As nuclear families have become increasingly less stable over the past quarter century, married couples have been faced with the difficult task of negotiating the terms by which marriage is ended. For parents, divorce involves questions revolving around the care and sustenance of children. In this paper we investigate whether observed divorce settlements indicate that parents make trade-offs in...

Proper estimation of foundation settlement is a crucial factor in designing shallow foundations. Recent literature shows the applicability of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in predicting the settlement of shallow foundations. However, conventional ANNs have some drawbacks: getting trapped in local minima and a slow rate of learning. Utilization of an optimization algorithm such as Particle S...

A small number of studies have demonstrated that settlement stage decapod crustaceans are able to detect and exhibit swimming, settlement and metamorphosis responses to ambient underwater sound emanating from coastal reefs. However, the intensity of the acoustic cue required to initiate the settlement and metamorphosis response, and therefore the potential range over which this acoustic cue may...

Theoretical studies on the e¤ect of life settlement market on consumer welfare show that it crucially depend on the reasons for the lapsation of life insurance policies: if lapsation is purely due to the loss of bequest motives by the policyholders, then life settlement is shown to be detrimental to consumer welfare in equilibrium; on the other hand, if lapsation results from liquidity shocks, ...

We focus on investor-state dispute settlement provisions contained in various, though far from all, bilateral investment treaties as a possible determinant of BIT-related effects on bilateral FDI flows. Our estimation results prove to be sensitive to the specification of these provisions as well as the inclusion of transition countries in the sample. Stricter dispute settlement provisions do no...