Childhood: Value and duties

Rights and Duties

Evolutionary Computation: Challenges and duties

Evolutionary Computation (EC) is now a few decades old. The impressive development of the field since its initial conception has made it one of the most vigorous research areas, specifically from an applied viewpoint. This should not hide the existence of some major gaps in our understanding on these techniques. In this essay we propose a number of challenging tasks that –according to our opini...

Conflicting clinical duties.

The first three articles in the Clinical Ethics section of this issue of Journal of Medical Ethics address potential conflicting duties of physicians. The first paper, by Niklas Juth and Niels Lynöe (see page 215, Editor’s choice), reports results of an empirical study of Swedish physicians’ attitudes regarding the provision of virginity certificates or hymen restorations requested by women, of...

Managerial Duties and Managerial Biases

We propose a novel approach to evaluating the empirical importance of individual managerial characteristics: We analyze different managerial positions (CEO and CFO) jointly and ask whether a managerial bias (overconfidence) matters for decisions under the control of the manager, but not for decisions outside the manager’s core duties. Using a new data set on CEO and CFO overconfidence, we show ...

Does Expanding Fiduciary Duties towards Debtholders Shift Focus to Long-Term Shareholder Value Creation?

The 1991 Delaware court ruling involving Credit Lyonnais expanded the fiduciary duties of managers towards debtholders in the event that a firm is within the proximity of insolvency. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits this exogenous shock, we find that the 1991 ruling induced managers of Delaware firms ex ante to place a greater emphasis on investments that foster long-ter...