A Tournament of Judges?

We suggest a Tournament of Judges where the reward to the winner is elevation to the Supreme Court. Politics (and ideology) surely has a role to play in the selection of justices. However, the present level of partisan bickering has resulted in delays in judicial appointments as well as undermined the public\u27s confidence in the objectivity of justices selected through such a process. More significantly, much of the politicking is not transparent, often obscured with statements on a particular candidate\u27s merit - casting a taint on all those who make their way through the judicial nomination process. We argue that the benefits from introducing more (and objective) competition among judges are potentially significant and the likely damage to judicial independence negligible. Among the criteria that could be used are opinion publication rates, citations of opinions by other courts, citations by the Supreme Court, citations by academics, dissent rates, and speed of disposition of cases. Where political motivations drive the selection of an alternative candidate, our proposed system of objective criteria will make it more likely that such motivations are made transparent to the public. Just as important, a judicial tournament for selection to the Supreme Court will serve not only to select effective justices, but also to provide incentives to existing judges to exert effort

The Pricing of Non-Price Terms in Sovereign Bonds: The Case of the Greek Guarantees

In March 2012, Greece conducted one of the biggest and most brutal sovereign debt restructurings ever, asking holders of Greek government bonds to take net present value haircuts of near 80 percent. Greece forced acquiescence to its terms from a large number of its bonds by using a variety of legal strong-arm tactics. With the vast majority of Greek bonds, the tactics worked. There were, however, thirty-six bonds guaranteed by the Greek state, which, because of the weakness of the underlying companies, were effectively obligations of the Greek state. Yet, on these thirty six bonds, even though Greece desperately needed every euro of respite it could get, no restructuring was even attempted. Why not? The answer we received was that the guarantees escaped the restructuring because their contractual provisions made them much harder to restructure than the ordinary Greek government bonds. Assuming this contract-based claim to be true, the foregoing, in combination with the Euro area crisis of 2010–2014 throws up an opportunity to test the extent to which markets price legal differences in bond contract terms. We report evidence that the markets did price in at least some of the advantage that guaranteed bonds had over ordinary sovereign bonds in the months immediately prior to the March 2012 restructuring

Mean values of Dirichlet polynomials and applications to linear equations with prime variables

We prove a new mean-value theorem for Dirichlet polynomials with coefficients given by the von Mangoldt function. We then use our theorem to derive new estimates for certain exponential sums over primes. The latter have applications to additive problems with prime variables. In particular, we are able to improve on a recent result of J.Y. Liu and K.M. Tsang on the size of the solutions of linear equations with prime variables