The Revolution that Wasn't

The Revolution that Wasn't: A principal legacy of the Rehnquist Court is its revitalization of doctrines associated with federalism. No similar evolution occurred in separation of powers doctrines. Commentators do not perceive important shifts in the doctrine. Nor should they the reasoning and results in the Rehnquist Court cases are of a piece with what came before. Lack of "revolution" was not for lack of opportunity. And, from the perspective that the Supreme Court has invoked in explaining many of its federalism cases, there is muchvery much, in factthat is not right about the structure of the federal government and the constitutional rules that permit that structure. Using the federalism decisions as a point of comparison, this paper asks why there has been no "revolution" (using the term loosely) in separation of powers jurisprudence during the Rehnquist Court. The paper argues that internal and external factors that drive separation of powers jurisprudence diverge from the factors that drive federalism jurisprudence. The paper focuses on four factors: judicial incentives; the positive law that the Court is applying; the external factors that influence doctrinal developments; and the likely results of shifts in doctrine.

Equity, Options and Efficiency in the Presence of Moral Hazard

This paper provides a general equilibrium analysis of an economy with production under uncertainty in which the firms' capital (ownership) structure creates a moral hazard problem for their managers. The paper studies the concept of an equilibrium with rational, competitive price perceptions (RCPP) in which investors correctly anticipate the optimal effort of entrepreneurs by observing their financial decisions, and entrepreneurs are aware that investors use their financial decisions as signals. The competitive element in the equilibrium valuation of firms comes from the fact that entrepreneurs cannot affect the market price of risks. It is shown that under appropriate spanning assumptions an RCPP is constrained Pareto optimal. Furthermore, if sufficiently many options are traded, then full optimality can be obtained despite the moral hazard problem: options serve both to increase the span of the market and to provide incentives for entrepreneurs.

Student as Value Based Product: Reconceptualizing the Subjective Nature of Education

In this paper we consider how students are positioned in school classrooms and the effect positioning has on their ontological and social development. The creation of a powersanctioned objective reality, we argue, pervades student learning in contemporary U.S. classrooms, reducing knowledge students might otherwise acquire to socially acceptable conditions they assume in adulthood. Consequently, this creates a society in which antiintellectualism is normalized as learned codes of behavior are lived. Homogenization then isolates and alienates students as they are produced to fill the ranks of a skills-based workforce. Several factors work in tandem to ingrain students with a perceived objective consciousness, they include: top down educational policy, commodification of difference, distraction and normalization of the above mentioned codes of conduct, a sense of morality tied to citizenship, and civilized absurdity: students become mere abstractions of living experience as they accept life as citizen worker.Educatio

Common Shocks and Relative Compensation Schemes

This paper studies qualitative properties of an optimal contract in a multi-agent setting in which agents are subject to a common shock. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the optimal reward of an agent to be a decreasing (increasing) function of the outputs of the other agents, under the assumption that the agents' outputs are informative signals of the value of the common shock. The condition is that the likelihood ratio of a given outcome with high versus low effort be a decreasing (increasing) function of the common shock. We derive conditions on the way the common shock affects the marginal product of effort under which the likelihood ratio is decreasing for all output levels, or increasing for some output levels and decreasing for others.optimal incentive contracts, common shocks, multi agents, monotone likelihood ratio

Engineering of interworking TINA-based telecommunication services

This paper describes a Service Creation approach being developed in the EU funded ACTS TOSCA (TINA Open Service Creation Architecture) project to rapidly develop validated TINA based multimedia telecommunications services. The approach is based around object-oriented software frameworks in SDL which are specialized towards services by means of graphical paradigm tools. Further, in TOSCA, the need for service interworking across service provider domains via federation has been recognized in order to allow users to join service sessions offered by providers they are not customers of. However, service interworking may cause undesired behavior - the so called service interaction phenomenon. This paper focuses on this issue and the underlying technology of the service creation approach with emphasis on how service federation has been implemented

NORMATIVE PROPERTIES OF STOCK MARKET EQUILIBRIUM WITH MORAL HAZARD

This paper presents a model of stock market equilibrium with a finite number of corporations and studies its normative properties. Each firm is run by a manager whose effort is unobservable and influences the probabilities of the firm’s outcomes. The Board of Directors of each firm chooses an incentive contract for the manager which maximizes the firm’s market value. With a finite number of firms, the equilibrium is constrained Pareto optimal only when investors are risk neutral and firms’ outcomes are independent. The inefficiencies which arise when investors are risk averse, or when firms are influenced by a common shock, are studied and it is shown that under reasonable assumptions there is under investment in effort in equilibrium. The inefficiencies exist when the firms are not completely negligible, as is typical of the large corporations with dispersed ownership traded on public exchanges in the US. In the idealized case where firms of each type are replicated and replaced by a continuum of firms of each type with independent outcomes, the inefficiencies disappear.market, economics, stock

A Study of the Factors Affecting Perceptions of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) in Young People

No abstract available

WHICH IMPROVES WELFARE MORE: NOMINAL OR INDEXED BOND?

Despite economists'' long standing arguments in favor of systematic indexation of loan contracts to remove the risks associated with fluctuations in the purchasing power of money (Jevons (1875), Marshall (1887, 1923), F~lsher (1922), Friedman (1991)), surprisingly few loan contracts are indexed in most Western Eclonomies. fin the United States even thirty year corporate and government bonds are not indexed. The situation is however different in many Latin American countries where indexing is widely used as a way of coping with high and variable inflation rates. What seems difiicult to eicplain is that it takes lvgh variability in inflation rates before private sector agents shift from lmindexed to indexed contracts. In practice, indexing a loan contract m.eans linking its payoff to the value of an officially computed price index such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Such an index is always an imperfect measure of the purchasing power of money: in particular, it fluctuates not only with variations in the general level of prices but also varies with changes in the relative prices of goods. This paper formalizes the idea that the imperfections of indexing may serve tal explain why agents prefer nominal bonds in economies with a low variability in purchasing power of money and only resort to indexing when the variability becomes sufficiently high. The model is a variant of the two-period general equilibrium model with incomplete markets (GEI) in which the purchasing power of money depends on a (broadly defined) measure of the amount of money available in the economy and on an index of real output. The objective of the analysis is to compare two second-best situations, in which in addition to a given security structure, there is either a nominal bond which has the risks induced by fluctuations in the purchasing power of money or an indexed bond which has the risks induced by relative price fluctuations. Adding a bond to an existing market structure has two effects: the first is the direct effect of increasing the span of the fmancial markets i.e. increasing the opportunity sets of agents for transferring income; the second is the indirect effect of changing spot and security prices, which can either increase or decrease agents'' welfare. This paper only compares direct effects, all indirect effects being absent by virtue of the specification of agents'' preferences. The direct effects are always present, even with more general preferences, but some of the results that we

An Equilibrium Model of Managerial Compensation

This paper studies a general equilibrium model with two groups of agents, investors (shareholders) and managers of firms, in which managerial effort is not observable and influences the probabilities of firms' outcomes. Shareholders of each firm offer the manager an incentive contract which maximizes the firm's market value, under the assumption that the financial markets are complete relative to the possible outcomes of the firms. The paper studies two sources of inefficiency of equilibrium. First, when investors are risk averse and effort influences probability, market-value maximization differs from maximization of expected utility. Second, because the optimal contract exploits all sources of information for inferring managerial effort, when firms' outputs are correlated the contract of a manager depends on the outcomes of other firms. This leads to an external effect of the effort of one manager on the compensation of other managers, which market-value maximization ignores. We show that under typical conditions these two effects lead to an under-provision of effort in equilibrium. These inefficiencies disappear however if each firm is replicated, and in the limit there is a continuum of firms of each type.general equilibrium, incentive contracts, inefficiencies