operation. In addition, through its multi hop routing facility, each node could function as a router, thus communication between nodes could be made available without the need of a supporting fixed router or an access point. However, these handy facilities come with big challenges, especially in dealing with the security issues. This research aims to address MANET security issues by proposing a novel intrusion detection system that could be used to complement existing prevention mechanisms that have been proposed to secure such a network. A comprehensive analysis of attacks and the existing security measures proved that there is a need for an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect MANETs against security threats. The analysis also suggested that the existing IDS proposed for MANET are not immune against a colluding blackmail attack due to the nature of such a network that comprises autonomous and anonymous nodes. The IDS architecture as proposed in this study utilises trust relationships between nodes to overcome this nodes' anonymity issue. Through a friendship mechanism, the problems of false accusations and false alarms caused by blackmail attackers in global detection and response mechanisms could be eliminated. The applicability of the friendship concept as well as other proposed mechanisms to solve MANET IDS related issues have been validated through a set of simulation experiments. Several MANET settings, which differ from each other based on the network's density level, the number of initial trusted friends owned by each node, and the duration of the simulation times, have been used to study the effects of such factors towards the overall performance of the proposed IDS framework. The results obtained from the experiments proved that the proposed concepts are capable to at least minimise i f not fully eliminate the problem currently faced in MANET IDS

The odd fiscal ‘implicit bargain’ in the Eurozone. A continental view of sovereignty.

At present, the European customs and currency union finds itself in a transitional period. It has not yet politically unified in a federal body, nonetheless it has prematurely bound constituents by ‘hard law’ fiscal limitations mainly by way of the Maastricht Treaty. In other words, it is caught in an odd \u27implicit bargain’ (Goodhart) where members are expected to abide by de jure fiscal constraints with no central authority having the fiscal capabilities for stabilization, redistribution, and state-building (Arrighi) expenditures --all of which are indispensable in modern credit (money) economies. The belief underlying the present paper is that by making use of continental economic traditions, reliant on statecraft, an alternative conceptual basis for rethinking continental unity can be forged. Specifically, we look at the work of List, Keynes, and the chartalists. The work of F. List sets European economic unification in its historic place as a strategy founded in large part on exploiting economies of scale (demand and supply-side), by political and economic aggregation of smaller non-self sustaining markets, for ‘catching-up’ with world economic leaders. Keynes’s international economics is revisited as an orienting blueprint for how the European customs and currency union can address the particularity of economic unification among sovereigns absent political unity. Chartalist views are invaluable for an understanding of the political nature of the European Central Bank as it often clumsily attempts to hold together the Union. Despite its differential treatment of members, the ECB has the potential to become a centerpiece institution in the consolidation of Europe as a self-sustaining pole of international effective demand. The overriding leitmotiv binding together the different authors and traditions discussed is that of European economic sovereignty in a region continuously struggling to balance political independence with economic co-dependence and unity