Search

We propose a shadow policy interest rate based on an estimated structural model that accounts for the zero lower bound. The lower bound constraint, if expected to bind, is contractionary and increases the shadow rate compared to an unconstrained systematic policy response. By contrast, forward guidance and other unconventional policies that extend the expected duration of zero-interest-rate policy are expansionary and decrease the shadow rate. By quantifying these distinct effects, our structural shadow federal funds rate better captures the stance of monetary policy given economic conditions than a shadow rate based only on the term structure of interest rates.

I model tax planning subject to challenges from a tax authority given an uneven tax code. The model captures the amount of deliberation required of the authority to properly challenge gray areas and the probability that it will prevail. The authority weighs these items when deciding whether to initiate the challenge. The ensuing unofficial shadow standard is a credible commitment which encourages less aggressive tax planning while saving the authority its deliberation costs. The shadow standard creates two groups – unchallenged taxpayers who abide by the shadow standard, and taxpayers with significantly more aggressive (and risky) positions. This explains the undersheltering paradox, and helps to resolve the longstanding lack agreement on precise definitions for tax aggressiveness and tax risk. Unlike the well-studied tax evasion paradigm (where more scrutiny induces more compliance), less scrutiny afforded by an increasing shadow standard may increase net tax collections under a tax planning paradigm.

Using the 2015 data of the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), the relationship between family socioeconomic background, parent involvement, and shadow education participation was explored through structural equations. The results showed that: parent involvement strengthened shadow education participation; parent involvement played a part in the mediating role in the influence of family socioeconomic background on shadow education participation. Parent involvement activates the advantage of family socioeconomic background. Families with high socioeconomic backgrounds are more active in participating in shadow education, and families of different strata are divided into opportunities for participation in shadow education.

This statement addresses the topic of case selection and review at the Supreme Court. It considers the decline in cases on the Court's regular docket, and how that is related to views of precedent. It also considers the increase in high-profile cases on the Court's "shadow docket," and analogizes the shadow docket to the preliminary injunction.

This paper studies the heterogeneous response of State-owned enterprises (SOEs) and nonState-owned enterprises (nonSOEs) to the monetary policy. I find that SOEs’ investment declines by 5% - 12% more than nonSOEs after a 100 basis point monetary tightening shock using recent data from China. I provide evidence that a shadow banking channel could explain the empirical results. I show that, via a rise of shadow banking relative to bank loans, a monetary tightening shock raises the credit spread of SOEs to nonSOEs, which further slows down the investment of SOEs compared to nonSOEs.

This article provides extended summaries and (separately) the author's take on every employment and labor law decision rendered by the Supreme Court during its most recent term. Also covered in this piece are abbreviated reviews of all grants of certiorari for the upcoming term and short summaries and analyses of all other employment-related opinions published by the Court this term, including those on the so-called shadow docket portion of the orders lists. The article concludes with additional commentary on the work of the Supreme Court as it affects the labor and employment law sector.

We investigate how the market evaluates nonfinancial firms that recently bought wealth management products (WMPs) when raising equity capital. Using a sample of Chinese firms, we find that the stock market reacts less positively to private equity placements (PEPs) by firms that recently purchased WMPs than to those that did not. Further analysis suggests that compared with retail investors, sophisticated (i.e., institutional and high-net-worth) investors pay a higher price for the shares of these WMP-buying firms. After PEPs, we find that the long-term operating performance and firm value of WMP-buying firms are higher than those of non-buying firms. Overall, the findings suggest that: (i) engaging in shadow banking activities (buying WMPs) does not mean a firm is inferior, and (ii) sophisticated investors are less concerned than retail investors about a firm’s shadow banking activities.

Italy exhibits a very divided economy with an economic powerhouse in its northern regions and an economically less developed South. At the same time, the North of Italy is also characterized by a historically decentralized financial system with small and local banks that fit to the SMEs of the region's industrial sector. By means of correlated random effects-regressions for the 21 Italian NUTS2-regions, we show that this decentralized banking system helps northern Italy in buffering economic shocks from financial crises. The relative number of banks, the size of banks, and their focus on traditional interest rate business increase economic wealth and household incomes while reducing unemployment. We further find that the economically strong North did not enter a race to the bottom to its southern neighbors during and after the sovereign debt crisis and benefits from its more diverse banking system. Meanwhile, the southern regions could also not catch up.

In this paper, I show that the existence of non-bank financial institutions (NBFIs) has implications for the optimal regulation of the traditional banking sector. I develop a New Keynesian DSGE model for the euro area featuring a heterogeneous financial sector allowing for potential credit leakage towards unregulated NBFIs. Introducing NBFIs raises the importance of credit stabilization relative to other policy objectives in the welfare-based loss function of the regulator. The resulting optimal policy rule indicates that regulators adjust dynamic capital requirements more strongly in response to macroeconomic shocks due to credit leakage. Furthermore, introducing non-bank finance not only alters the cyclicality of optimal regulation, but also has implications for the optimal steady-state level of capital requirements and loan-to-value ratios. Sector-specific characteristics such as bank market power and risk affect welfare gains from traditional and NBFI credit.

This study is about the taxation system of Pakistan, especially in legal perspective, review the tax policy structure, its concerns and recent tax reforms initiatives of current Government of Pakistan. The purpose is to determine the tax policy scope of improvement to meet the changing needs of the modern world and in interest of public development and services. Pakistan’s taxation system has complex nature, narrow approach and administrative flaws. With a public trust deficit and corrupt practices, reliance of the government on foreign and local borrowing can’t stop. Government has introducing, amnesty schemes for asset declaration, tax cut for construction industries and rewards scheme on whistleblowing, to enhance economic activity, financial circulation and minimizing shadow economy. In conclusion some recommendations to legislatures for complex taxation structure to rectify imbalance approach of tax policy.

Shadow financing through off-balance sheet wealth management products (WMPs) has become increasingly important besides deposits in China. We quantify the economic magnitude of the effect of WMPs on banking stability in an equilibrium model calibrated to Chinese banking sector data. Alternative equilibria emerge, which deviate substantially from the observed banking system and lead to severe financial distress and large welfare losses. Rollover costs from the WMP market and negative shocks to the asset market underlying WMPs can exacerbate banking instability. Moreover, we show that smaller and medium sized banks are comparably relevant for financial stability as the systemically important big 4 banks in China.

This paper evaluates the effect of Chinese monetary policy shocks on credit creation through the shadow banking sector in mainland China. I identify monetary policy shocks by constructing a measure of monetary policy surprises based on changes to the 1-Year Interest Rate Swaps on the 7-Day Repo Rate on monetary policy announcement dates. A two-stage local projection was then estimated, using the surprise measure as an instrument. The results give two key findings: 1) shadow credit expands in response to contractionary monetary policy, and 2) I provide additional evidence of the transmission of monetary policy through the interest rate channel.

Agency MBS issuers can choose among three securitization venues: individual securitization where an issuer uses her own loans to create an MBS, collective securitization where different issuers deliver loans into a common MBS, and cash window where issuers receive immediate cash payment by selling loans to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who then conduct securitization. We find that issuers with greater immediate liquidity needs (e.g., smaller issuers and shadow banks) have a larger fraction of their loans securitized through cash window. The uniform pricing feature of collective securitization results in cross-subsidy from traditional banks, who have relatively high-value loans, to shadow banks, especially fintech issuers, who have relatively low-value loans; hence, shadow banks and traditional banks prefer collective and individual securitization, respectively. We further show that securitization venues affect the quality and quantity of loans that issuers securitize, using Fannie Mae's policy shock on collective securitization and the COVID-19 shock on cash window.

The debate on human rights and investment law has markedly developed since Markus Krajewski wrote the first overview on recent trends in arbitration and treaty-making for the Yearbook of International Investment Law & Policy in 2017. In 2020, the investment and human rights nexus has not only been discussed by critical scholars, and general international law journals, but also in fora of the investment law community. Yet, the mainstreaming of human rights into investment law and arbitration has so far not led to a systematic realignment of human rights and investment law. In this chapter, I will investigate recent developments in the relationship between investment and human rights. This includes both newly registered and concluded cases in investor-state arbitration and new investment agreements, as well as broader developments and political discussions in the field of business and human rights. Ultimately, all those developments are eclipsed by the emergent conflict between investment and human rights obligations arising out of the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why this chapter closes with a snapshot of the current debate.

This Article examines the Supreme Court’s recent shadow docket opinion in FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG)—not just its present effects, but its bigger-picture implications for the future of abortion jurisprudence. In FDA v. ACOG, the Court, without full briefing or argument, stayed a Maryland court’s injunction against the FDA. In doing so, it allowed the FDA to continue enforcing its “in-person requirement,” forcing women to travel to pick up abortion medication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Parts I and II of this paper review the Court’s abortion jurisprudence and the opinion in FDA v. ACOG. Part II also suggests that FDA v. ACOG is inconsistent with the Court’s contemporaneous “shadow docket” opinions—summary opinions that enjoined states’ restrictions on church gatherings during the pandemic. Part III then explores the impact that FDA v. ACOG could have on abortion jurisprudence in a post-pandemic world. We first speculate about a post-pandemic United States where the Court continues to recognize abortion as a constitutionally-protected right. We argue that, while “in-person requirements” impede women seeking abortions, they also, ironically, make it harder for states to pass laws restricting access to abortion under contemporary case law. We then contemplate a parallel post-pandemic universe in which the Court overturns Roe v. Wade and stops recognizing the right to abortion. If the Court decides that abortion is not a fundamental right, as pro-choice liberals fear, it will be the in-person mifepristone requirements, or lack thereof, that determine the severity of that decision for many women in the United States. In a world without Roe, in-person requirements would maximally restrict women’s access to abortion.

This paper detects and offers solutions to alleviate COVID-19 induced inequality. The COVID-19 external shock now clearly created economic disparity between nations, industries and societal groups. This paper discusses rising inequality trends in finance, healthcare and digitalization exacerbated during the global COVID pandemic. It then discusses the most novel and cutting-edge innovations in bridging the finance-world and real economy inequality gap, fostering digitalization advancements and common goods oriented access to affordable healthcare but also equality in connectivity and tech-skills development to overcome unforeseen inequality in the shadow of COVID-19. KEYWORDS: Banking, Connectivity, Consumption, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Digitalization, Finance, Healthcare, Medical care, Real economy, Social volatility, Socio-Economics&nbsp

A puzzle of China’s shadow banking system is its stark growth since the 2008 Subprime Crisis, which is in sharp contrast to most of countries. We present a model to explain why the shadow banking activities have been allowed to expand with the full awareness of regulators in China. In the presence of local government intervention, which tends to distort the banks’ portfolio choices towards inefficient low-quality projects, the policy combination of formal banking sector credit tightening and shadow banking sector loosening forces banks to improve credit quality. This is because shadow banking assets are less diversified than commercial bank assets, thereby subject to higher bank run risk, which forces banks to improve the quality of shadow banking assets. Negative shocks to project quality may trigger information production in the shadow banking sector and prevent banks from providing funding to efficient projects, which creates additional welfare losses. This result provides a rationale for China's new regulations on shadow banking sector since 2018 in the background of increasing risks.

This study investigates the long-term effects of exposure to infectious disease on individuals’ risk preference and behaviors. Using nationally representative datasets in China, we adopt a differences-in-differences strategy to evaluate the long-term impacts of exposure to China’s 1967 meningitis epidemic. We find that intense exposure to the meningitis epidemic during childhood led to increased risk aversion. In addition, we show that exposure to the meningitis epidemic decreased risky behaviors, including financial investment, credit card usage, entrepreneurship, and migration.

This paper studies the impact of shadow banking regulation on the financial system and the real economy. For identification, I exploit a policy – “New Asset Management Rules” (NAMR) – that restrict the issuance and investment directions of wealth management products (WMPs) in China. I find that depositors substitute the WMPs with deposits, leading to an increase in bank loans. I provide evidence the substitution is imperfect and the net credit supply of banks declines. Using a bank-firm linked database, I show that private-owned enterprises (POEs) with high shadow banking or WMP exposure experienced a decline in investments, the growth rate of total assets, liabilities, and revenue. The province-level data shows the aggregate impact of the NAMR is sizable. A counterfactual analysis shows that the investment growth rate would have been 1.6 percentage points higher, translating to a 1 percentage point higher GDP growth rate in 2018.

We use granular data covering regulated (brokerage-financed) and unregulated (shadow-financed) margin trading during the 2015 market turmoil in China to provide the first systematic analysis of margin investors' characteristics, leverage management policies, and liquidation choices. We show that leverage constraints induced substantial forced and preemptive sales, and leverage and cash management differed substantially across investor and account types. We explore tha relation between margin trading and shock propagation, and show that China's proice limit rule led to unintended contagion across stocks. Compared to brokerage investors, shadow investors were closer to their leverage constraints, and played a more significant role in transmitting chocks across stocks.

We propose a shadow rate no-arbitrage DTSM with drifting trends to estimate the natural rate of interest. With the shadow rate reflecting overall financial market condition (Wu and Zhang (2019)), its long run forecast (in real term), defined as our natural rate, provides a useful measure against which monetary policy stance may be assessed. We apply our model to treasury yields data in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany for the sample from November 1972 to December 2019. We find that all three natural rates have been declining since as early as the 1990s and have all turn negative in the most recent few years. Furthermore, there is a strong co-movement among the three natural rates indicating that global factors contribute significantly to the natural rate declining dynamics, corroborating findings in Holston et al. (2017). The term premium estimates from our model are quite stationary and are significantly and positively correlated with several inflation uncertainty measures, consistent with Wright (2011).

Credit spreads on household and business loans move in lockstep and spike in every recession. We propose a theory as to why banks tighten their lending standards following a drop in market sentiment. The key feature is a procyclical shadow banking sector that shifts risk from traditional banks to investors through securitisation. We fit the model to euro‑area data and find that market sentiment shocks are the main driver of business and financial cycles over the past two decades.

We investigate the real effects of shadow banking in the case of technological innovation. Using manually collected entrusted loan data, we find that firm-to-firm entrusted loans, once the largest part of the shadow banking sector in China, enhance the borrowers’ innovation output. The effects are more prominent when the borrowers are subject to severer financial constraints and information asymmetry. A plausible underlying economic channel is capital reallocations from less productive but easy-financed lender firms to more innovative but financially less-privileged borrower firms. Our paper sheds new light on the bright side of shadow banking in China, i.e., it helps correct bank credit misallocations and thus serves as a second-best market design in financing the real economy.

This paper reveals ways in which algorithms on the Facebook platform have the effect of suppressing content distribution without specifically targeting it for removal, and examines the consequential stifling of users’ speech. At the heart of it is an examination of the colloquial concept of a ‘shadow ban’. This is a term that refers to specific scenario where users’ content is hidden or deprioritised without informing them. The paper reveals how the Facebook shadow ban works by blocking dissemination in News Feed. This is Facebook’s recommender system that curates content for users, and is also the name of the algorithm that encodes the process. The decision-making criteria are based on ‘behaviour’, a term that relates to activity of the page that is identifiable through patterns in the data. It’s a technique that is rooted in computer security, and raises questions about the balance between security and freedom of expression. The paper is situated in the field of research that addresses the responsibility and accountability of the large online platforms with regard to content moderation. It works through the lens of the user to examine the impact of the Facebook shadow ban. Users, whether they are acting as speakers or as recipients of information, have positive rights that must be protected and they should not be treated as passive victims. The user experience was studied over the period of a year from November 2019 to November 2020 across 20 Facebook Pages from the UK. Data provided to the Pages via Facebook Insights was analysed in order to produce a comparative metric, and it was considered how the shadow ban could be assessed under human rights standards. The paper concludes with a recommendation for quality controls on Facebook’s internal processes, potentially with a form of triage to identify genuine, lawful content that has been caught up in the security net. Overall, an improved understanding should be developed around the automated processes and algorithms that are used in content moderation. This is a vital step to safeguarding the online platforms as a forum for public discourse.

Expectations are a key element of strategic environments, accordingly in all competitive situations. As it has already been shown that men's performance in current competitions is affected by the strength of expected future opponents, we investigate whether women are overshadowed by future competitors as well. In doing so, we use data from professional tennis, replicate the results for men and compare it with women's behavior. Extending previous research, we focus on individuals that have already entered a competition and investigate the role of uncertainty in this context, particularly, whether behavior differs and is gender-specific when individuals have to form expectations instead of having accurate information about future competitors. Our findings suggest that highly qualified men and women perform worse in current competitions in case that the expected future opponent is stronger. We find gender-specific behavior when analyzing uncertainty as a potential source of this effect: Women's current performance does not depend on the future competitor's strength when they know her for sure, whereas they are overshadowed when having to form expectations. In contrast, men are negatively affected by the future competitor's strength, both when they know him and when they need to form expectations, whereby the effect is weaker in the first case. Finally, our results suggest that women (men) rather seem to be sensitive to direct (more distant) incentives. These findings might be transferred to information revelation in promotion contests in order to help highly qualified individuals, especially women, climb the career ladder.

This Chapter sheds light on illiberalism and its relationship to national sovereignty through drawing a comparison with liberalism’s relationship to national sovereignty. The immediate political context of the liberal regime today is typically the sovereign nation state. Equally, the immediate political context of the illiberal regime – in whose perspective liberal values are secondary and in at least some measure dispensable - is also the sovereign nation state. This is no coincidence. Liberalism and illiberalism alike identify sovereignty and nationalism as important enabling conditions, and there is sufficient overlap in the manner in which and the consequences with which those enabling conditions operate in these ostensibly contrasting regimes that there is inevitable seepage from one to the other. Illiberalism, then, should be considered as the shadow and temptation of liberalism, as much as its normative inverse and a reaction against it. The chapter concludes by assessing and comparing the apparently rising prospects of populist illiberalism today in both Central European and Western European states, keeping that close relationship with the liberal alternative in mind.

A central feature of China’s shadow banking sector is the prevalence of implicit guarantees that investors come to expect for returns on risky investments. We develop a theoretical model and argue that project screening by financial intermediaries such as trust companies, accompanied by their implicit guarantees on project payoffs, can be the second best arrangement in funding risky projects. Using a comprehensive set of investment products sponsored by all the licensed trust companies, we document evidence consistent with the model’s predictions about the ex ante pricing of the products and ex post recourse in case of defaults on the products. In particular, initial yields of the products not only reflect borrower risks, but also reflect the strength of implicit guarantees, including the characteristics of the issuing company and its controlling shareholder, and whether the product is sold through a large bank. In addition, the spread-to-risk sensitivity is flattened by strong guarantees.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the development of shadow banking has been seen as one of the determinants for the increase of system risk. While diversity within the shadow banking system has been largely overlooked, in this paper we focus on European Monetary Market Funds (MMFs) and Finance Services (FSs) in order to investigate their influence on systemic risk. We evaluate the impact of their accounting and financial variables on systemic risk using the Adrian and Brunnermeier (2016)'s ∆CoVaR measure. The dataset is composed of 476 listed traditional and shadow European banking entities, over the period 2006:12015:4. We find that the size of financial institutions contributes more to systemic risk, in particular for MMFs. Market-to-book value ratio, beta and equity returns volatility play a crucial role in explaining systemic risk for FSs. Finally, for traditional banks, the short-term liability ratio is a key determinant in increasing systemic risk.

One view in the literature (Popov 2020) is that East Asian model is superior to other models in the Global South, at least in terms of catch-up development and possibly even in innovations beyond the technological frontier. Unlike economic models in Latin America and Sub-Sahara Africa, the East Asian model prioritizes community interests (e.g., that of work collective, neighborhood, nation-state, and all of humanity) over those of individuals with the possibility of limiting some human rights for the greater benefit of all. Crucial features of the East Asian economic model include relatively low income and wealth inequalities, strong state institutional capacity (as measured by the murder rate and share of the shadow economy). The origins of the East Asian economic model can be traced to different trajectories of the development of the Global South since the 16th century (Popov, 2009; 2014). This paper argues that European economic model and East Asian model have a lot in common. After controlling for the size of the country and the level of development, it turns out that government consumption as a share of GDP is relatively high in both models, whereas income inequalities are relatively low.

This paper takes into discussion the diasporic phenomena, namely, rootlessness, nostalgia, memory and alienation in two of Amitav Ghosh’s novels namely The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace. It infers that the characters get respite from memory banks. Ghosh uses the flashback technique in order to intensify the characters’ quest for identity. Diasporic literature traverses barricades in order to clinch a new selfhood. The very thought and longing for belongingness form the core to search for the original root. It refers to the rootedness namely one’s home-place. One is not able to detach from the human bondage, sentiments, and love. Another element which is associated with this attachment to home-place is ‘Memory’. An immigrant never forgets one’s home-place. The thread which links the past and the present is the recollection. Thus, nostalgia and memory are equally interlinked to search for one’s root or belongingness. This fixation to one’s home-place is the belongingness which is portrayed through the lens of recollection and flash back technique. Past always acts as a mirror in which the present has its reflections. In the Shadow Lines the glorious memories of Calcutta and Dhaka are beautifully pictured by the characters longing for their homelands. The partition of Bengal and the resultant trauma are widely depicted. The old family house stands as a wholesome framework of attachment of deeprootedness. It remains a home for the grandmother, even after partition and she always longs to see it again. In the Glass Palace, home thoughts are not something to be merely remembered as an abstract construct but represented as a cultural tool of negotiation for new cultural encounters. Thus, a new space is created through home thoughts which helps in the construction of a new identity. The past is remembered not as a dead, remote period, but as flowing on, into the present.

In this paper, we study the impact of exogenous variations of international oil prices on the incidence of protest, while exploring the role of the shadow economy as a mitigating factor. We find that oil price shocks are negatively associated with protests, but the effect is less severe the higher the initial size of the shadow economy. To explain these results, we show that the size of the shadow economy responds counter-cyclically to oil-price-driven income shocks. In particular, we find that the decline in the GDP per capita growth following a negative oil price shock leads to an increase in the size of the shadow economy. This suggest that the shadow economy’s capacity to absorb persistent oil price fluctuations without provoking political unrest, should regard it as a mitigation tool rather than an economic burden.

Despite Africa’s fragmented sub-regional economic regimes, the AfCFTA Agreement represents a significant moment for African States to harness the continent’s international trade and investment opportunities on their own terms. The AfCFTA Agreement initiates a set of complex and lengthy negotiations with a view to reducing tariffs, galvanize industrial production and boost Africa’s trade. The success of Africa’s reinvigorated liberal internationalism embodied in the AfCFTA Agreement depends on a host of factors that primarily includes its effective implementation. This Chapter situates the AfCFTA Agreement in the historical and contemporary contexts of the mixed performance of sub-regional economic communities and other regimes in which its implementation will be embedded. The Chapter also examines the pre-existing structural deficiencies that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore and their implications for the AfCFTA Agreement. Building on the foregoing, the Chapter also critically examines the blindspots of the pan-Africanist underpinning of the AfCFTA Agreement for the future of trade regime in Africa. The Chapter examines the substantive provisions of the AfCFTA Agreement and its institutions focusing on the question of supranationality in the decision-making process. In the third section, I deepen the Chapter’s analysis by examining the promise of the AfCFTA in the shadow of Africa’s mixed record of economic cooperation. Based on the analyses of the systemic deficiencies in African regional trade regimes, as impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. To illustrate the latter, I draw on the finance sector - debt burden conundrum and digitalisation. The examples are selected to illustrate areas where historical deep-seated challenges exist and emerging sectors that African leaders should capitalise for a better post-pandemic Africa. I contend that a critical understanding of pan-Africanism and in a morphological sense that acknowledges its shortcomings is important to understanding the attitude of African States to the lethargic implementation of regional trade agreements. Operating with such consciousness, I contend, engenders a better understanding of the intrigues of the implementation phase, as opposed to the narrow, lack of political will arguments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped the demand for goods and services worldwide. The combination of a public health emergency, economic distress, and misinformation-driven panic have pushed customers and vendors towards the shadow economy. In particular, dark web marketplaces (DWMs), commercial websites accessible via free software, have gained significant popularity. Here, we analyse 851,199 listings extracted from 30 DWMs between January 1, 2020 and November 16, 2020. We identify 788 listings directly related to COVID-19 products and monitor the temporal evolution of product categories including Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), medicines (e.g., hydroxyclorochine), and medical frauds. Finally, we compare trends in their temporal evolution with variations in public attention, as measured by Twitter posts and Wikipedia page visits. We reveal how the online shadow economy has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlight the importance of a continuous monitoring of DWMs, especially now that real vaccines are available and in short supply. We anticipate our analysis will be of interest both to researchers and public agencies focused on the protection of public health.

An effective means of disorientation is well nurtured and the manure for the same is well abetted by the media. This has resulted in a successful formation into the creation of the ‘Other’, who no longer is a part of the socio- economic system. This can be majorly seen through varied dimensions, but all these varied dimensions results in a convenient shadow of resorting into a single definition which is the Caste. Hence this process of resorting to a homogenous methodology of Caste definition, calls for a multi-disciplinary approach wherein annihilation to the creation of the ‘Other’ can be achieved only when thought’s alone become macro and plural in its upbringing. These thoughts can be seen in the form of practices through a social, genetic, political, economic, gendered and almost any subjects one can think off .For this very reason, Caste along with Class are used as an effective and efficient hierarchical step, to disorient many resulting in an internalization of the dignified. Hence the article tries to orient the measures used to disorient, by trying to create an antagonistic research relationship of contestations, through using the same prevalent methods that were earlier used for the singularization of one’s being and becoming .The rationale employed in the article is “only if there is a mix of the ‘here and now’ along with the understanding of ‘then’ , the time and space become a civilized existence of social understanding that is bereft of a caste and class consciousness.”

Using a proprietary data set of private credit agreements, I document five facts about a previously unexplored segment of the US corporate debt market: nonbank direct lending to private equity (PE) middle-market buyouts. First, PE-backed middle-market firms have high cash flow, low liquidation value of tangible assets, and exhibit strong (weak) dependence of debt capacity to cash flow (liquidation value). Second, these features are stronger for those borrowing using direct loans despite their being smaller in size. Third, direct loans face markedly higher annual borrowing costs that are over 300 basis points higher than on comparable bank loans. Fourth, direct loans instead have a much more borrower-friendly covenant structure. Fifth, borrowers of direct loans find covenant violation costly, for it may constrain future borrowing. These findings suggest that small firms are not limited to asset-based bank debt and can rely heavily on cash flow-based debt. Further, direct lenders can provide more flexible solutions to PE sponsors in exchange for greater cash flow rights without compromising ex-post enforcement of contractual rights. Overall, this paper raises important questions for research in the growing literature on shadow banking.

The gender gap in income and leadership positions in many domains of our society is an undisputed pervasive phenomenon. One explanation for the disadvantaged position of women put forward in the economic and psychology literature is the weaker response of women to competitive incentives. Despite the large amount of literature trying to explain this fact, the precise mechanisms behind the gender difference in competitive responsiveness are still not fully uncovered. In this paper, we use laboratory experiments to study the potential role of stereotype threat on the response of men and women to competitive incentives in mixed-gender competition. We use a real effort math task to induce an implicit stereotype threat against women in one treatment. In additional treatments we, respectively, reinforce this stereotype threat and induce a stereotype threat against men. In contrast to much of the literature we do not observe that women are less competitive than men, neither when there is an implicit nor when there is an explicit stereotype threat against women. We attribute this to two factors which differentiates our experiment from previous ones. We control, first, for inter-individual performance differences using a within-subject design, and, second, for risk differences between non-competitive and competitive environments by making the former risky. We do find an adverse stereotype threat effect on the performance of men when there is an explicit stereotype threat against them. In that case any positive performance effect of competition is nullified by the stereotype threat. Overall, our results indicate that a stereotype threat has negative competitive performance effects only if there is information contradicting an existing stereotype. This suggests that the appropriate intervention to prevent the adverse effect of stereotype threat in performance is to avoid any information referring to the stereotype.

In this paper, we argue that bank-sponsored prime institutional money market funds (PI-MMFs) are different from non-bank-sponsored PI-MMFs. This difference can arise because the sponsoring bank holding companies (BHCs) can extend shadow insurance to ailing affiliated MMFs. We hypothesize that PI-MMFs price this shadow insurance through higher expense ratios. Indeed, after September 2008 when industry risk increased, expense ratios were seven basis points higher than those of non-BHC-sponsored MMFs. This increase is of similar size to the average deposit insurance premium charged by the FDIC in 2008. We also show, despite higher expense ratios, the redemptions in BHC sponsored MMFs were lower in contrast to expectations of prior literature.

The Supreme Court has decided many more patent cases than trademark or copyright cases. This is so not just in the past decade—the focus of the tenth annual Supreme Court IP Review at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, in September 2019, at which I presented this research—but in the past 20 decades. In gathering the entire body of the Court’s i.p. caselaw, for a study with citation-network-analysis tools, I found that patent cases greatly outnumber trademark and copyright cases. Moreover, patent cases, especially patent & antitrust cases, dominate the metrics for the most central cases in the citation network. One can, however, take the Court’s trademark and copyright cases out of the shadow of the patent cases, creating a citation network focused on those areas of i.p. law. This paper does so. Specifically, I focus on the basic citation and co-citation networks embedded in all the Supreme Court trademark and copyright cases that cite out to one or more prior Supreme Court cases in any doctrinal area. These i.p. cases run from Stevens v. Gladding, 58 U.S. (17 How.) 447 (1855), to, most recently, Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC, 139 S. Ct. 1652 (2019). The lesson is as clear as it is brief: trademark dominates the jurisprudence through 1972, then copyright dominates from 1973 to the present.

Social trust is a crucial ingredient for successful collective action. What causes social trust to develop, however, remains poorly understood. The quality of political institutions has been proposed as a candidate driver and has been shown to correlate with social trust. We show that this relationship is causal. We begin by documenting a positive correlation between quality of institutions, measured by embezzlement, and social trust using survey data. We then take the investigation to the laboratory: We first exogenously expose subjects to different levels of institutional quality in an environment mimicking public administration embezzlement. We then measure social trust among the participants using a trust game. Coherent with our survey evidence, individuals exposed to low institutional quality trust significantly less.

Viewed closely and comprehensively, Masterpiece Cakeshop, far from simply being the narrow, shallow, and modest decision many have taken it to be, is a rich, multi-faceted decision that cleaves and binds the parties to the case, carefully managing conflictual crisis. Through a ruling for a faithful custom-wedding-cake baker against a state whose legal processes are held to have been marred by anti-religious bias, the Court unfolds a cross-cutting array of constitutional wins and losses for cultural conservatives and traditional moralists, on the one hand, and for lesbians and gay men and their supporters committed to civil and equal rights, on the other. The Court’s central anti-religious-discrimination holding doesn’t only potentially benefit opponents of such discrimination in other cases. This holding also has boomerang-like tendencies that should make it useful for those who would level anti-discrimination claims on a variety of other grounds. Liberal and progressive audiences might thus reconsider their aversions to the decision for this reason alone. What’s more, Masterpiece Cakeshop’s “shadow rulings,” described in detail here, dole out notable victories to cultural conservatives, traditional moralists, and lesbians and gay men alike. Officially declining to adjudicate the merits of the baker’s artistic freedom claim under the First Amendment, the Court’s opinion expresses openness and sympathy, but ultimately substantive doubt about it. In these respects, and notwithstanding suggestions to the contrary, Masterpiece Cakeshop is full of substantive lawmaking. Having tracked that lawmaking to its textual limits, analysis turns to the opinion’s final passage, which, on one level, importantly recapitulates the opinion’s constitutional rulemaking, instructing courts and governmental actors one last time on how to handle cases like this one in the future. On another level, the passage is a compass pointing to lessons in moral politics that the opinion offers to the partisans of the Kulturkampf. One version of the Court’s moral-political teaching involves instruction in a moral politics of respect and friendship. This may be practically politically viable, leaving aside whether it will in fact be accepted. A more ambitious version of the opinion’s moral-political teaching involves a moral politics of sibling love that’s certain to be widely and emphatically rejected. Reconfigured in aesthetic terms, however, the moral politics of sibling love may receive a more nuanced hearing: widely dismissed as an undertaking appropriate for politics, but received with perhaps different sensibilities on an aesthetic plane. If it’s presently uncertain and undecidable whether Masterpiece Cakeshop will prove to have been a major legal event, whatever is ultimately made of it, it covers plenty of ground, doing plenty of legal and extra-legal work, in the here and now.

This paper argues that individual economies and the global economy can grow and thrive, even in the shadow of a pandemic. Specifically, it argues that quarantines can be modified to allow for greater economic and social participation. It suggests ways to address shortages of medical supplies and human capital. It also suggests ways to reduce uncertainty and strengthen economic security overall. Finally, it offers an economic approach for disrupting the flow of illicit drugs, during a public health crisis.

Cryptocurrency arose, and grew in popularity, following the financial crisis of 2008 built upon a promise of decentralizing money and payments. An examination of the history of money and banking the United States demonstrates that stable money benefits from strict controls and commitments by a centralized government through chartering restrictions and a broad safety net, rather than decentralization. In addition, financial crises happen when government allows money creation to occur outside of official channels. The U.S. central bank is then forced into a policy of supporting a range of money-like assets in order to maintain a grip on monetary policy and some semblance of financial stability. In addition, this chapter argues that cryptocurrency as a form of shadow money shares many of the problematic attributes of both the privately issued bank notes that created instability during the “free banking” era and the “shadow banking” activities that contributed to the 2008 crisis. In this sense, rather than being a novel and disruptive idea, cryptocurrency replicates many of the systemically destabilizing aspects of privately issued money and money-like instruments. This chapter proposes that, rather than allowing a new, digital “free banking” era to emerge, the better alternative is a public model. Specifically, it argues that the Federal Reserve should use its tools to improve public payment systems, enact robust utility-like regulations for private digital currencies, and limit the likelihood of bubbles using macroprudential measures.

Social interactions predominantly take place under the shadow of the future. Previous literature on infinitely repeated games has highlighted the primary role of self-interested strategic considerations in explaining outcomes. Using indefinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma games, this paper demonstrates experimentally the importance of social preferences for achieving efficient cooperative outcomes. Sorting agents by their pro-sociality, we find that cooperation is three to four times higher among prosocial players compared to selfish players. We also show that social preferences are less important when individuals interact in mixed populations. This can explain why the influence of social preferences has not been detected in previous studies.

In this article, Professor Ferguson addresses the problem of business debtors who avoid the reorganization process of Chapter 11 bankruptcy by instead selling their business under Bankruptcy Code § 363. There is concern that the sales are not producing the best and highest values. Professor Ferguson proposes a two part business in-fact and business in-law process that he believes will produce fairer and more optimal results.

Library Genesis is one of the oldest and largest illegal scholarly book collections online. Without the authorization of copyright holders, this shadow library hosts and makes more than 2 million scholarly publications, monographs, and textbooks available. This paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the service’s administrators. We reconstruct the social and economic factors that drive the global and European demand for illicit scholarly literature. In particular, we test if lower income regions can compensate for the shortcomings in legal access infrastructures by more intensive use of illicit open resources. We found that while richer regions are the most intensive users of shadow libraries, poorer regions face structural limitations that prevent them from fully capitalizing on freely accessible knowledge. We discuss these findings in the wider context of open access publishing, and point out that open access knowledge, if not met with proper knowledge absorption infrastructures, has limited usefulness in addressing knowledge access and production inequalities.

A literature in the social sciences proposes that humans can promote cooperation with strangers by signaling their generosity through investment in unrelated pro-social activities. This paper studied this hypothesis by conducting a laboratory experiment with an infinitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma game under random matching. A novel feature of the experiment is that each player first decided how much to donate to a charitable organization, the British Red Cross, and then this donation information was conveyed to the player’s matched partner. Surprisingly, the donation activities significantly undermined cooperation. This negative effect of charitable-giving was consistently observed regardless of whether players had a post-interaction opportunity to punish the partners. A detailed analysis suggests that the negative effect (a) resulted from the transmission of the charitable-giving information, not from the fact that subjects engaged in the charitable-giving, and (b) was caused by mis-coordination between the two parties who can both costly signal their generosity. This suggests that letting players have an implicit costly signaling opportunity has damaging unintended consequences for their interactions among strangers. Possible ways to encourage players to use costly signaling for mutual cooperation, such as partner choice, are also discussed in the paper.

This article focuses on the difficult relationship between the fight for the Rule of Law in the EU and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It outlines the connections between the two and then focuses on when and how the Charter could and should play a more significant role in upholding the Rule of Law in EU Member States and at the supranational level itself. Turning first to the Member State-level Rule of Law breakdowns, we demonstrate that the Charter has either been missing in the shadow of Article 19(1) TEU or threatening to undermine the fight for the Rule of Law in the instances when the principle of judicial independence was misrepresented as a right via Article 47 CFR standing alone. Turning then to the supranational level Rule of Law issues, we show that the Charter has so far been applied to a problematically limited extent. The Charter could and should play a much more significant role as there is no doubt about its applicability. This is particularly clear when turning to party-financing at EU-level, which offers a case in point to show how taking the Charter seriously could make a difference in protecting the Rule of Law in the EU.

Polish Abstract: Artykul stanowi politologiczną i prawną analize opcji wyboru, procesow decyzyjnych oraz strategii negocjacyjnych aktorow politycznych znajdujących sie w sporze o termin wyborow prezydenckich toczonym w cieniu pandemii COVID-19. Mozliwe decyzje są rozrysowane przy wykorzystaniu, znanego z teorii decyzji, drzewa decyzyjnego w jego zmodyfikowanej postaci, uwzgledniającej nie tylko opcje mieszczące sie w zakresie sprawczości poszczegolnych aktorow, scenariusze „uruchamiane” określonymi wyborami oraz wspolzalezne od zachowan innych aktorow (ich kooperacji bądź braku kooperacji). Analiza bazuje na zalozeniach teorii wyboru publicznego i ma postac opisowo-wyjaśniającą oraz predykcyjną. Artykul objaśnia rowniez prawne uwarunkowania wyznaczające zakresy dzialan aktorow politycznych. English Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide a political and legal analysis of the choice options, decision-making processes and negotiation strategies of political actors in dispute over the date of the presidential elections in Poland the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Possible decisions are outlined in the form of a modified decision tree known from the decision theory, taking into account not only the options falling within the scope of individual actors' performance, but also scenarios triggered by specific choices and interdependent on the behavior of other actors (their cooperation or lack of cooperation). The descriptive-explanatory and predictive analysis is based on the assumptions of the public choice theory. The article also explains the legal determinants and boundaries of actions available to political actors.