LEGAL TECHNIQUES AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The problem with which we are going to deal is one of comparative law, a discipline probably even more illusory than legal science itself. A body of laws represents in itself neither a social reality nor a social ideal. One of the difficulties that every historian faces in trying to reconstruct a period of the past with the help of legal monuments is due to the great variety of relations existing between legal rules and social reality. So, e.g., legal monuments generally contain in an inextricable confusion at least two contradictory types of rules: rules which are a simple restatement of an existing custom, and rules which are enacted with the very purpose of reversing existing customs and which, in terms of social reality, should be read as we read the negative of a snapshot: white for black and black for white

VaR- and CVaR-minimal futures Hedging Strategies: An Analytical Approach

Although Value at Risk (VaR) and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) have been established as standard techniques in many fields of risk management and portfolio selection, the literature rarely applies these risk measures to futures hedging. The purpose of this paper is to characterize analytically VaR- and CVaR-minimal hedging strategies. We apply results about quantile derivatives to obtain first order conditions that hold under weak assumptions on the underlying return distribution. We then focus on conditionally elliptical return processes, which enables us to derive closed form expressions for these conditions. In the case of hedging with a single futures contract, these expressions can explicitly be solved for (C)VaR-minimal hedge ratios. Hedging strategies based on these results account for the risk caused by the fat tails of return distributions. In a further step, we extend our characterizations of optimal hedging strategies to mixtures of elliptical distributions. This generalization allows capturing distributional asymmetries, which was found to be highly important for tail based risk measurement. Overall, our findings can be used to implement (C)VaR-minimal hedging rules for most econometric models employed in the futures hedging literature, including multivariate GARCH and regime switching models

Tail Risk Hedging and Regime Switching

In this paper, we analyze futures-based hedging strategies which minimize tail risk measured by Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR). In par- ticular, we first deduce general characterizations of VaR- and CVaR-minimal hedging policies from results on quantile derivatives. We then derive first-order conditions for tail-risk-minimal hedging in mixture and regime-switching (RS) models. Using cross hedging examples, we show that CVaR-minimal hedging can noticeably deviate from standard minimum-variance hedging if the return data exhibit nonelliptical features. In our examples, we find an increase in hedging amounts if RS models identify a joint crash scenario and we confirm a reduction in tail risk using empirical and EVT-based risk estimators. These results imply that switching from minimum-variance to CVaR- minimal hedging can cut losses during financial crises and reduce capital requirements for institutional investors

Об одном случае прагматикализации в русском языке: микродиахроническое исследование частицы ‘же’ в составе вопроса

Že is one of the most closely studied particles in Russian, but its use within interrogative sentences, although it is a separate type of use, has not been investigated in detail. In this paper, I deal with the semantic and syntactic properties of že as part of a constituent or a polar question in the 18th–19th centuries and in modern usage. Based on the Russian National Corpus data, it is demonstrated that, in modern texts, že can appear in questions in four different meanings, each of them pragmatically coloured, whereas in the 19th century and earlier, že could also have a pragmatically neutral meaning, close to a conjunctive one, which has today been lost. This diachronic development corresponds to a typologically widespread scenario and represents the process known as pragmaticalization. The proposed semantic analysis of že is further considered in the light of syntactic tendencies in the evolution of this particle. This analysis can explain the absence of že in the polar questions in modern Russian and its presence in such types of questions in the Russian language of the 18th–19th centuries. The assumption that že has lost its conjunctive-like meaning in interrogative sentences is consistent with the observation that the conjunctive že is the less frequent type of že in declarative sentences. DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2020.9.1.12Частица же относится к числу наиболее исследованных частиц русского языка, однако ее употребление в составе вопросительных конструкций (ср. Когда же мы вернемся домой?), хотя и имеет свои особенности, до сих пор подробно не изучалось. В настоящей работе сопоставляются семантические и синтаксические свойства частицы же, входящей в состав частного или общего вопроса, в текстах XVIII–XIX веков и в современном языке. На материале Национального корпуса русского языка демонстрируется, что в современных текстах «вопросительное» же может выступать в четырех значениях, каждое из которых прагматически окрашено, тогда как в XIX в. и ранее в ряду значений же имелось также прагматически нейтральное — присоединительное — значение, сегодня утраченное. Такое диахроническое развитие соответствует типологически распространенному сценарию, представляя собой образец прагматикализации. Предлагаемое семантическое описание частицы же далее рассматривается сквозь призму синтаксических закономерностей в эволюции этой частицы. Оно позволяет объяснить запрет на употребление же в общем вопросе, действующий в современном русском языке, но отсутствовавший в языке XVIII–XIX вв., а также существование ряда общевопросительных конструкций, не подчиняющихся запрету. Кроме того, предположение об утрате частицей же присоединительного употребления в вопросе согласуется с известной тенденцией к снижению частотности присоединительного же в составе утвердительных предложений.DOI: 10.31168/2305-6754.2020.9.1.1

C:/Documents and Settings/Leo Pekelis/My Documents/VIGRE paper/VIGREpaper.dvi

Abstract A singular stochastic control problem with state constraints in two-dimensions is studied. We show that the free boundary between the control and no-action regions is approximately linear away from the state constraining boundaries. Proof of this result relies on connections with related optimal stopping problems. We provide an explicit solution to one such optimal stopping problem. Results of a numerical study of the free boundary and optimal value function are presented