Time to Start Over on Deferred Compensation

Government regulators would do well to follow simple heuristics like that. Writing good regulations-- good in the sense of promoting the public interest--always presents challenges. Regulators must hit a small but important target where private conduct is brought within appropriate government control, but unnecessary compliance burdens and other deadweight costs are minimized. Even if they see the government\u27s objectives clearly, regulators often have only a limited understanding of the underlying private activities. Moreover, regulators may be unaware of how their rules disrupt or distort those activities in socially harmful ways. Regulators occasionally hit the target exactly. More often, they miss--though not by an intolerably wide margin (good enough for government work, as the saying goes). However, sometimes regulators miss the mark so badly that the only responsible next step is to acknowledge the failure. That is the case with the final regulations under Internal Revenue Code (Code) section 409A. Those regulations are irreparably flawed--so flawed that the best members of the practicing bar cannot make sense of them for basic transactions. When the government issues rules that even experts cannot understand, the government should start over

On the discovery of social roles in large scale social systems

The social role of a participant in a social system is a label conceptualizing the circumstances under which she interacts within it. They may be used as a theoretical tool that explains why and how users participate in an online social system. Social role analysis also serves practical purposes, such as reducing the structure of complex systems to rela- tionships among roles rather than alters, and enabling a comparison of social systems that emerge in similar contexts. This article presents a data-driven approach for the discovery of social roles in large scale social systems. Motivated by an analysis of the present art, the method discovers roles by the conditional triad censuses of user ego-networks, which is a promising tool because they capture the degree to which basic social forces push upon a user to interact with others. Clusters of censuses, inferred from samples of large scale network carefully chosen to preserve local structural prop- erties, define the social roles. The promise of the method is demonstrated by discussing and discovering the roles that emerge in both Facebook and Wikipedia. The article con- cludes with a discussion of the challenges and future opportunities in the discovery of social roles in large social systems

Executive Compensation Reform and the Limits of Tax Policy

The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 includes a major attempt to reform the tax rules for deferred compensation arrangements covering corporate managers. This paper examines the tax policy and corporate-governance policy objectives of the reform effort, explores the shortcomings of the legislation, and outlines a different approach for future executive compensation reform

The Quest for the Causal Joint

This study is an examination of three proposals for a \"causal joint\" model of God\'s action in the world. Adapting the thought of Austin Farrer and David Burrell, the author seeks to show how these hypotheses are theologically flawed. The flaws stem from an overemphasis on the doctrine of creatio continua. Without an affirmation of both creatio ex nihilo and creatio continua, the latter is mistakenly removed from its theological context and adds unnecessary incoherence to the doctrine of creation

Molding the Physical World Upon Francis Bacon's Anvil

This examination of the division of the sciences offered by Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon compares the ontological approach to the sciences proposed by Aquinas and the modern pragmatic scientific theory of Bacon. The author weighs a proposed elimination of metaphysics from the thinking of Bacon and its implications for modem scientific thought, concluding finally that metaphysics is extremely important as the governing agent of the sciences