Legislative Notes: The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975

Part I reviews the landmark judicial decisions which have established the right of handicapped children to participate in free, public education. The basic provisions of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 are then presented in Part II. The funding provisions are discussed in Part III with particular emphasis upon the tension between the promise of federal largesse and the expense of compliance with statutory and judicial requirements. Part IV reviews prior efforts to obtain judicial recognition of a substantive right to an appropriate education and suggests some ways in which the 1975 Act may alter the framework of judicial consideration of this endeavor. Finally, Part V examines in detail the Act\u27s provisions for individualized educational programs and procedural safeguards. The utility of these provisions to persons who seek to hold educational agencies accountable for their special education programs is stressed. In addition, particular attention is paid to certain legal problems that are likely to emerge from the implementation of the complaint procedure incorporated into the 1975 Act

Boston inside out: a brothel, a boardinghouse, and the construction of the 19th-century North End's urban landscape through embodied practice

This dissertation examines how the urban landscape of mid-19th-century Boston's North End was constructed and understood—physically, socially, and culturally—by the city's different social groups. Over the course of the 19th century, Boston's North End gained a reputation as a "slum" characterized by its deteriorating buildings, overcrowded housing, and immoral immigrant population—a stereotype that did not reflect the reality of the neighborhood's working-class residents. The dissertation identifies specific experiences, practices, and perceptions that created different understandings of the same physical space. This study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of urban landscapes by incorporating tangible artifacts excavated from domestic contexts in analyzing intangible social processes by employing a practice theory-based framework that interweaves archaeological and historical data to address social structures on multiple spatial scales: Boston as a macro-scale landscape; the medium-scale North End neighborhood; and micro-scale individual actions. The archaeological data analyzed for viii the study originated from two ca. 1850–1880 privy deposits associated with working-class North End households: a brothel/tenement at 27–29 Endicott Street and a boardinghouse at 19–21 North Square. To interpret these data within their historical and cultural context, city directory and census records are cross-referenced with Boston Valuation List tax records to compile a database of residential and commercial activity between 1850 and 1880 on the blocks surrounding these sites. The research shows how the conceptualization of the North End as a "slum" was constructed by middle-class and elite observers to assign personal responsibility to the poor for the structural poverty endemic to a capitalist economy and also to facilitate the development of their own class identities. Archaeological analysis reveals that North End residents constructed their neighborhood landscape by enacting household practices in public spaces, creating a sense of familiarity and control. They re-appropriated objects usually associated with middle-class culture by using them in unintended ways, creating new symbols and values that helped form a distinct working-class culture. By dressing and behaving in public in ways that subverted dominant social norms, working-class Bostonians used their bodies to create an urban landscape in which they and their culture could thrive

The Cost of Trend Chasing and The Illusion of Momentum Profits

There is a large and growing literature documenting the relation between ex ante observable variables and stock returns. Importantly, much of the evidence on the relation between returns and observable variables like market capitalization, the ratio of price/book, and prior price change has been portrayed in the context of returns to simulated portfolio strategies. Often missing in these analyses is the distinction between realizable returns (i.e., the returns portfolio managers can realistically achieve in practice) and returns to simulated strategies. There is ample evidence that size and value strategies can be successfully implemented in practice; that is not the case for momentum strategies. This paper documents the costs of implementing actual momentum strategies. I examine the trade behavior, and the costs of those trades, for three distinct investor styles (momentum, fundamental/value, and diversified/index) for 33 institutional investment managers executing trades in the U.S. and 36 other equity markets worldwide in both developed and emerging economies. The results show: (1) that momentum traders do indeed condition their trades on prior price movements; and (2) that costs for trades that are made conditional on prior market returns are significantly greater than for unconditional costs, especially for momentum traders. The evidence that we report on the actual costs of momentum-based trades indicates that the returns reported in previous studies of simulated momentum strategies are not sufficient to cover the costs of implementing those strategies

Anatomy of the Trading Process Empirical Evidence on the Behavior of Institutional Traders

This paper examines the behavior of institutional traders. We use unique data on the equity transactions of 21 institutions of differing investment styles which provide a detailed account of the anatomy of the trading process. The data include information on the number of days needed to fill an order and types of order placement strategies employed. We analyze the motivations for trade, the determinants of trade duration, and the choice of order type. The analysis provides some support for the predictions made by theoretical models, but suggests that these models fail to capture important dimensions of trading behavior

The Relation Between Stock Market Movements and NYSE Seat Prices

Exchange seat prices are widely reported and followed as measures of market sentiment. This paper analyzes the information content of NYSE seat prices using: (1) annual seat prices from 1869 to 1998, and (2) the complete record of trades, bids and offers for the seat market from 1973 to 1994. Seat market volumes have predictive power regarding future stock market returns, consistent with a model where seat market activity is a proxy for unobserved factors affecting expected returns. We find abnormally large price movements in seats prior to October 1987, consistent with the hypothesis that seat prices capture market sentiment

Stale or Sticky Stock Prices? Non-Trading, Predictability, and Mutual Fund Returns

The observed predictability in indexes and domestic mutual funds has been attributed to stale prices. Market timing of mutual funds exploits this predictability. We show that there are few stale prices for stocks in the top few deciles of market value and that mutual funds concentrate their holding in these deciles. Still, we observe predictability in the returns of portfolios and mutual funds holding these stocks. Much of this predictability is due to stickiness, or momentum, in market returns and not stale prices. Thus, the often suggested use of “fairvalue” accounting will not eliminate the profitability of market timing

Simplifying Choices in Defined Contribution Retirement Plan Design

In view of the growth and popularity of defined contribution pensions, along with the government’s growing attention to retirement plan costs and investment choices provided, it is important to evaluate how people select their plan investments. This paper tracks how employees in a large firm altered their fund allocations when the employer streamlined its pension fund menu, tiering options in an easier-to-understand format. Using administrative data, we examine what investment choices the plan participants elected prior to and after the streamlining, and how they altered their equity share, risk exposure, fees paid, and turnover patterns as a result of the change. We also discuss what difference the changes might make for participants’ eventual retirement wellbeing. Specifically, we show that streamlined participants’ new allocations exhibited significantly lower turnover rates and expense ratios; based on reasonable assumptions, this could lead to additional aggregate savings for these participants over a 20-year period of $20.2M, or in excess of$9,400 per participant. Moreover, after the reform, streamlined participants’ portfolios held significantly less equity and exhibited significantly lower risks by way of reduced exposures to most systematic risk factors, compared to their non-streamlined counterpart

The Valuation of Callable Bonds

Callable bond indentures contain provisions that allow the issuing entity to retire the bond at a predetermined price before the maturity of the bond.1 As such a callable bond is often viewed as a combination of an otherwise identical but non-callable bond and an option to call that bond. The writer of the call option is the holder of the bond, and the buyer of the call is the stockholder of the issuing corporation. Thus, the price of a callable bond is the value of the straight bond less the value of the call provision