The Long View: Has Anything Really Improved for Children and Families Involved with Child Welfare over 3 Decades?

The overall poor health status and outcomes of children and youth in foster care have been documented in multiple studies over the last 3 decades. During this time, knowledge about brain development, positive parenting, resilience, traumatic stress, and epigenetics has exploded, resulting in demands for child welfare to become trauma-informed, child-centered, and developmentally focused. This special issue affords us the opportunity to reflect on: what’s better or not after 30 years; whether legislation and financing are aligned with child welfare’s goals of safety, permanency and well-being; and what remains to be done to improve the outcomes of children and youth in foster care or otherwise involved with child welfare

Outcome validation report: CCAFS engagement in the Global Commission on Adaptation

The Global Commission on Adaptation (GCA) was launched in October 2018 to accelerate adaptation action and support by elevating the political visibility of adaptation and focusing on concrete solutions to the climate crisis. It is led by Ban Ki-moon, 8th Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and Bill Gates, Co-Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is convened by 17 countries and guided by 30 Commissioners, and co-managed by the Global Center on Adaptation and World Resources Institute. The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has been heavily involved in the work of the GCA. This outcome validation report focuses on how CCAFS has been involved in the GCA processes, focusing on contributions made in 2019

How Relevant is Dividend Policy under Low Shareholder Protection?

This paper reopens the debate on the substitutability of dividends and shareholder control in mitigating free cash flow concerns, by examining dividend behavior when shareholder control is restricted in the firm.We consider the stakeholder-oriented governance regime of the Netherlands, where shareholdings are concentrated, but shareholder rights are often severely restricted by a legally imposed governance regime and anti-shareholder devices such as Dutch-style poison pills.We find that dividend payouts are generally low, unresponsive to earnings changes and show little relationship with size, leverage, and investment opportunities.Shareholder power restrictions affect dividend behavior to varying degrees, but those that do are used by the vast majority of Dutch listed firms.Once accounting for these, we find no evidence that strong shareholders would allow firms to relax their dividend policy, as has been proposed in the existing literature.As shareholders, institutional investors and managers actually force higher payouts.Thus, it seems that dividends often complement rather than substitute shareholders efforts to alleviate agency concerns.This finding is unlikely to be specific to the Netherlands, and could possibly be extended to other stakeholder-oriented governance regimes.Dividend policy;Corporate governance;Shareholder power restrictions;Ownership and control

How do Mergers and Acquisitions Affect Bondholders in Europe? Evidence on the Impact and Spillover of Governance and Legal Standards

This paper contributes to the comparative corporate governance literature by showing how cross-country differences in governance and legal standards affect the bondholder wealth effects of European merger and acquisitions (M&As).Using investment-grade Eurobonds, we find some remarkable results.Firstly, M&As involving European firms are considerably more bondholderfriendly than are US domestic deals.Bidding firm bondholders earn economically significant positive returns, while target bondholders incur positive but insignificant returns. Overall, acquisitions do generate value to European bidding firms, but most of the wealth effect is captured by the bondholders.Secondly, bondholder gains in both bidding and target firms are systematically higher in M&As that involve Continental European firms.Thirdly, bidder abnormal bond returns are lower in cross-border deals.However, this is counterbalanced if creditor rights and the efficiency of credit contract enforcement are stronger in the target country. There is also strong evidence that, consistent with crossborder spillovers, improved creditor protection redistributes wealth from shareholders to bondholders.Finally, we document that bondholder wealth changes are subject to changes in asset risk and to a negative listing effect similar to that previously reported for changes in shareholder wealth.bondholder returns;Eurobonds;mergers and acquisitions;creditor rights;takeover;corporate governance;shareholders abnormal returns;M&A;insolvency

Corporate Restructuring and Bondholder Wealth

This paper provides an overview of existing research on how corporate restructuring affects the wealth of creditors.Restructuring is defined as any transaction that affects the firm's underlying capital structure.Thus, it reaches well beyond asset restructuring and includes transactions such as leveraged buyouts, security issues and exchanges, and the issuance of stock options.The analysis identifies significant gaps in the literature, emphasizes the potential differences between creditor wealth changes in market- and network-oriented governance systems, and provides valuable insights into methodological advances.Many issues obviously remain, as empirical evidence is still incomplete and focuses exclusively on the US.In network-oriented regimes, the potential for research remains constrained by the lesser development of bond markets that disclose information on creditor wealth shocks.Still, on-going debt securitization should now allow for the investigation of at least some critical issues.This is imperative, as the position of creditors in the firm differs substantially across governance systems despite the gradual convergence of these regimes across the world.bondholder wealth;corporate restructuring;mergers and acquisitions;event studies;bond returns

Boundary conditions in linearized harmonic gravity

We investigate the initial-boundary value problem for linearized gravitational theory in harmonic coordinates. Rigorous techniques for hyperbolic systems are applied to establish well-posedness for various reductions of the system into a set of six wave equations. The results are used to formulate computational algorithms for Cauchy evolution in a 3-dimensional bounded domain. Numerical codes based upon these algorithms are shown to satisfy tests of robust stability for random constraint violating initial data and random boundary data; and shown to give excellent performance for the evolution of typical physical data. The results are obtained for plane boundaries as well as piecewise cubic spherical boundaries cut out of a Cartesian grid.Comment: 22 pages, 6 Postscript figure

Some mathematical problems in numerical relativity

The main goal of numerical relativity is the long time simulation of highly nonlinear spacetimes that cannot be treated by perturbation theory. This involves analytic, computational and physical issues. At present, the major impasses to achieving global simulations of physical usefulness are of an analytic/computational nature. We present here some examples of how analytic insight can lend useful guidance for the improvement of numerical approaches.Comment: 17 pages, 12 graphs (eps format