Jean Giono. The man who planted trees, 20th anniversary edition. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2005.

The story was written in 1953 and first published in Vogue magazine in 1954 as “The Man Who Planted Hope and Grew Happiness”. This story is one of his most well known, having been translated into several languages and made into an Oscar-winning short animated film

Causation’s Nuclear Future: Applying Proportional Liability to the Price-Anderson Act

For more than a quarter century, public discourse has pushed the nuclear-power industry in the direction of heavier regulation and greater scrutiny, effectively halting construction of new reactors. By focusing on contemporary fear of significant accidents, such discourse begs the question of what the nation\u27s court system would actually do should a major nuclear incident cause radiation-induced cancers. Congress\u27s attempt to answer that question is the Price-Anderson Act, a broad statute addressing claims by the victims of a major nuclear accident. Lower courts interpreting the Act have repeatedly encountered a major stumbling block: it declares that judges must apply the antediluvian preponderance-of-the-evidence logic of state tort law, even though radiation science insists that the causes of radiation-induced cancers are more complex. After a major nuclear accident, the Act\u27s paradoxically outdated rules for adjudicating causation would make post-incident compensation unworkable. This Note urges that nuclear-power-plant liability should not turn on eighteenth-century tort law. Drawing on modern scientific conclusions regarding the invariably statistical nature of cancer, this Note suggests a unitary federal standard for the Price-Anderson Act—that a defendant be deemed to have caused a plaintiff\u27s injury in direct proportion to the increased risk of harm the defendant has imposed. This proportional liability rule would not only fairly evaluate the costs borne by injured plaintiffs and protect a reawakening nuclear industry from the prospect of bank-breaking litigation, but would prove workable with only minor changes to the Price-Anderson Act\u27s standards of injury and fault

Shortening Agency and Judicial Vacancies Through Filibuster Reform? An Examination of Confirmation Rates and Delays from 1981 to 2014

This Article explores the failure of nominations and the delay in confirmation of successful nominations across recent administrations, with a focus on the November 2013 change to the Senate voting rules. Using a new database of all nonroutine civilian nominations from January 1981 to December 2014, there are several key findings. First, approximately one-quarter of submitted nominations between 1981 and 2014 were not confirmed, with a higher failure rate for the last two Presidents. Nominations to courts of appeals and independent regulatory commissions had much higher failure rates than other entities. Second, for confirmed nominations, the time to confirmation has been increasing. President Obama’s nominees faced confirmation delays that were more than twice as long as President Reagan’s choices. Failure rates of nominations did not always go hand-in-hand with confirmation delays for successful nominations. Although more nominations failed in divided government, confirmation delays were roughly equal when different parties controlled the Senate and the White House. Third, comparing the year after the change to the filibuster rules to the preceding year, confirmation times for the courts decreased but increased for all types of agencies. For many agencies and agency positions, however, significantly fewer nominations failed after the voting change. Even so, these improvements in 2014—to the confirmation rates for both agency and judicial nominees and to the confirmation pace for judicial picks—are relative: for the average nomination, the failure rate was higher and the confirmation process was slower than under preceding administrations. Fourth, nearly 30 percent of nominees hailed from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, raising concerns that the confirmation process may be narrowing the pool of top officials. This Article suggests some possible explanations for the findings and further avenues of investigation, and also proposes some reforms

Half-Heard Voices of the Primal Zone; Sleep and Waking in a Poem by Cao Shuying

Initially touching artifacts and sculpture from ancient Greece, and the risk of misreading thought or emotion cross-culturally, this essay draws briefly on Wordsworth’s testimony that poetic process arises first in a primally sensual and pre-verbal zone. The essay then proposes that similar practice, carried by craft and poetic experience in the target language, may be equally advantageous in poetry translation, while helping bridge individual and cross-cultural differences. In light of this, the essay’s second half addresses translational details in rendering Cao Shuying’s poem “I Often Read, Early Mornings.

On Risk Aversion in the Rubinstein Bargaining Game

We derive closed-form solutions for the Rubinstein alternating offers game for cases where the two players have (possibly asymmetric) utility functions that belong to the HARA class and discount the future at a constant rate. We show that risk aversion may increase a bargainers payoff. This result - which contradicts Roth’s 1985 theorem tying greater risk neutrality to a smaller payoff - does not rely on imperfect information or departures from expected utility maximization.

Women Returning to Employment, Education and Training in Ireland - An Analysis of Transitions

Recent improvements in the Irish labour market have led to a substantial increase in the labour force participation rate of women in Ireland. Part of this increase has been fuelled by women moving from the home into paid employment. Much of the existing research on labour market activity among Irish women has focused on cross-sectional analyses of the stock of labour market participants. In this paper we aim to address some of the gaps in the literature by investigating the transition from home to work, and from home to education, training and employment schemes among women in Ireland during the period 1994 to 1999. We adopt a dynamic approach by drawing on the nationally representative longitudinal data in the Living in Ireland Survey. This allows us to provide, for the first time, a representative profile of returners, and to formally model the transition process in terms of supply and demand factors. The analysis also investigates the factors associated with the return to part-versus full-time work. Our analysis reveals that about one-quarter of those engaged full-time in home duties in 1994 had made a transition to paid work within the six-year period 1994-1999. The study identifies a number of key factors that influence the transition from home to work or education, training and employment schemes, including, on the supply side, age, education, previous work experience, time out of the labour force, and the presence of young children in the household, and on the demand side, macro-economic conditions and urban versus rural residence.

Trade Credit, International Reserves and Sovereign Debt

We present a unified model of sovereign debt, trade credit and international reserves. Our model shows that access to short-term trade credit and gross international reserves critically affect the outcome of sovereign debt renegotiations. Whereas competitive banks do optimally lend for the accumulation of borrowed reserves that strengthen the bargaining position of borrowers, they also have incentives to restrict the supply of short-term trade credit during renegotiations. We first show that they effectively do so and then derive propositions that : I) establish the size of sovereign debt haircuts as a function of economic fundamentals and preferences ; II) predict that defaults occur during recessions rather than booms, contrary to reputation based models ; III) provide a rationale for holding costly borrowed reserves and, IV) show that the stock of borrowed international reserves tends to increase when global interest rates are low.

Rotation and Spin in Physics

We delineate the role of rotation and spin in physics, discussing in order Newtonian classical physics, special relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics and general relativity. In the latter case, we discuss the generalization of the Kepler formula to post-Newtonian order $(c^{-2}$) including spin effects and two-body effects. Experiments which verify the theoretical results for general relativistic spin-orbit effects are discussed as well as efforts being made to verify the spin-spin effects

Monetary Policy Rules For Manging Aid Surges In Africa

We examine the properties of alternative monetary policy rules in response to large aid surges in low-income countries characterized by incomplete capital market integration and currency substitution. Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, we show that simple monetary rules that stabilize the path of expected future seigniorage for a given aid flow have attractive properties relative to a range of conventional alternatives including those involving heavy reliance on bond sterilization or a commitment to a pure exchange rate float. These simple rules, which are shown to be robust across a range of fiscal responses to aid inflows, appear to be consistent with actual responses to recent aid surges in a range of post-stabilization countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.Basle Committee, capital adequacy, financial governance, financial architecture, financial reform, international standards, capital flows, poor countries, cost of capital, international development

Aid and Fiscal Instability

We show that a combination of temporariness and spending pressure is intrinsic to the aid relationship. In our analysis, recipients rationally discount the pronouncements of donors about the duration of their commitments because in equilibrium they know that some donors will honor those commitments while others will not. Donor types pool in equilibrium; in sharp contrast to conventional signaling situations, there is no separating equilibrium in pure strategies. Moreover, pooling necessarily creates what we call ex ante fiscal instability: expenditure smoothing is perfect ex post if the donor proves permanent, but if the donor is temporary the recipient faces an aid collapse and a fiscal adjustment problem. The Samaritan’s dilemma is at work here, in the guise of a use-it-or-lose-it restriction on spending out of aid. This restriction can produce ex ante fiscal instability even when information is symmetric.Aid, Fiscal instability, Use it or lose it, Samaritan’s dilemma, Pooling