Capital markets and the market structure of foreign investments

Contrary to the long-received theory of FDI, interest rates or rates of return can motivate foreign direct investment (FDI) in concert with the benefits of direct ownership. Thus, access to investor capital and capital markets is a vital component of the multinational’s competitive market structure. Moreover, multinationals can use their superior financial capacity as a competitive advantage in exploiting FDI opportunities in dynamic markets. They can also mitigate higher levels of foreign business risks under dynamic conditions by shifting more financial risk to creditors in the host economy. Furthermore, the investor’s expectation of foreign business risk necessarily commands a risk premium for exposing their equity to foreign market risk. Multinationals can modify the profit maximization strategy of their foreign subsidiaries to maximize growth or profits to generate this risk premium. In this context, we investigate how foreign subsidiaries manage their capital funding, business risk, and profit strategies with a diverse sample of 8,000 matched parents and foreign subsidiary accounts from multiple industries in 38 countries.We find that interest rates, asset prices, and expectations in capital markets have a significant effect on the capital movements of foreign subsidiaries. We also find that foreign subsidiaries mitigate their exposure to foreign business risk by modifying their capital structure and debt maturity. Further, we show how the operating strategy of foreign subsidiaries affects their preference for growth or profit maximization. We further show that superior shareholder value, which is a vital link for access to capital for funding foreign expansion in open market economies, is achieved through maintaining stability in the rate of growth and good asset utilization

Video Conversations - The Future of the Colorado River

This video series explores key Colorado River management issues with key managers across the basin. Video discussions in the table on the next page are presented in the order they were recorded. Topics include river ecosystems, California, Upper Basin, Tribal, and Federal perspectives, as well as future hydrology and climate. Each video runs for 60 to 90 minutes. Speakers start by describing how they got to the place they are professionally. There are prepared remarks and questions and answers from participants who attended at the time the video was recorded. Links to suggested readings are provided. Click the VIDEO url to access the video. Several early videos are no longer available but slides are provided. Asynchronous discussion prompts for select videos are noted in the far right column of the table and appear below the table. This series was produced during April and early May 2020 as part of the courses CEE 6490 Integrated River Basins Watershed Planning and Management and WATS 6330/5330 Large River Management at Utah State University co-taught by David Rosenberg and Jack Schmidt. The video series was produced as an alternative to a multi-day field trip to Glen Canyon Dam and Lees Ferry and face-to-face meetings with stakeholders that was canceled because of university travel restrictions imposed on March 11, 2020. Additional videos have been produced after May 2020 and are available at https://qcnr.usu.edu/coloradoriver/learn/

The Puzzles and Possibilities of Article V

Legal scholars describe Article V of the U.S. Constitution, which sets forth rules for amending the document, as an uncommonly stringent and specific constitutional provision. A unanimous Supreme Court has said that a “mere reading demonstrates” that “Article V is clear in statement and in meaning, contains no ambiguity, and calls for no resort to rules of construction.” Although it is familiar that a small set of amendments, most notably the Reconstruction Amendments, elicited credible challenges to their validity, these episodes are seen as anomalous and unrepresentative. Americans are accustomed to disagreeing over the meaning of the constitutional text, but at least in the text itself we assume we can find some objective common ground. This paper calls into question each piece of this standard picture of Article V. Neither the language nor the law of Article V supplies a determinate answer to a long list of fundamental puzzles about the amendment process. Legally questionable amendments have not been the exception throughout U.S. history; they have been the norm. After detailing these descriptive claims, the paper explores their doctrinal and theoretical implications. Appreciating the full extent of Article V’s ongoing ambiguity, we suggest, counsels a new approach to judging the validity of contested amendments, undermines some of the premises of originalism and textualism, and helps us to see new possibilities for constitutional change. Because the success or failure of attempted amendments turns out not to be exclusively or even primarily a function of following the rules laid out in the canonical document, all constitutional amending in an important sense takes place outside Article V

An Updated Midline Rule: Visual Callosal Connections Anticipate Shape and Motion in Ongoing Activity across the Hemispheres

It is generally thought that callosal connections (CCs) in primary visual cortices serve to unify the visual scenery parted in two at the vertical midline (VM). Here, we present evidence that this applies also to visual features that do not cross yet but might cross the VM in the future. During reversible deactivation of the contralateral visual cortex in cats, we observed that ipsilaterally recorded neurons close to the border between areas 17 and 18 receive selective excitatory callosal input on both ongoing and evoked activity. In detail, neurons responding well to a vertical Gabor patch moving away from the deactivated hemifield decreased prestimulus and stimulus-driven activity much more than those preferring motion toward the cooled hemifield. Further, activity of neurons responding to horizontal lines decreased more than the response to vertical lines. Embedding a single Gabor into a collinear line context selectively stabilized responses, especially when the context was limited to the intact hemifield. These findings indicate that CCs interconnect not only neurons coding for similar orientations but also for similar directions of motion. We conclude that CCs anticipate stimulus features that are potentially relevant for both hemifields (i.e., coherent motion but also collinear shape) because already prestimulus activity and activity to stimuli not crossing the VM revealed feature specificity. Finally, we hypothesize that intrinsic and callosal networks processing different orientations and directions are anisotropic close to the VM facilitating perceptual grouping along likely future motion or (shape) trajectories before the visual stimulus arrives

Integral points on elliptic curves and explicit valuations of division polynomials

Assuming Lang's conjectured lower bound on the heights of non-torsion points on an elliptic curve, we show that there exists an absolute constant C such that for any elliptic curve E/Q and non-torsion point P in E(Q), there is at most one integral multiple [n]P such that n > C. The proof is a modification of a proof of Ingram giving an unconditional but not uniform bound. The new ingredient is a collection of explicit formulae for the sequence of valuations of the division polynomials. For P of non-singular reduction, such sequences are already well described in most cases, but for P of singular reduction, we are led to define a new class of sequences called elliptic troublemaker sequences, which measure the failure of the Neron local height to be quadratic. As a corollary in the spirit of a conjecture of Lang and Hall, we obtain a uniform upper bound on h(P)/h(E) for integer points having two large integral multiples.Comment: 41 pages; minor corrections and improvements to expositio

Capital markets and the market structure of foreign investments

Contrary to the long-received theory of FDI, interest rates or rates of return can motivate foreign direct investment (FDI) in concert with the benefits of direct ownership. Thus, access to investor capital and capital markets is a vital component of the multinational’s competitive market structure. Moreover, multinationals can use their superior financial capacity as a competitive advantage in exploiting FDI opportunities in dynamic markets. They can also mitigate higher levels of foreign business risks under dynamic conditions by shifting more financial risk to creditors in the host economy. Furthermore, the investor’s expectation of foreign business risk necessarily commands a risk premium for exposing their equity to foreign market risk. Multinationals can modify the profit maximization strategy of their foreign subsidiaries to maximize growth or profits to generate this risk premium. In this context, we investigate how foreign subsidiaries manage their capital funding, business risk, and profit strategies with a diverse sample of 8,000 matched parents and foreign subsidiary accounts from multiple industries in 38 countries.We find that interest rates, asset prices, and expectations in capital markets have a significant effect on the capital movements of foreign subsidiaries. We also find that foreign subsidiaries mitigate their exposure to foreign business risk by modifying their capital structure and debt maturity. Further, we show how the operating strategy of foreign subsidiaries affects their preference for growth or profit maximization. We further show that superior shareholder value, which is a vital link for access to capital for funding foreign expansion in open market economies, is achieved through maintaining stability in the rate of growth and good asset utilization.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

White Paper 3. Managing the Colorado River for an Uncertain Future

Colorado River managers face many uncertainties—issues like climate change, future water demand, and evolving ecological priorities—and are looking for new tools to help cope with this uncertain future. They need new ways to help classify uncertain conditions, manage for uncertain conditions, and to create models in the face of a slew of oncoming unknowns. To help Colorado River stakeholders think about, talk about, and better manage the future river, the Center for Colorado River Studies offers a new white paper that distinguishes four levels of decision-making uncertainty and suggest tools and resources to manage the different levels