Law Commons^™

Investment Treaties, Investor-State Dispute Settlement, And Inequality: How International Investment Treaties Exacerbate Domestic Disparities, Lise Johnson, Lisa E. Sachs

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Over roughly the past four decades, government officials from around the world have been erecting a framework of economic governance with major – but under-appreciated – implications for intra-national inequality. The components of this framework are thousands of bilateral and multilateral treaties designed to protect international investment. In many jurisdictions, the treaties have been concluded without public awareness or scrutiny or even much discussion or analysis by government officials – including those officials responsible for negotiating the agreements(Poulsen 2015) – and without an adequate understanding of how these agreements could affect intra-national inequality. Long imperceptible, the size and power of …

Early Childhood Development And The Replication Of Poverty, Clare Huntington

Faculty Scholarship

Antipoverty efforts must begin early because abundant evidence demonstrates that experiences during the first five years of life lay a foundation for future learning and the acquisition of skills. Public investments can help foster early childhood development, but these efforts must begin early and must involve both parents and children. This chapter describes the patterns of convergence and divergence in state approaches to supporting early childhood development. For the prenatal period until age three, the federal government is the primary source of funds, and there is fairly limited variation in how this money is spent across the states. For the …

Moneys' Legal Hierarchy, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter discusses the way in which money is legally constructed and hierarchically structured. In financial markets, participants trade different forms of money, some of which is state-issued and some privately issued. A form of money is closer to the “apex” of the system the closer it is to entities that can issue liquid means or determine acceptable forms of payment, such as central banks and governments. During financial crises, market participants close to the “apex” are systematically advantaged. Various legal devices, e.g. property rights, collateral rights, or trust law, contribute to hierarchically structuring the financial system, by granting preferential …

Sovereign Wealth Funds And Global Finance, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

This chapter focuses on a number of specific sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) whose portfolios indicate strong interests in finance both in their home countries and abroad. It first reviews empirical evidence that shows SWFs having been major investors in Western financial intermediaries for decades. It then considers the organization and governance of SWFs, with particular emphasis on the three main schools of thought as well as the predictions one can derive from them vis-à-vis the behavior of individual actors in the global financial network: economic theories, economic sociology, and political economy. It also presents case studies that “test” these theories …

Structuring And Restructuring Sovereign Debt: The Role Of Seniority, Patrick Bolton, Olivier Jeanne

Center for Contract and Economic Organization

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure ex post. We show, however, that competition for repayment between lenders may result in a sovereign debt that is excessively difficult to restructure in equilibrium. This inefficiency may be alleviated by a suitably designed bankruptcy regime that facilitates debt restructuring.

The Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem In The Multi-Commodity Case, Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Jones, in his seminal paper (1957) on Heckscher-Ohlin theory, has argued that, for the case of two countries, two factors, and several commodities, the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem would remain valid in the following weak sense: "Ordering the commodities with respect to the capital-labor ratios employed in production is to rank them in order of comparative advantage. Demand conditions merely determine the dividing line between exports and imports; it is not possible to break the chain of comparative advantage by exporting, say, the third and fifth commodities and importing the fourth when they are ranked by factor intensity" (p. 85).

It …

Domestic Distortions, Tariffs, And The Theory Of Optimum Subsidy: Some Further Results, Jagdish N. Bhagwati, V.K. Ramaswami, T.N. Srinivasan

Faculty Scholarship

Bhagwati and Ramaswami (1963) showed that if there is a distortion, the Paretian first-best policy is to intervene with a tax (subsidy) at the point at which the distortion occurs. Hence a domestic tax-cum-subsidy with respect to production would be first-best optimal when there was a domestic distortion (defined as the divergence between domestic prices and the marginal rate of transformation in domestic production) just as a tariff policy would be first-best optimal under monopoly power in trade (which involves a foreign distortion). An important corollary, for the case of a distortionary wage differential, is that while a tax-cum-subsidy policy …