Decision making in the ECB's Governing Council - Should minutes and forecasts be published?

Governments seem to influence the decisions taken by the Governing Council of the ECB. It's been argued that the publication of forecasts and minutes of the Governing Council's meetings would have a negative effect due to the influence of governments on their representatives' votes. In my model, such information reduces their influence and benefits the Executive Board. Governments benefit from the publication of minutes, while they sometimes disagree with respect to the forecasts. The model suggests that the EMU members may want to withhold the publication of forecasts when taking enlargement with a more heterogeneous group of countries into account.European central bank, EMU, monetary union, voting, transparency

Does geography matter to bondholders?

We find that the location of corporate headquarters significantly affects the firm’s bondholders. Similar to Loughran and Schultz (2006) and others, who show that investors are better able to obtain information on nearby companies, we look at firms located in large metropolitan cities, small cities, and rural areas and find that firms located in remote rural areas exhibit significantly higher costs of debt capital (of up to 65 basis points) in comparison to their urban counterparts. Unlike other studies that focus on the role of information asymmetries in the local bias of investors and decision makers, we are able to show that firms in remote areas experience greater costs of debt capital primarily because of a greater difficulty of monitoring their activities. We find that the adverse impact of bad corporate governance on bondholders is magnified in geographically remote firms, primarily because geographic distance reduces the effectiveness of external monitoring. Consistent with that, we show that in the private placement market, where firms are closely monitored by institutional investors, location plays no role in explaining the cross-sectional variation in the cost of debt capital across companies. We also find that the passage of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which brought about regulatory improvements in monitoring and governance, significantly reduced the agency costs of debt in rural firms. Taken together, our results indicate that the firm’s information environment interacts with the impact of corporate governance, particularly affecting the effectiveness of external monitoring in alleviating agency problems between insiders and debt holders.

Jorge Luis Borges’s Partial Argentine Ulysses: A Foundational (Mis-)Translation

In this article, I first introduce the deconstructionist idea of the error (drawn primarily from Paul de Man) as a potentially productive category, then combine this idea with what I call Borges’s theory of mis-translation, to analyze the foundational role of (mis-)translation in Argentine literature, focusing specifically on Borges’s 1925 version of the last page of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I go on to discuss Borges’s theory of mis-translation and its importance within an Argentine as well as a transnational context. In essays such as “Las versiones homéricas” [The Homeric Versions] and “Los traductores de Las 1001 Noches” [The Translators of The 1001 Nights], Borges posits that translations are not necessarily inferior to originals, and that a translation’s merits may actually reside in its creative infidelities. After delineating Borges’s irreverent position on translation, I carefully analyze Borges’s 1925 translation of the last page of Joyce’s Ulysses, to examine how Borges uses (mis-)translation to create a partial Argentine version of Joyce’s Modernist novel, which serves, among other things, a paradoxical foundational role in Argentine and Latin American literatures.Dans le présent article, je me penche d’abord sur l’idée déconstructionniste de l’erreur, tirée principalement des écrits de Paul de Man, comme un élément potentiellement productif. Je combine ensuite cette idée avec ce que je nomme la théorie de la métraduction chez Borges, ce qui me permettra d’en analyser le rôle fondateur pour la littérature argentine, en prenant comme objet d’étude la version de 1925 faite par Borges de la dernière page du roman Ulysses, de James Joyce. Je poursuis ma réflexion en abordant la théorie de la métraduction chez Borges et son importance tant en Argentine qu’au-delà des frontières de ce pays. Dans ses essais tels que « Las versiones homéricas » [Les versions homériques] et « Los traductores de Las 1001 Noches » [Les traducteurs des 1001 nuits], Borges soutient que les traductions ne sont pas nécessairement inférieures aux originaux et que le mérite d’une traduction réside peut-être précisément dans ses infidélités créatrices. Après avoir cerné la position irrévérencieuse de Borges sur la traduction, j’analyse de près sa traduction de 1925 de la dernière page de Ulysses, afin de montrer comment Borges utilise la métraduction pour créer une version partielle argentine du roman moderniste de Joyce qui joue notamment un rôle fondateur paradoxal dans les littératures argentine et latino-américaine

Deference to the Rulemaker, Not the Rule: The D.C. Circuit\u27s Enabling Rejection of the SEC\u27s Fixed Indexed Annuities Rule in \u3cem\u3eAmerican Equity Investment Life Insurance Co. v. SEC\u3c/em\u3e

On July 12, 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in American Equity Investment Life Insurance Co. v. SEC, vacated the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 151A due to flaws in the SEC’s economic analysis of the rule. Rule 151A aimed to expand the SEC’s oversight to include purportedly “risky” hybrid annuity products— known as fixed indexed annuities—currently regulated by state insurance commissioners. In vacating the rule, however, the court actually embraced an expansive view of a federal agency’s authority to act in an area occupied by state regulation. This Comment argues that courts should avoid such deference when evaluating federal agency rules that threaten to encroach upon an area presumptively occupied by state law