Rewriting Fair Use and the Future of Copyright Reform

This essay describes a social practices approach to the production of creative expression, as a construct to guide reform of copyright law. Specifically, it reimagines copyright's fair use doctrine by basing its statutory text explicitly on social practices. It argues that the social practices approach is consistent with the historical development of the fair use doctrine and with the policy goals of copyright law, and that the approach should be recognized in the text of the statute as well as in judicial applications of fair use

Implementation of a Port-graph Model for Finance

In this paper we examine the process involved in the design and implementation of a port-graph model to be used for the analysis of an agent-based rational negligence model. Rational negligence describes the phenomenon that occurred during the financial crisis of 2008 whereby investors chose to trade asset-backed securities without performing independent evaluations of the underlying assets. This has contributed to motivating the search for more effective and transparent tools in the modelling of the capital markets. This paper shall contain the details of a proposal for the use of a visual declarative language, based on strategic port-graph rewriting, as a visual modelling tool to analyse an asset-backed securitisation market.Comment: In Proceedings TERMGRAPH 2018, arXiv:1902.0151

The Critical Tax Project, Feminist Theory, and Rewriting Judicial Opinions

Introduction to Symposium on Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Tax Opinions

Cultural Appropriation and the Plains\u27 Indian Headdress

“Cultural appropriation” can be defined as the borrowing from someone else’s culture without their permission and without acknowledgement to the victim culture’s past. Recently there has been a conversation taking place between Native American communities and non-Indian communities over cases of cultural appropriation, specifically the misuse of the Plains’ Indian headdress, which Natives compare to the Medal of Honor. The “hipster subculture”, which can be defined as a generally pro-consumerist, anti-capitalist group of middle-to-upper class non-Indian Americans, has selectively appropriated aspects of many minority cultures; this action has heavily trended toward aspects of Native American culture. As a result, Native Americans have reacted with outrage as they perceive the offenses to be products of insensitivity, ignorance and prejudice. Although there are many justifications behind the actions of the hipster subculture, ultimately, studies suggest that the reasons for appropriation have been subconscious and unknown even to the subculture itself. Because they do not have a consistent body of rites and cultural traditions, middle-to-upper class non-Indian Americans who belong to the hipster subculture selectively appropriate aspects of minority culture such as the Plains’ Indian headdresses, not to offend its significance, but in order to subconsciously make it, and all they believe it stands for, a part of their own culture

Trading Dynamics with Adverse Selection and Search: Market Freeze, Intervention and Recovery

We study the trading dynamics in an asset market where the quality of assets is private information of the owner and finding a counterparty takes time. When trading of a financial asset ceases in equilibrium as a response to an adverse shock to asset quality, a large player can resurrect the market by purchasing bad assets which involves financial losses. The equilibrium response to such a policy is intricate as it creates an announcement effect: a mere announcement of intervening at a later point in time can cause markets to function again. This effect leads to a gradual recovery in trading volume, with asset prices converging non-monotonically to their normal values. The optimal policy is to intervene immediately at a minimal scale when markets are deemed important and losses are small. As losses increase and the importance of the market declines, the optimal intervention is delayed and it can be desirable to rely more on the announcement effect by increasing the size of the intervention. Search frictions are important for all these results. They compound adverse selection, making a market more fragile with respect to a classic lemons problem. They dampen the announcement effect and cause the optimal policy to be more aggressive, leading to an earlier intervention at a larger scale.Trading Dynamics, Adverse Selection, Search, Intervention in Asset Markets, Announcement Effect

The Conundrum of Covered Bonds

Covered bonds, which have been part of European fi nance since the time of Frederick the Great, are now being widely touted as the answer to securitization’s imperfections. There is great confusion, though, about the nature of covered bonds and their relationship to secured bond fi nancing and securitization. This article attempts to demystify covered bonds, examining how they fi t within a larger fi nancing framework, analyzing their legal rights and obligations, and comparing their costs and benefi ts. The benefi ts of covered bonds are similar to those of securitization; both can access low-cost capital market funding with low risk to their investors, and both can be used to regenerate lending markets. The costs of covered bonds may be higher, though, because the “dynamic” collateral pools and “dual” recourse to the issuer that protect covered bonds shift virtually all risk to unsecured creditors. Whether that risk should be allowed to be shifted so asymmetrically is a policy question for any nascent covered bond regime

Financial Intermediaries and Transaction Costs

We present an overlapping generations model with spatial separation and agents who face unsystematic liquidity risk. In a pure exchange economy, agents engage in life cycle portfolio rebalancing. In an intermediated economy, intergenerational banks or mutual funds cater to diversified clienteles so as to avoid rebalancing transactions. In equilibrium, these intermediaries pay redemptions with portfolio income and never sell secondary assets. We also find that the pure exchange economy has a downward sloping yield curve and is inherently cyclical.Financial Intermediation, Overlapping Generations, Liquidity.

The Impact of Short-Sale Constraints on Asset Allocation Strategies via the Backward Markov Chain Approximation Method

This paper considers an asset allocation strategy over a finite period under investment uncertainty and short-sale constraints as a continuous time stochastic control problem. Investment uncertainty is characterised by a stochastic interest rate and inflation risk. If there are no short-sale constraints, the optimal asset allocation strategy can be solved analytically. We consider several kinds of short-sale constraints and employ the backward Markov chain approximation method to explore the impact of short-sale constraints on asset allocation decisions. Our results show that the short-sale constraints do indeed have a significant impact on the asset allocation decisions.