THE POLITICS OF LEGAL REFORM

As a result of the emerging market crises of the last decade and a large body of academic research on the influence of investor protection in the development of capital markets and economic growth, there is a growing consensus that reforming the legal infrastructure supporting business should be an important component of reforms in many developing countries. But the consensus is unwieldy, as there are still many forces against reform and little agreement about what constitutes feasible legal reforms. This paper has two parts. In the first, we identify the forces for and against legal reform and review the role these forces play in episodes of reform. In the second, we seek to further our understanding of what constitutes good laws and regulatory mechanisms, and more importantly how to make them enforceable in different countries. If legal reform is to succeed, the commonly advocated principles of corporate governance in the international community must be brought down to the local political and judicial realities. Translating international corporate governance initiatives into clear and enforceable rights for creditors and shareholders that incorporate these constraints will be difficult but necessary. Bankruptcy law and corporate law reform need to be politically feasible and enforceable. Legal reforms should be complemented with carefully drafted judicial reforms, as well as market-based mechanisms that foster a culture of corporate governance.

Item-by-item sampling for promotional purposes

This is an accepted manuscript of an article accepted for publication by Taylor & Francis in Quality Technology & Quantitative Management on 7 June 2017, available online at doi: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/16843703.2017.1335494In this paper we present a method for sampling items that are checked on a pass/fail basis, with a view to a statement being made about the success/failure rate for the purposes of promoting an organisation’s product/service to potential clients/customers. Attention is paid to the appropriate use of statistical phrases for the statements and this leads to the use of Bayesian credible intervals, thus it exceeds what can achieved with standard acceptance sampling techniques. The hypergeometric distribution is used to calculate successive stopping rules so that the resources used for sampling can be minimised. Extensions to the sampling procedure are considered to allow the potential for stronger and weaker statements to be made as sampling progresses. The relationship between the true error rate and the probabilities of making correct statements is discussed.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Determinants of Privatization Prices

Generating government revenue is a common objective in privatization. This paper asks: what determines privatization prices? Pursuing this query helps resolve the current controversies about the bearing of speed and the role for government actions prior to privatization. The data, gathered from primary sources, encompass 361 privatized Mexican companies in 49 four-digit industry codes. The determinants of auction privatization prices are divided into three groups: (1) company performance and industry parameters; (2) the auction process and its requirements; and (3) the prior restructuring actions taken by the government. Controlling for company and industry effects reveals the significant impact of the costs and characteristics of the labor force. Minority control packages carry large discounts. Auction requirements that allow foreign investors result in higher sale premia, while restrictions constraining participation or payment forms reduce net prices. The speed of privatization substantially influences net prices: the longer it takes to put the company on the block, the more severe the deterioration in performance, and the lower the premium obtained. Pre-sale reductions in labor force, and particularly the firing of CEOs, lead to significantly higher premiums. Debt absorption, investment, and performance improvement programs do not increase the net price, while de-investment measures prove more beneficial. Overall, the results show increased premia for government actions that stimulate bidder participation and expedite the privatization process.

Intersections of Quadrics, Moment-angle Manifolds and Connected Sums

The topology of the intersection of two real homogeneous coaxial quadrics was studied by the second author who showed that its intersection with the unit sphere is in most cases diffeomorphic to a connected sum of sphere products. Combining that approach with a recent one (due to Antony Bahri, Martin Bendersky, Fred Cohen and the first author) we study here the intersections of k>2 quadrics and we identify very general families of such manifolds that are diffeomorphic to connected sums of sphere products. These include those moment-angle manifolds for which the result was conjectured by Frederic Bosio and Laurent Meersseman. As a byproduct, a simpler and neater proof of the result for the case k=2 is obtained. Two new sections contain results not included in the first version of this article: Section 2 describes the topological change on the manifolds after the operations of cutting off a vertex or an edge of the associated polytope, which can be combined in a special way with the previos results to produce new infinite families of manifolds that are connected sums of sphere products. In other cases we get slightly more complicated manifolds: with this we solve another question by Bosio-Meersseman about the manifold associated to the truncated cube. In Section 3 we use this to show that the known rules for the cohomology product of a moment-angle manifold have to be drastically modified in the general situation. We state the modified rule, but leave the details of this for another publication. Section 0 recalls known definitions and results and in section 2.1 some elementary topological constructions are defined and explored. In the Appendix we state and prove some results about specific differentiable manifolds, which are used in sections 1 and 2.Comment: We have included many clarifying suggestions and minor corrections from some colleagues who read the manuscript carefully. The only change in content from the previous version is the suppression a special case (item 3) of Theorem 1.3 because we have not been able to fill in the details of any of the known sketched proofs (including ours

Existence and non existence results for the singular Nirenberg problem

In this paper we study the problem, posed by Troyanov (Trans AMS 324: 793–821, 1991), of prescribing the Gaussian curvature under a conformal change of the metric on surfaces with conical singularities. Such geometrical problem can be reduced to the solvability of a nonlinear PDE with exponential type non-linearity admitting a variational structure. In particular, we are concerned with the case where the prescribed function K changes sign. When the surface is the standard sphere, namely for the singular Nirenberg problem, we give sufficient conditions on K, concerning mainly the regularity of its nodal line and the topology of its positive nodal region, to be the Gaussian curvature of a conformal metric with assigned conical singularities. Besides, we find a class of functions on S^2 which do not verify our conditions and which can not be realized as the Gaussian curvature of any conformal metric with one conical singularity. This shows that our result is somehow sharp

Variation of the ultraviolet extinction law across the Taurus-Auriga star forming complex. A GALEX based study

The Taurus-Auriga molecular complex (TMC) is the main laboratory for the study of low mass star formation. The density and properties of interstellar dust are expected to vary across the TMC. These variations trace important processes such as dust nucleation or the magnetic field coupling with the cloud. In this article, we show how the combination of near ultraviolet (NUV) and infrared (IR) photometry can be used to derive the strength of the 2175 \AA\ bump and thus any enhancement in the abundance of small dust grains and PAHs in the dust grains size distribution. This technique is applied to the envelope of the TMC, mapped by the GALEX All Sky Survey (AIS). UV and IR photometric data have been retrieved from the GALEX-AIS and the 2MASS catalogues. NUV and K-band star counts have been used to identify the areas in the cloud envelope where the 2175 \AA\ bump is weaker than in the diffuse ISM namely, the low column density extensions of L1495, L1498 and L1524 in Taurus, L1545, L1548, L1519, L1513 in Auriga and L1482-83 in the California region. This finding agrees with previous results on dust evolution derived from Spitzer data and suggests that dust grains begin to decouple from the environmental galactic magnetic field already in the envelope.Comment: Accepted in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societ