87 research outputs found
Yoongoorrookoo
Since the momentous release of the Montecristi Constitution of
Ecuador in 2008, which recognised Nature, or Pacha Mama, as a
subject of rights, the rights of Nature movement across the world
has gained exponential momentum, with numerous jurisdictions
worldwide now recognising some form of legal subjectivity vested
upon Nature. In particular, since 2017, river personhood has
dominated news headlines around the world as one of the most
recognisable forms of Nature’s novel subjectivity. The emergence
of legal personhood for nature, however, has been far from
uncontroversial, and numerous critiques have been advanced
against the use of such a legal category – traditionally applied to
humans and their abstract creations (such as States and
corporations) – to the natural world, resulting in numerous calls for
an alternative category of legal personhood (one that some rights
of Nature advocates have termed an ‘environmental person’).
Against the backdrop of this emerging debate, this paper
acknowledges the work undertaken by the Martuwarra Fitzroy
River Council (Martuwarra Council), which was established in 2018
in the Kimberley region of Western Australia by six independent
Indigenous nations to preserve, promote and protect their
ancestral River from ongoing destructive ‘development’. The
Council believes it is time to recognise the pre-existing and
continuing legal authority of Indigenous law, or ‘First Law’, in
relation to the River, in order to preserve its integrity through a
process of legal decolonisation. First Law differs markedly from its
colonial counterpart, as its principles are not articulated in terms of
rules, policies and procedures, but rather through stories. This
paper, therefore, begins with a dialogical translation of one First
Law story relating to Yoongoorrookoo,1 the ancestral serpent being,2 to create a semantic bridge between two apparently distant
legal worldviews. A dialogical comparative analysis is then followed
to posit and explore the concept of an ‘ancestral person’ as a novel
comparative tool that may be able not only to capture the idea of
Nature as a legal subject, but also complex Indigenous worldviews
that see Nature – in this case instantiated in the Martuwarra – as
an ancestral being enmeshed in a relationship of interdependence
and guardianship between the human and the nonhuman world.
To instantiate and embody such relationships, the paper directly,
and somewhat provocatively, acknowledges the River itself, the
Martuwarra RiverOfLife, as the primary participant in such dialogue,
an embodied non-human co-author who began a conversation
then left to human writers to continue
Stock Market Returns, Corporate Governance and Capital Market Equilibrium
This paper analyzes why corporate governance matters for stock returns if the stock market prices the underlying managerial agency problem correctly. Our theory assumes that strict corporate governance prevents managers from diverting cash flows, but reduces incentives for managerial effort. In capital market equilibrium, this trade-off has implications for the firm's earnings, stock returns, and managerial ownership, because governance impacts the firm's risk-return structure. In particular, the strictness of corporate governance is negatively related to earnings and positively to β. Various empirical tests with U.S. data using the governance index of Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick (2003) yield results consistent with these predictions
Eurozone Network Connectedness During Calm and Crisis: Evidence from the MTS Platform for Interdealer Trading of European Sovereign Debt
Non-Standard Errors
In statistics, samples are drawn from a population in a data-generating process (DGP). Standard errors measure the uncertainty in estimates of population parameters. In science, evidence is generated to test hypotheses in an evidence-generating process (EGP). We claim that EGP variation across researchers adds uncertainty: Non-standard errors (NSEs). We study NSEs by letting 164 teams test the same hypotheses on the same data. NSEs turn out to be sizable, but smaller for better reproducible or higher rated research. Adding peer-review stages reduces NSEs. We further find that this type of uncertainty is underestimated by participants
The Pitfalls of Central Clearing in the Presence of Systematic Risk
Through the lens of market participants' objective to minimize counterparty risk, we provide an explanation for the reluctance to clear derivative trades in the absence of a central clearing obligation. We develop a comprehensive understanding of the benefits and potential pitfalls with respect to a single market participant's counterparty risk exposure when moving from a bilateral to a clearing architecture for derivative markets. Previous studies suggest that central clearing is beneficial for single market participants in the presence of a sufficiently large number of clearing members. We show that three elements can render central clearing harmful for a market participant's counterparty risk exposure regardless of the number of its counterparties: 1) correlation across and within derivative classes (i.e., systematic risk), 2) collateralization of derivative claims, and 3) loss sharing among clearing members. Our results have substantial implications for the design of derivatives markets, and highlight that recent central clearing reforms might not incentivize market participants to clear derivatives
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