Negligent Release Litigation: a Proposal for Procedural Reform

1989 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 595-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman G. Poythress

Much of what has been written lately regarding tort reform has dealt with substantive as opposed to procedural concerns. This paper offers a preliminary proposal regarding procedural reform that would potentially correct for the hindsight bias in negligent release litigation and have application in other torts contexts involving transferred responsibility. The proposal for bifurcated trial proceedings is worthy of consideration by legal scholars and policy makers as a potential mechanism for ensuring fairness and improving the quality of justice. As a footnote, it might be added that social scientists might contribute to the assessment of the proposed bifurcation procedure by conducting jury simulation studies that investigate the impact of bifurcated vs. non-bifurcated procedures as a function of strong vs. weak evidence of clinician negligence in mock negligent release cases.

Author(s):  
Jo Blanden ◽  
Emilia Del Bono ◽  
Kirstine Hansen ◽  
Birgitta Rabe

AbstractPolicy-makers wanting to support child development can choose to adjust the quantity or quality of publicly funded universal pre-school. To assess the impact of such changes, we estimate the effects of an increase in free pre-school education in England of about 3.5 months at age 3 on children’s school achievement at age 5. We exploit date-of-birth discontinuities that create variation in the length and starting age of free pre-school using administrative school records linked to nursery characteristics. Estimated effects are small overall, but the impact of the additional term is substantially larger in settings with the highest inspection quality rating but not in settings with highly qualified staff. Estimated effects fade out by age 7.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 5795
Author(s):  
Sławomir Biruk ◽  
Łukasz Rzepecki

Reducing the duration of construction works requires additional organizational measures, such as selecting construction methods that assure a shorter realization time, engaging additional resources, working overtime, or allowing construction works to be performed simultaneously in the same working units. The simultaneous work of crews may affect the quality of works and the efficiency of construction processes. This article presents a simulation model aimed at assessing the impact of the overlap period on the extension of the working time of the crews and the reduction of a repetitive project’s duration in random conditions. The purpose of simulation studies is to provide construction managers with guidelines when deciding on the dates of starting the sequential technological process lines realized by specialized working crews, for sustainable scheduling and organization of construction projects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 1442 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Richard Gold ◽  
Sarah E. Ali-Khan ◽  
Liz Allen ◽  
Lluis Ballell ◽  
Manoel Barral-Netto ◽  
...  

Serious concerns about the way research is organized collectively are increasingly being raised. They include the escalating costs of research and lower research productivity, low public trust in researchers to report the truth, lack of diversity, poor community engagement, ethical concerns over research practices, and irreproducibility. Open science (OS) collaborations comprise of a set of practices including open access publication, open data sharing and the absence of restrictive intellectual property rights with which institutions, firms, governments and communities are experimenting in order to overcome these concerns. We gathered two groups of international representatives from a large variety of stakeholders to construct a toolkit to guide and facilitate data collection about OS and non-OS collaborations. Ultimately, the toolkit will be used to assess and study the impact of OS collaborations on research and innovation. The toolkit contains the following four elements: 1) an annual report form of quantitative data to be completed by OS partnership administrators; 2) a series of semi-structured interview guides of stakeholders; 3) a survey form of participants in OS collaborations; and 4) a set of other quantitative measures best collected by other organizations, such as research foundations and governmental or intergovernmental agencies. We opened our toolkit to community comment and input. We present the resulting toolkit for use by government and philanthropic grantors, institutions, researchers and community organizations with the aim of measuring the implementation and impact of OS partnership across these organizations. We invite these and other stakeholders to not only measure, but to share the resulting data so that social scientists and policy makers can analyse the data across projects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 656
Author(s):  
Szymon Chmielewski

Visual pollution (VP) is a visual landscape quality issue, and its most consistently recognized symptom is an excess of out of home advertising billboards (OOHb). However, the VP related research concerns landscape aesthetic and advertisement cultural context, leaving the impact of outdoor billboard infrastructure on landscape openness unanswered to date. This research aims to assess the visual impact of outdoor billboard infrastructure on landscape openness, precisely the visual volume—a key geometrical quality of a landscape. The method uses 3D isovists and voxels to calculate the visible and obstructed subsets of visible volume. Using two case studies (Lublin City, Poland) and 26 measurement points, it was found that OOHb decreased landscape openness by at least 4% of visible volume; however, the severe impact may concern up to 35% of visual volume. GIS scientists develop the proposed method for policy-makers, and urban planners end users. It is also the very first example of compiling 3D isovists and voxels in ArcGIS Pro software in an easy-to-replicate framework. The research results, accompanied by statistically significant proofs, explain the visual landscape’s fragility and contribute to understanding the VP phenomenon.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (12) ◽  
pp. 1521-1547
Author(s):  
John S. Howe ◽  
Thibaut G. Morillon

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on information asymmetry in the banking sector. Specifically, the authors look at whether specific firm or deal characteristic influence information asymmetry levels between insiders and investors, as well as the impact of recent regulation such as the Dodd–Frank Act.Design/methodology/approachThe authors decompose the M&A process into three periods (pre-announcement, negotiation and post-completion period) and document changes in the information asymmetry levels between insiders and investors through the M&A process. The authors capture changes in information asymmetry using six different spread-based information asymmetry measures.FindingsThe authors find evidence that information asymmetry increases following M&A announcement and decreases following deal completion. These findings are more pronounced for acquisitions involving a private target, all-cash deals and for mergers, as opposed to acquisition of assets. We find that overall, successful mergers improve the quality of the information environment, while failed deals degrade it. Additionally, the enactment of Dodd–Frank reduced the magnitude of the changes in information asymmetry during the M&A process. The results are important to regulators, policy makers and investors.Originality/valueTo authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that looks at the effect of bank M&As on information asymmetry as well as the effect of regulations on information asymmetry.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 458-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica-Violeta ACHIM ◽  
Sorin-Nicolae BORLEA ◽  
Codruţa MARE

Our finding contributes towards the understanding of movements regarding the adoption of corporate governance practice in emerging countries such as Romania and its impact on business performances of a company. We have developed two econometric models to assess the business performances of the companies listed on Bucharest Stock Exchange, in order to point out the impact of corporate governance on business performances. Our results are inconsistent for the period 2001–2011, but if we consider only 2011, the results document a positive correlation between corporate governance quality and market value of companies, such it is reflected by Tobin’s Q. Therefore, our results contribute to the studies relating corporate governance and business performances, as it confirms a positive relationship between the two variables which appears once the Romanian emerging economy has began to adopt the best corporate governance practices. Firstly, our research has important implications for managers in order to know that the adoption of the best corporate governance practices could contribute to the financial success of the firm. Secondly, the results are useful for any investor who needs to consider the quality of corporate governance as a good predictor for the best rate of return of theirs investments. Moreover, our findings have also implications on policy-makers and regulatory authorities in European developing countries and offer them a barometer of adopting the best corporate governance practices in European space.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 497-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Schiavone ◽  
Antonio Meles ◽  
Vincenzo Verdoliva ◽  
Manlio Del Giudice

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of being located in a science park (SP) on the level of a firm's intellectual capital (IC) performance. Design/methodology/approach – Using a sample of 183 Italian firms (i.e. 61 tenant and 122 non-tenant firms), and through the GLS technique, the authors regress the firms’ IC performance across various explicative variables including a dummy that discriminates tenant and non-tenant firms. Findings – Consistently with expectations, the results show that the location of a firm in a SP leads to improved IC performance. Moreover, the authors find that some other firm characteristics, such as size, age, and leverage, are important predictors of its IC-based performance. Research limitations/implications – The sample is small and the impact on performance might be biased by factors related to the regional context (e.g. level of industrialization, quality of education, and science system). Practical implications – Implications for policy makers: support the growth of firms in SPs especially in those industries full of firms with scarce performance in IC. Implications for SP managers: they could “sell” (in terms of marketing) to both entrepreneurs to attract and policy makers this result. Implications for institutional investors: they should look at SPs with greater interest to find high-quality firms and improve their screening activity. Originality/value – This paper aims to extend literature about factors explaining the level of a firm's IC performance and the current understanding of the impact of SPs at firm level.


2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-58
Author(s):  
Klimis Vogiatzoglou

Abstract This paper examines long-term developments in the quality and efficiency of free market institutional systems across thirteen emerging economies from South, South-east, and East Asia over the 1995–2014 period. The paper also empirically assesses the impact of free market institutions on a country’s inward foreign direct investment (FDI) performance. We find that the free market institutional framework in most economies is still relatively inefficient, restrictive, and underdeveloped but has, nevertheless, substantially improved during the last twenty-year period. Our empirical results also indicate that a free market institutional system in a host-country is a factor that attracts inward FDI to emerging Asian economies by multinational companies. Consequently, policy makers should focus on further improving the quality of free market institutions.


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 2211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khydija Wakil ◽  
Malik Asghar Naeem ◽  
Ghulam Abbas Anjum ◽  
Abdul Waheed ◽  
Muhammad Jamaluddin Thaheem ◽  
...  

With increasing focus on more nuanced aspects of quality of life, the phenomenon of urban visual pollution has been progressively gaining attention from researchers and policy makers, especially in the developed world. However, the subjectivity and complexity of assessing visual pollution in urban settings remain a challenge, especially given the lack of robust and reliable methods for quantification of visual pollution. This paper presents a novel systematic approach for the development of a robust Visual Pollution Assessment (VPA) tool. A key feature of our methodology is explicit and systematic incorporation of expert and public opinion for listing and ranking Visual Pollution Objects (VPOs). Moreover, our methodology deploys established empirical complex decision-making techniques to address the challenge of subjectivity in weighting the impact of individual VPOs. The resultant VPA tool uses close-ended options to capture the presence and characteristics of various VPOs on a given node. Based on these inputs, it calculates a point based visual pollution scorecard for the observation point. The performance of the VPA tool has been extensively tested and verified at various locations in Pakistan. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such tool, both in terms of quantitative robustness and broad coverage of VPOs. Our VPA tool will help regulators in assessing and charting visual pollution in a consistent and objective manner. It will also help policy makers by providing an empirical basis for gathering evidence; hence facilitating evidence-based and evidence-driven policy strategies, which are likely to have significant impact, especially in the developing countries.


2019 ◽  
Vol 121 (14) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth A. Frank ◽  
Kaitlin T. Torphy

This is a dialogue between a curmudgeon and a millennial regarding the import of social media for education and for educational research. The dialogue emerged out of conversations the authors have had with policy makers, researchers, and practitioners over the last three years regarding the impact of social media on education (see teachersinsocialmedia.org). It was presented in the context of Kenneth Frank's research group meeting January 4, 2018. The topics covered include a broad understanding about what social media are and how they relate to teaching and curriculum; understanding about social media as a data artifact; a discussion about how social media platforms shape the interactions of participants; the quality of resources available on social media; why teachers engage in using social media; the lack of research on social media; and how social media may give teachers more power relative to the status quo. We invite you to follow along as these topics emerge in the authentic flow of a conversation. There are opportunities for reader participation on Twitter.


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