Implementing Symmetric Treatment of Financial Contracts in Bankruptcy and Bank Resolution

Financial contracts come in many forms and serve many functions in both the financial system and the broader economy. Repos secured by U.S. Treasury securities act as money substitutes and can play an important role as part of the money supply, while similarly structured repos, secured by more volatile collateral, may be used as speculative devices or hedges. Swaps can be used to insure against various types of market risk, from interest rates to oil prices, or they can operate as vehicles for highly leveraged investments. The parties to these instruments are sometimes major financial institutions and, other times, ordinary businesses. Default poses differing risks to the financial system depending upon the type of instrument and the nature of the parties. Under current U.S. law, however, financial contracts receive one of only two radically different types of treatment in insolvency depending on the identity of the insolvent party: banks and systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) get one treatment; everyone else gets another. More specifically, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) resolves banks under the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA), and, unless an orderly resolution can be accomplished in bankruptcy, the FDIC also now has authority to resolve SIFIs under Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act. Everyone else makes use of the Bankruptcy Code

Stories Told and Untold: Lawyering Theory Analyses of the First Rodney King Assault Trial

These analyses, arranged as a mosaic article, emerged from the collaboration of five law students, a practicing lawyer, and two clinical law teachers. In the years since our work began, the students have graduated and are practicing or teaching. We have continued to correspond, exchanging ideas and drafts from time to time, in subgroups or as an ensemble. Although the separate tiles of the mosaic are attributed to the members of the group primarily responsible for crafting them, all parts of the article reflect the work and thinking of the whole group.</p

Regional Competitiveness Under New Perspectives

The term "competitiveness" has been used in conceptually distinct ways at the firm, regional and national levels. After primarily reviewing existing concepts at the national level, we introduce a new definition of regional competitiveness adapting definitions used in the academic literature. Specifically, we connect "outcome competitiveness" with new perspectives on a more socially inclusive and ecologically sustainable growth path, as envisaged in the WWWforEurope research program, in which 33 European research groups are taking part. Evaluating competitiveness requires both an input assessment (costs, productivity, economic structure, capabilities) and an outcome assessment. We define regional outcome competitiveness as the ability of a region to deliver Beyond GDP goals. For regions in industrialized countries, this ability depends on innovation, education, institutions, social cohesion and ecological ambition. Given this new perspective (of broader Beyond GDP goals), social investments and ecological ambitions should not be considered costs, but rather drivers of competitiveness. This is compatible with a new innovation policy fostering non-technical innovations and a new industrial policy supporting societal goals. Applying this concept to European regions, we show which regions take the "high road" to competitiveness and compare our results with the existing literature

All downhill from the PhD? The typical impact trajectory of US academic careers

© 2020 The Authors. Published by MIT Press. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00072.Within academia, mature researchers tend to be more senior, but do they also tend to write higher impact articles? This article assesses long-term publishing (16+ years) United States (US) researchers, contrasting them with shorter-term publishing researchers (1, 6 or 10 years). A long-term US researcher is operationalised as having a first Scopus-indexed journal article in exactly 2001 and one in 2016-2019, with US main affiliations in their first and last articles. Researchers publishing in large teams (11+ authors) were excluded. The average field and year normalised citation impact of long- and shorter-term US researchers’ journal articles decreases over time relative to the national average, with especially large falls to the last articles published that may be at least partly due to a decline in self-citations. In many cases researchers start by publishing above US average citation impact research and end by publishing below US average citation impact research. Thus, research managers should not assume that senior researchers will usually write the highest impact papers

Looking for love in the student experience

This chapter represents an early attempt to engage and think with the ethos that underpins the Manifesto for a Post-Critical Pedagogy (Hodgson et al. 2017), specifically from a sociology of education perspective. The Manifesto is an exhortation to move beyond the critical by also celebrating what we may love and therefore wish to preserve in education. With this in mind, the author undertakes a re-examination of the literature on the university student experience in the UK. They argue that, outside pedagogical research on students, there are three overlapping but somewhat distinct literatures, each of which focuses primarily on social inequalities, aspects of marketization, or geographies, in relation to higher education. It appears that there are gaps in each of these bodies of scholarship, with some dimensions of identity underrepresented in the first, surprisingly little empirical work in the second, while the third has attracted minimal attention to date. Furthermore, it seems that there is little to love in our current understanding of the student experience as the overwhelming focus is on dysfunctions in and around UK higher education. Applying the tenets of a Post-Critical Pedagogy does suggest that widening our scope would allow for an extension of the literature and a more positive appreciation of the UK student experience. At the same time, though, there may be some aspects of the Manifesto that require minor revisions