Relational Investing and Agency Theory

This Article analyzes how, and when, corporate governance could be improved by utilizing "relational investing." The term relational investing is just coming into vogue and there does not yet seem to be a consensus on what it means. Although the term has been trumpeted on the cover of Business Week, before the Conference on Relational Investing at Columbia University, relatively little legal writing had been published on the subject. For the purposes of this Article, we define relational investing to encompass commitments to buy and hold significant blocks of a corporation's stock. And it is particularly important that the relational investors commit not to tender their shares to hostile bidders. Using our definition, relational investing is used to foreclose or reduce hostile takeover threats, replacing this form of external discipline with enhanced internal discipline by the relational investors. The long-term investment induces the relational shareholders to invest more in acquiring information about the effectiveness of management. To be effective internal monitors, however, relational investors must be able to use this information to influence corporate policy. At a minimum, relational investors must be "provocable" -- they must be able to increase the likelihood that poor management or poor policies will be changed. Relational investors might accomplish these changes through either internal (informal negotiation or proxy contest) or external (tender offer) means.Relational Investing; Takeovers; Agency Costs; Moral Hazard

Deficit Reduction Through Diversity: How Affirmative Action at the FCC Increased Auction Competition

In recent auctions for paging licenses, the Federal Communications Commission has granted businesses owned by minorities and women substantial bidding credits. In this article, Professors Ayres and Cramton analyze a particular auction and argue that the affirmative action bidding preferences, by increasing competition among auction participants, increased the government's revenue by $45 million. Subsidizing the participation of new bidders can induce established bidders to bid more aggressively. The authors conclude that this revenue- enhancing effect does not provide a sufficient constitutional justification for affirmative action-but when such justification is independently present, affirmative actions can cost the government much less than is currently thought.Auctions; Affirmative Action

Ultraviolet Spectroscopy of Rapidly-Rotating Solar-Mass Stars: Emission Line Redshifts as a Test of the Solar-Stellar Connection

We compare high-resolution ultraviolet spectra of the Sun and thirteen solarmass main sequence stars with different rotational periods that serve as proxies for their different ages and magnetic field structures. In this the second paper in the series, we study the dependence of ultraviolet emission-line centroid velocities on stellar rotation period, as rotation rates decrease from that of the Pleiades star HII314 (Prot = 1.47 days) to Alpha Cen A (Prot = 28 days). Our stellar sample of F9 V to G5 V stars consists of six stars observed with the Cosmic Origins 1Guest Observer, NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and User of the Data Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Spectrograph on HST and eight stars observed with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph on HST. We find a systematic trend of increasing redshift with more rapid rotation (decreasing rotation period) that is similar to the increase in line red shift between quiet and plage regions on the Sun. The fastest-rotating solar-mass star in our study, HII314, shows significantly enhanced redshifts at all temperatures above log T = 4.6, including the corona, which is very different from the redshift pattern observed in the more slowly-rotating stars. This difference in the redshift pattern suggests that a qualitative change in the magnetic-heating process occurs near Prot = 2 days. We propose that HII314 is an example of a solar-mass star with a magnetic heating rate too large for the physical processes responsible for the redshift pattern to operate in the same way as for the more slowly rotating stars. HII314 may therefore lie above the high activity end of the set of solar-like phenomena that is often called the "solar-stellar connection".Comment: 36 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, to appear in the Astrophysical Journal July 201

Foucault's asceticism and the subject of AIDS

textAlthough Foucault elaborated upon the socio-political possibilities he associated with a “homosexual ascesis” in several other interviews and writings, his death from AIDS in 1984 kept him from continuing to speak about this his final project. My dissertation, Foucault’s Asceticism and the Subject of AIDS, will argue for the contemporary significance of Foucault’s call for a “homosexual ascesis” by placing Foucault’s last work on the genealogy of asceticism into direct dialogue with three of his intellectual and artistic peers: Derek Jarman, Herve Guibert and David Wojnarowicz. Like Foucault, all three men died of AIDS; unlike him, they left us a prolific literary and visual documentation of their experience with the disease. Drawing upon Foucault’s historical-theoretical discussions of asceticism to identify interpretive topoi for reading these AIDS self-writings, my goal in this dissertation is twofold: 1) to reveal the specificity of Foucault’s transvaluation of asceticism and in doing so, to contribute to the work of current scholars who seek to refine and extend our grasp of Foucault’s late theories of subjectivity; and 2) to argue for the important place Foucault’s “asceticism” must have within our ongoing attempts at understanding how AIDS has impacted the formation of homosexual subjectivities and cultures.Englis

Relational Investing and Agency Theory

This Article analyzes how, and when, corporate governance could be improved by utilizing relational investing. The term relational investing is just coming into vogue and there does not yet seem to be a consensus on what it means. Although the term has been trumpeted on the cover of Business Week, before the Conference on Relational Investing at Columbia University, relatively little legal writing had been published on the subject. For the purposes of this Article, we define relational investing to encompass commitments to buy and hold significant blocks of a corporation\u27s stock. And it is particularly important that the relational investors commit not to tender their shares to hostile bidders. Using our definition, relational investing is used to foreclose or reduce hostile takeover threats, replacing this form of external discipline with enhanced internal discipline by the relational investors. The long-term investment induces the relational shareholders to invest more in acquiring information about the effectiveness of management. To be effective internal monitors, however, relational investors must be able to use this information to influence corporate policy. At a minimum, relational investors must be provocable —they must be able to increase the likelihood that poor management or poor policies will be changed. Relational investors might accomplish these changes through either internal (informal negotiation or proxy contest) or external (tender offer) means

Q-Word As Red Herring: Why Disparate Impact Liability Does Not Induce Hiring Quotas

The debates over the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act\u27 were marked by passionate disagreement: conservatives objected to the legislation as an unwarranted interference with employers\u27 freedom of contract, while liberal supporters considered it a first step toward racial justice. While disagreement about what employment discrimination law should do has continued-in much the same form-to this day, there has been surprising consensus about the mechanism by which Title VII actually works: whether it is thought of as inadequate or excessive, Title VII is usually presumed to promote the hiring of those it is designed to protect.\u27The logic underlying this presumption is simple: by making employers liable for failures to hire based on race (or other forbidden grounds), the law raises the price of such discriminatory activity and produces less of it than would occur if employers were left completely free to hire whomever they wished

Deficit Reduction Through Diversity: How Affirmative Action at the FCC Increased Auction Competition

In recent auctions for paging licenses, the Federal Communications Commission has granted businesses owned by minorities and women substantial bidding credits. In this article, Professors Ayres and Cramton analyze a particular auction and argue that the affirmative action bidding preferences, by increasing competition among auction participants, increased the government\u27s revenue by $45 million. Subsidizing the participation of new bidders can induce established bidders to bid more aggressively. The authors conclude that this revenue-enhancing effect does not provide a sufficient constitutional justification for affirmative action—but when such justification is independently present, affirmative actions can cost the government much less than is currently thought

Molecular absorption in transition region spectral lines

Aims: We present observations from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) of absorption features from a multitude of cool atomic and molecular lines within the profiles of Si IV transition region lines. Many of these spectral lines have not previously been detected in solar spectra. Methods: We examined spectra taken from deep exposures of plage on 12 October 2013. We observed unique absorption spectra over a magnetic element which is bright in transition region line emission and the ultraviolet continuum. We compared the absorption spectra with emission spectra that is likely related to fluorescence. Results: The absorption features require a population of sub-5000 K plasma to exist above the transition region. This peculiar stratification is an extreme deviation from the canonical structure of the chromosphere-corona boundary . The cool material is not associated with a filament or discernible coronal rain. This suggests that molecules may form in the upper solar atmosphere on small spatial scales and introduces a new complexity into our understanding of solar thermal structure. It lends credence to previous numerical studies that found evidence for elevated pockets of cool gas in the chromosphere.Comment: accepted by A&A Letter