Ronald J. Daniels

The Role of Debt in Interactive Corporate Governance

Most of the corporate governance literature rests on a premise that the interests of various stakeholder groups conflict and that managerial loyalty is more likely to be captured by shareholders than any other constituency. Yet, stakeholder interests do converge in the objective of controlling managerial slack and non-equity constituents have substantial influence over firm decisions. Although the study of governance has taken early steps to abandon its preoccupation with equity-centered solutions and identify interdependencies existing among a broader range of stakeholders, governance scholars have missed an important element of interactivity. A stakeholder reacts to the actions of others and thereby contributes to the collective interest in controlling slack. Each stakeholder has a window on the firm through which it can acquire some type of information at lower cost than other stakeholders. When a stakeholder detects an unsatisfactory state of affairs, it reacts by choosing to exit or exercise voice. The exercise of either the voice or exit option may pressure management to correct the unsatisfactory state of slack. More to the point, however, a stakeholders exit bears important information for other stakeholders, at least some of whom may be better placed to take action that corrects the slack. This Article describes an interactive system of corporate governance and provides a stylized theory of the role of lenders within this system. The divergence in the interests of these lenders and other stakeholders does not preclude interactive governance, but it does threaten to reduce the net benefits from the process. Therefore, the authors identify a number of legal and institutional mechanisms that help to channel the efforts of the lender toward the common goal of containing and correcting managerial slack. The interactive perspective thus permits new explanations for phenomena such as debt covenants, bankruptcy preference rules and lender liability laws. For example, the definition of debt covenants and events of default in lending agreements raise the likelihood that the lender exit is prompted by slack rather than lender opportunism and thereby enhances the informational value of the exit. Bankruptcy preference rules encourage early exit before the firm becomes insolvent, thereby enabling remaining stakeholders to take action before the firms condition becomes irreparable. Thus, debt covenants and preference rules provide a window that increases the value of lender exit in prompting the correction of managerial slack.

A generation at risk: Young investigators and the future of the biomedical workforce

A number of distressing trends, including a decline in the share of key research grants going to younger scientists, as well as a steady rise in the age at which investigators receive their first funding, are now a decades-long feature of the US biomedical research workforce. Working committees have proposed recommendations, policy makers have implemented reforms, and yet the trajectory of our funding regime away from young scientists has only worsened. An investigation of some of the major factors and their geneses at play in explaining the increasing average age to first RO1 is presented. Recommendations related to funding, peer review, career paths, and the university–government partnership are provided.

Rule of Law Reform and Development

This important book addresses a number of key issues regarding the relationship between the rule of law and development. It presents a deep and insightful inquiry into the current orthodoxy that the rule of law is the panacea for the world’s problems. The authors chart the precarious progress of law reforms both in overall terms and in specific policy areas such as the judiciary, the police, tax administration and access to justice, among others. They accept that the rule of law is necessarily tied to the success of development, although they propose a set of procedural values to enlighten this institutional approach. The authors also recognize that states face difficulties in implementing this institutional structures and identify the probable impediments, before proposing a rethink of law reform strategies and offering some conclusions about the role of the international community in the rule of law reform.

Rethinking the welfare state : the prospects for government by voucher

1. Introduction 2. The Case for Vouchers 3. Food Stamps 4. Low Income Housing 5. Legal Aid 6. Health Care 7. Primary and Secondary Education 8. Post-Secondary Education 9. Labour Market Training 10. Early Childhood Education 11. Conclusion

Do Institutions Matter: A Comparative Pathology of the HIV-Infected Blood Tragedy

The introduction of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) into the blood systems of many different countries, developed and developing, during the late 1970s and early 1980s and its subsequent transmission to recipients of blood transfusions and blood products has precipitated a public health catastrophe of proportions unparalleled, at least in developed countries, in recent decades, leaving thousands of people dead or facing the inevitability of premature and agonizing death, and a legacy of fatal illness and financial and emotional devastation for many of their families and loved ones. This catastrophe has not only provoked critical scrutiny of the performance of existing institutional actors in a number of countries, but also has led, in some countries, to consideration of changes in the institutional framework for the collection and distribution of blood. The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing debates over institutional re-design by attempting a comparative analysis of the actual performance of different blood systems in different countries in response to the HIV crisis. We examine the performance of blood collection, distribution and fractionation systems in seven developed, industrialized countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain (excluding Scotland, which operates its own bloodsystem), Switzerland, and the United States. Our aim is not to make an overall judgment about the performance of these systems, either against efficiency or other criteria, but to understand the capacity of these systems to respond to a crisis that threatened the integrity of the blood supply.As the title of this Article suggests comparative study of institutional performance with respect to the crisis of HIV-infected blood is also relevant to the more general debate in the political economy literature over whether and how institutions matter to policy outcomes. Generally speaking the political economy debate over whether institutions matter has focused largely on comparative governmental performance. And to date, most official and scholarly inquiries into the performance of national blood systems with respect to the risk of HIV infection have focussed on perceived weaknesses in each countrys system. By broadening the focus to seven countries, similar in stages of economic development and in many cases with like cultural values, we hope to be able to identify patterns in structure and performance that will enable students of political economy to infer more robust institutional prescriptions. The HIV-infected blood case study also offers the possibility of broadening this analysis to examine not just the comparative performance of governmental institutions across a range of countries, but also the comparative performance of both governmental and private (either non-profit or for-profit) institutions. Moreover, as will become clear when we assess and attempt to explain differences in performance, some of the institutional choices that may matter most to real world outcomes have not been well captured by the focus on profit vs. non-profit provision.

The Cost of Protecting Occupational Health: The Asbestos Case

This paper estimates the cost of reducing the mortality risks from asbestos exposure. We use a dose-response model to predict cancer-related fatalities caused by exposure to asbestos. We then estimate the cost of controlling these exposures in the workplace and calculate the cost per life saved at different exposure levels. We argue that current government regulation in the United States and Canada controlling the amount of asbestos to which a worker may be exposed yields a cost per life saved far in excess of the costs for occupational accidents.

A new data effort to inform career choices in biomedicine

Institutions will report student and postdoc outcome data The biomedical research enterprise finds itself in a moment of intense self-reflection, with science leaders, professional organizations, and funders all working to enhance their support for the next generation of biomedical scientists. One focus of their attention has been the lack of robust and publicly available information on education and training outcomes. In the absence of such information, students are prevented from making informed choices about their pre- and postdoctoral training activities, and universities from preparing trainees for a full range of careers. Today, we presidents and chancellors of nine U.S. research universities and one research institute are announcing a new initiative, the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science (1), that responds to these challenges by adopting a series of transparency enhancing efforts, the first of which is to begin reporting data in early 2018. We have agreed to start with the biomedical research arena because of the considerable attention that workforce issues in this domain have received, but the logic of our initiative extends to other scholarly disciplines.

Academic medical centers--organizational integration and discipline through contractual and firm models.

OVER THE LAST SEVERAL DECADES, SUBSTANTIAL literature has developed regarding the roles, functions, and resources of—as well as the challenges facing—the academic medical center (AMC). Yet with some notable exceptions, little of the discussion surrounding the AMC has been informed by organizational theory, leaving underexamined how various organizational structures and approaches may reduce or exacerbate tensions among the AMC’s divergent stakeholders. Far from a purely theoretical inquiry, the exploration of how AMC organizational structures affect allocation of resources and sharing of risk as well as institutional abilities to respond to external and internal changes has profound implications for how these bastions in the landscape of modern health care can best achieve their scientific, financial, educational, and societal goals.

THE PERSISTENT DILEMMAS OF DEVELOPMENT: THE NEXT FIFTY YEARS†

Among the most significant of Michael Trebilcocks many exceptional scholarly contributions has been the impact of his work on the field of law and development. At the core of the development enterprise lies a central conundrum—Why do obviously desirable institutional outcomes not transpire in the developing world?—and Trebilcock has provided invaluable insights into how various historic, economic, social, and political forces may promote, shape, or inhibit such salutary change. Taking Trebilcocks existing corpus of work as a starting point, we outline a proposed research agenda for the next fifty years of law and development scholarship, highlighting outstanding questions that surround the sequencing of reforms; the role of path dependence; the interaction of law, culture, and institutions; and, finally, the role of international institutions in addressing the dilemmas of development.