Stock Repurchases in Canada: Performance and Strategic Trading

During the 1980s, U.S. firms that announced stock repurchase programs earned favorable long-run returns. Recently, concerns have been raised regarding the robustness of these findings. This comes at a time of explosive worldwide growth in the adoption of repurchase programs. This study provides out-of-sample evidence for 1,060 Canadian repurchase programs announced between 1989 and 1997. As in the U.S., the Canadian stock market seems to discount the information contained in repurchase announcements. Value stocks announcing repurchase programs have particularly favorable returns. Canadian law requires companies to report how many shares they repurchase on a monthly basis. We find that managers are sensitive to mispricing as completion rates are higher in cases where undervaluation may be a more important factor. Moreover, trades are linked to price movements; managers buy more shares when prices fall and reduce their buying when prices rise.

Dialogue of civilizations in a multipolar world: toward a multicivilizational-multiplex world order

In this article, I explore the relationship between the new multipolar trends related to the emerging powers and the idea of dialogue of civilizations. My starting point is to understand multipolarity as part of a broader epoch making process of transformation of contemporary international society beyond its Western-centric matrix. In the first part of this article, I therefore argue for an analytical understanding that emphasizes the emergence of a new multipolar world of civilizational politics and multiple modernities. In the second part of the article, I reflect on how to counter the risk inherent in the potential antagonistic logic of multipolarity by critically engaging the normative Huntingtonian construction of a multicivilizational-multipolar world order. I argue that the link between dialogue of civilizations and regionalism could represent a critical issue for the future of global peace. In particular, multiculturally constituted processes of regional integration are antidotes to the possible negative politicization of cultural differences on a global scale and can contribute to the emergence of a new cross-cultural jus gentium. These elements are critical to the construction of a realistic dialogue of civilizations in international relations while preventing the risks inherent in its growing multipolar configuration. They shape what, drawing on Amitav Acharya's work, could be named a multicivilizational-multiplex world order

The Isolation of Fusarium moniliforme Sheld. from Corn Kernels

Kernels representing six inbred corn lines were soaked in sterile distilled water for 24 and 48 hours, with and without aeration during soaking. When the kernels were plated on a nutritive medium following such treatments, frequency of appearance of Fusarium moniliforme on kernels was directly associated with longer periods of soaking, and with continuous aeration provided during soaking. Such variations in recovery of the organisms from the kernel, depending on isolation procedure used, strongly emphasize the fact that failure to isolate a fungus from host tissue does not necessarily mean the fungus is absent

Math, Class, and Katrina Aftermath: The Impact of Experiences Teaching Mathematics to Low-income Middle School Students on Middle-income Teachers’ Pedagogical Strategies

Despite a century of educational reforms, no matter how achievement is measured, learning and opportunity gaps can still be predicted by race and socioeconomic status. Teachers and schools are blamed for functioning to reproduce social inequality. This study investigated teacher agency and transformative potentials. It considered how teachers modified their pedagogical practices when teaching low-income and high-poverty students. In order to capture teacher beliefs and logic, a qualitative approach was used involving in-depth interviews of a small number of participants. The research used the context of the dislocation of students from high-poverty Orleans Parish schools in the year following Hurricane Katrina and their absorption into often higher income schools to understand middle-class teachers’ perspectives on their new students’ learning needs and how they adjusted their practice. Participants were middle-school mathematics teachers ranging in experience and orientation. Evacuees had weaker mathematics backgrounds (often two years below grade level). In all cases, evacuees were in classes with non-evacuees. Teachers made different pedagogical choices: continuing to use diverse methods aimed at higher-order understanding, or moving to direct instructional strategies; remediating or accelerating students with below-grade-level mathematics skills; and whether or not to help students acculturate (code-switch) from one set of classroom norms and etiquettes to another. Key factors influencing choices included: socioeconomic makeup of their classes; teachers’ level of mathematics expertise; emphasis on test scores; teachers’ views of students’ culture; and teachers’ peer environments. The study provides insights into teacher and classroom mechanisms that contributed to Katrina evacuee multi-year achievement gains

Reasons of State

In this lucid and theoretically sophisticated book, G. John Ikenberry focuses on the oil price shocks of 1973–74 and 1979, which placed extraordinary new burdens on governments worldwide and particularly on that of the United States. Reasons of State examines the response of the United States to these and other challenges and identifies both the capacities of the American state to deal with rapid international political and economic change and the limitations that constrain national policy

A new approach to the creation and propagation of exponential moments in the Boltzmann equation

We study the creation and propagation of exponential moments of solutions to the spatially homogeneous $d$-dimensional Boltzmann equation. In particular, when the collision kernel is of the form $|v-v_*|^\beta b(\cos(\theta))$ for $\beta \in (0,2]$ with $\cos(\theta)= |v-v_*|^{-1}(v-v_*)\cdot \sigma$ and $\sigma \in \mathbb{S}^{d-1}$, and assuming the classical cut-off condition $b(\cos(\theta))$ integrable in $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$, we prove that there exists $a > 0$ such that moments with weight $\exp(a \min{t,1} |v|^\beta)$ are finite for $t>0$, where $a$ only depends on the collision kernel and the initial mass and energy. We propose a novel method of proof based on a single differential inequality for the exponential moment with time-dependent coefficients.Comment: 14 pages. Many typos corrected in this revised versio