Sovereign Wealth Funds and Global Justice

Dozens of countries have established Sovereign Wealth Funds in the last decade or so, in the majority of cases employing those funds to manage the large revenues gained from selling resources such as oil and gas on a tide of rapidly rising commodity prices. These funds have raised a series of ethical questions, including just how the money contained in such funds should eventually be spent. This article engages with that question, and specifically seeks to connect debates on SWFs with debates on global justice. Just how good are national claims to the great wealth contained in SWFs in the first place? Using the example of Norway's very large SWF – derived from selling North-Sea petroleum – I show that national claims are at least sometimes very weak, with the implication that the wealth in many such funds is ripe for redistribution in the interests of global justice. I conclude by offering some guidance for how the money contained in such funds could best be spent, with the goal of advancing global justice

Adaptive testing on a regression function at a point

We consider the problem of inference on a regression function at a point when the entire function satisfies a sign or shape restriction under the null. We propose a test that achieves the optimal minimax rate adaptively over a range of H\"{o}lder classes, up to a $\log\log n$ term, which we show to be necessary for adaptation. We apply the results to adaptive one-sided tests for the regression discontinuity parameter under a monotonicity restriction, the value of a monotone regression function at the boundary and the proportion of true null hypotheses in a multiple testing problem.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOS1342 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A Curator's Perspective: Communities in Communication, July-December 2014

As with any exhibition, intellectual and practical concerns combined to shape Communities in Communication: Languages and Cultures in the Low Countries, 1450-1530. In practical terms, I was keen to showcase the substantial holdings of the John Rylands Library from and about this dynamic culture. The corpus has been built up over more than a century: one manuscript, French MS 144, was acquired as recently as 1997.1 Yet libraries and users worldwide can easily underestimate how much material relates to the Low Countries. Catalogues invariably classify documents by language and/or medium; a practice exemplified by the very shelfmark of French MS 144, and which obscures the connections between the cultural products of a region where books were produced in Dutch, French, English, and Latin, and in both manuscript and print.2 Communities in Communication was conceived partly to counter this tendency towards fragmentation

What good are markets in punishment?

There are two chronically unexamined assumptions about privatisation in punishment. First is the idea that it is a relatively new development. In fact, penal activity has always been (at least partly) private. Second, it is assumed that the state can create a market when and where it wants. This article aims to unpack such intuitions in order to expose neglected aspects of privatisation in punishment. I argue that the experiment with the kinds of privatisation that sceptics worry most about, private companies owning and running whole prisons, has amounted to a ripple rather than a tidal wave in the sea of penal activity. Attempts to increase the private sector's role have largely failed to produce efficient markets. These activities have been transformative, however, by instilling a market ethos among public servants and a professional identity as business managers rather than as agents of social control. A case study of an American jurisdiction that attempted to privatise all of its youth justice institutions provides the data for this analysis