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Mutual fund families increasingly hold bonds and stocks from the same firm. We study the implications of such dual holdings for corporate governance and firm decision-making. We present evidence that dual ownership allows financially distressed firms to increase investments and to refinance by issuing bonds with lower yields and fewer restrictive covenants. As such, dual ownership reduces shareholder-creditor conflicts, especially when families encourage cooperation among their managers. Overall, our results suggest that mutual fund families internalize the shareholder-creditor agency conflicts of their portfolio companies, highlighting the positive governance externalities of intra-family cooperation.

Today’s scientists are making remarkable progress as they strive to understand and explain the many intricacies of the human brain. Educators and students alike can benefit from understanding the basic tenets of this research and then putting that knowledge into play in the classroom. To that aim, this article first explains some basic brain structures and the physiological process of learning, and next gives examples of classroom activities that can capitalize upon that knowledge in order to improve vocabulary teaching and learning through neuro-educational strategies.

Per Magnus Wijkman was the first foreign observer to urge Iceland in print to regulate its fisheries by price. This was in 1975, nine years before the Icelandic fishing quota system came into effect, a system judged discriminatory and unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of Iceland in 1998 (but not in 2000!) as well as by the United Nations Committee on Human Rights in 2007, principally because the advice given by Wijkman and others was not heeded. This paper discusses the human rights aspects of natural resources management in view of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which stipulates the inalienable rights of nations to the rents from their natural resources.

Dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) is an NMR hyperpolarization technique that mediates polarization transfer from highly polarized unpaired electrons to NMR-active nuclei via microwave (mw) irradiation. The ability to generate arbitrarily shaped mw pulses using arbitrary waveform generators opens up the opportunity to remarkably improve the robustness and versatility of DNP, in many ways resembling the early stages of pulsed NMR. We present here novel design principles based on single-spin vector effective Hamiltonian theory to develop new broadband DNP pulse sequences, namely an adiabatic XiX-DNP experiment and a broadband amplitude modulated signal enhanced (BASE) experiment. We demonstrate that the adiabatic BASE pulse sequence may achieve a DNP $^{1}$H enhancement factor of $\sim$ 360, a record that outperforms all previously known pulsed DNP sequences at $\sim$ 0.35 T and 80 K in static solids. The bandwidth of the BASE-DNP experiments is about 3 times the $^{1}$H Larmor frequency ($\sim$50 MHz).

Gender roles of Syrian women started to shift in 2011, in light of the Syrian conflict. This shift was a response to the difficult situations which Syrian women faced inside Syria as well as in the neighboring countries to which they fled in the attempt to find safer living conditions. However, the uncertain situation and the precarious working and living conditions in Syria and the neighboring countries forced many Syrian women and families to flee to Europe, with the highest number to Germany, facing the challenge of a new culture and new social norms. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate if and how the gender roles of Syrian women who fled to Berlin, Germany, have shifted. Using semi-structured interviews conducted in the period July - December 2016, the study illustrates the challenges and opportunities they face, both as women and as refugees, and in how far these affect their gender roles.

This working document presents the results of the most significant cephalopods caught on the Porcupine Spanish Groundfish Survey (SP-PORC-Q3) in 2020. Biomass, abundance, geographical distribution and length frequencies were analysed for Eledone cirrhosa (horned octopus), Bathypolypus sponsalis (globose octopus), Todarodes sagittatus (European flying squid), Todaropsis eblanae (lesser flying squid), Loligo forbesi (veined squid), Illex coindetii (broadtail shortfin squid), Rossia macrosoma (stout bobtail squid) and other scarce cephalopods. The biomass and abundance of the most common cephalopods increased, especially I. coindetii and T. sagitattus. In contrast, T. eblanae and B. sponsalis decreased in this last survey. E. cirrhosa and L. forbesi remained at very similar values to the previous year and most of the usually scarce species also generally increased their biomass, with the exception of A. lichtensteinii, R. minor and S. oweniana, which decreased.

There is a long-standing difference amongst public economists between those who think that collective choice must be formally acknowledged, and those who derive their policy recommendations from a social planning framework in which politics plays no role. The purpose of this book is to contribute to a meaningful dialogue between these two groups, in the belief that the future of both political economy and of normative public finance lies somewhere between the two approaches. Some of the specific questions addressed in the book include: does public finance need political economy? Should collective choice play a role in the standard of reference used in normative public finance? What is a ‘failure' in a non-market or policy process? And what have we learned about the theory and practice of public finance from three decades of empirical research on public choice? The book also provides a practitioner's view of the political economy of redistribution.

An accurate forecast for inflation is mandatory in the conduct of monetary policy in every monetary framework. This research puts a first effort to accurately model and consequently forecast monthly inflation for the economy of Suriname. This paper employs various econometric techniques such as Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average models, Vector Autoregressive models, Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive models, Bayesian Vector Autoregressive models and Vector Error Correction models to model monthly inflation for Suriname over the period 2004 to 2018. Consequently, the in-sample forecast performance of the models is evaluated by comparison of the Root Mean Square Error and the Mean Average Errors. Since Suriname encountered a high-inflation period, we split up the sample in two periods, i.e. including and excluding this high-inflation episode. In this evaluation, not surprisingly, the Root Mean Square Errors of the models was considerably lower in the sample excluding the high inflation episode. Consequently, we also conducted an out-of-sample forecasting exercise. The VECM yields the best results forecasting up to three months ahead, while thereafter, the FAVAR, which includes more economic information, outperforms the VECM, based on the assessment of the out-of-sample forecast performance of the models. The authors are staff members of the Research Department of the Central Bank of Suriname. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Bank. Research papers constitute work in progress and are published to elicit comments and to further debate