International Courts Improve Public Deliberation

The paper starts with the effects of international courts on the broader public and narrows down to their influence on a small elite of lawyers. Part I suggests that international courts captivate the public imagination, allowing citizens to articulate their rights. Part II demonstrates how governments, parliaments, and national courts around the world interact with international courts in ways that improve public deliberation. Part III studies the global elite of lawyers that work in conjunction with international courts to shape policy. Part IV concludes by arguing that the dialogue fostered between international courts and democratic bodies does, in fact, lead to more vibrant democratic deliberation

When Immediate Responses Fail

Tit-for-tat is a strategy of immediate and proportional responses. Game theorists showed that this strategy often leads to fruitful cooperation. Indeed, many legal regimes resemble a tit-for-tat strategy and benefit from its ability to avoid unnecessary conflicts. But in situations of uncertainty--when actors cannot be sure about the actions of their adversaries--a tit-for-tat strategy would destroy cooperation and lead to continuous clashes. Because tit-for-tat responds immediately, a single mistake about the intentions of the adversary can lead to retaliation and start an endless string of counterstrikes. When uncertainty prevails, a strategy of many-tits-for-many-tats is optimal. Actors applying this strategy study the actions of their adversaries over multiple rounds without issuing an immediate response. Only when the actor is convinced that the adversary intentionally defects, will the actor issue a disproportionately forceful response. The laws of war, criminal law, and international sales law all face some situations of uncertainty. This Article argues that each of these legal fields adopts a strategy of many-tits-for-many-tats to address conditions of acute uncertainty

Judicial Deference Allows European Consensus to Emerge

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) searches for human rights policies that are adopted by the majority of the countries in Europe. Using a doctrine known as “emerging consensus,” the court then imposes these policies as an international legal obligation on all the countries under its jurisdiction. But the ECHR sometimes defers to countries, even if their policies fall short of the standard accepted by most of the countries in Europe. This deference is accomplished by using the so-called “margin of appreciation” doctrine. Naturally, emerging consensus and margin of appreciation are often conceived as competing doctrines: the more there is of one, the less there is of another. This article suggests a novel rationale for the emerging consensus doctrine: the doctrine can allow the ECHR to make good policies by drawing on the independent decision-making of many similar countries. In light of that, the article demonstrates that a correct application of the margin of appreciation doctrine actually helps emerging consensus reach optimal results by giving countries an incentive to make their policies independently

Democracy, Populism, and Concentrated Interests

Concentrated interest groups have a significant advantage over diffuse interest groups: they can effectively stop free riding among their members. Because of this advantage, concentrated interest groups work in unison and manage to capture the government in many democracies. Democratic mechanisms of separation of powers, an independent judiciary, and the rule of law are designed to prevent the capture of government by concentrated interests. Under certain conditions, these mechanisms make it possible for diffuse interests to have a fair share of the influence over the government. Populist ideologists doubt that claim, however. They are convinced that democracies are captured by a small elite that controls most of the political power. The declared aim of populists is to give political power back to the majority of society. Despite that declared aim, this Article argues that the actions taken by populists have exactly the opposite outcome. By downgrading democratic mechanisms that constrain the government, populists end up making it easier for concentrated interests to capture the government and take advantage of diffuse groups

Self-Consistent Determination of Coupling Shifts in Broken SU(3)

The possibility that certain patterns of SU(3) symmetry breaking are dynamically enhanced in baryon-meson couplings is studied by bootstrap methods. For the strong couplings, a single dominant enhancement is found. It produces very large symmetry-breaking terms, transforming like an octet, as often conjectured. Experimental consequences are listed, such as a reduction of K-baryon couplings relative to π-baryon couplings which is in accord with the experimental weakness of K relative to π production in many circumstances, such as photoproduction and multi-BeV cosmic-ray collisions. For parity-violating nonleptonic couplings, a dominant octet enhancement is again found, as mentioned in a previous paper, which leads to an excellent fit with experiment. For parity-conserving nonleptonic couplings, on the other hand, several different enhancements compete, and the only conclusion we can draw is that terms with the "abnormal" transformation properties brought in by strong symmetry-breaking corrections are present. Our work provides a dynamical derivation of various phenomenological facts associated with SU(6), such as the dominance of the 35 representation in parity-violating nonleptonic decays

La deferencia judicial permite que emerja el consenso europeo

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) searches for human rights policies that are adopted by the majority of the countries in Europe. Using a doctrine known as “emerging consensus,” the court then imposes these policies as an international legal obligation on all the countries under its jurisdiction. But the ECHR sometimes defers to countries, even if their policies fall short of the standard accepted by most of the countries in Europe. This deference is accomplished by using the so-called “margin of appreciation” doctrine. Naturally, emerging consensus and margin of appreciation are often conceived as competing doctrines: the more there is of one, the less there is of another. This article suggests a novel rationale for the emerging consensus doctrine: the doctrine can allow the ECHR to make good policies by drawing on the independent decision-making of many similar countries. In light of that, the article demonstrates that a correct application of the margin of appreciation doctrine actually helps emerging consensus reach optimal results by giving countries an incentive to make their policies independently.El Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos (TEDH) indaga en políticas de derechos humanos adoptadas por la mayoría de los países de Europa. Utilizando una doctrina conocida como el “consenso emergente”, el Tribunal impone tales políticas como una obligación jurídica internacional a todos los países bajo su jurisdicción. Sin embargo, en ocasiones, el TEDH cede ante los Estados, incluso si sus políticas no están a la altura del estándar aceptado por la mayoría de los países de Europa. Esta deferencia se logra utilizando la doctrina llamada “margen de apreciación”. Naturalmente, el consenso emergente y el margen de apreciación se conciben, a menudo, como doctrinas en competencia: cuanto más hay de una, menos hay de otra. En el presente artículo se sugiere una nueva justificación de la doctrina del consenso emergente: la doctrina puede permitir que el TEDH formule buenas políticas recurriendo a la toma de decisiones independiente de muchos países similares. A la luz de ello, el documento demuestra que una aplicación correcta de la doctrina del margen de apreciación ayuda, realmente, a que el consenso emergente alcance resultados óptimos, al dar a los países un incentivo para elaborar sus políticas de forma independiente. El Tribunal Europeo de Derechos Humanos (TEDH) indaga en políticas de derechos humanos adoptadas por la mayoría de los países de Europa. Utilizando una doctrina conocida como el “consenso emergente”, el Tribunal impone tales políticas como una obligación jurídica internacional a todos los países bajo su jurisdicción. Sin embargo, en ocasiones, el TEDH cede ante los Estados, incluso si sus políticas no están a la altura del estándar aceptado por la mayoría de los países de Europa. Esta deferencia se logra utilizando la doctrina llamada “margen de apreciación”. Naturalmente, el consenso emergente y el margen de apreciación se conciben, a menudo, como doctrinas en competencia: cuanto más hay de una, menos hay de otra. En el presente artículo se sugiere una nueva justificación de la doctrina del consenso emergente: la doctrina puede permitir que el TEDH formule buenas políticas recurriendo a la toma de decisiones independiente de muchos países similares. A la luz de ello, el documento demuestra que una aplicación correcta de la doctrina del margen de apreciación ayuda, realmente, a que el consenso emergente alcance resultados óptimos, al dar a los países un incentivo para elaborar sus políticas de forma independiente

Applying economic restrictions to foreign exchange rate dynamics: spot rates, futures, and options

Extant models of exchange rate behavior have typically relied on statistical rather than economic considerations. The approach has been to employ a variant of the generalized central limit theorem to develop tests for the models proposed. ; We propose a minimal set of simple economic restrictions symmetry, invariance, and non-negativity that must be satisfied by an exchange rate process. By symmetry, we mean that both the direct and indirect exchange rate processes must belong to the same class of distributions. By invariance, we mean that the distribution for an exchange rate must be invariant to changes in the currency unit. By non-negativity, we mean that the exchange rate process must preclude negative values. We identify various alternative specifications for exchange rate processes and show that some of them do not possess some or all of the above properties. Finally, we propose a new exchange rate process -- the mean-reverting logarithmic process (MRL) -- and develop valuation equations for several exchange rate instruments, from forward and futures contracts to straight options on the spot rates to options on the futures contracts.Foreign exchange rates ; Futures ; International finance

A highly sensitive mean-reverting process in finance and the Euler-Maruyama approximations

Empirical studies show that the most successful continuous-time models of the short term rate in capturing the dynamics are those that allow the volatility of interestchanges to be highly sensitive to the level of the rate. However, from the mathematics, the high sensitivity to the level implies that the coeffcients do not satisfy the lineargrowth condition, so we can not examine its properties by traditional techniques. This paper overcomes the mathematical difculties due to the nonlinear growth and examines its analytical properties and the convergence of numerical solutions in probability. The convergence result can be used to justify the method within Monte-Carlo simulations that compute the expected payoff of financial products. For illustration, we apply our results compute the value of a bond with interest rate given by the highly sensitive mean-reverting process as well as the value of a single barrier call option with the asset price governed by this process

The Optimal Control of Heteroscedastic Macroeconomic Models

This paper analyses the implications of heteroscedasticity for optimal macroeconomic policy and welfare. We find that changes in the variance structure driven by exogenous processes like generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) affect welfare but not the optimal feedback rule. However, changes in the variance structure driven by state-dependent processes affect both. We also derive certainty-equivalent transformations of state-dependent volatility models that allow standard quadratic dynamic programming algorithms to be employed to study optimal policy. These results are illustrated numerically using a reduced-form model of the US economy in which changes in volatility are driven by a GARCH process and the rate of inflation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd