Territorial Integrity: Rethinking the Territorial Sovereign Right of the Existence of the States

Legal contemporary doctrine has a reified approach to the state. This has led to the perception that territorial integrity is the completeness/unity of the state territory. Amazingly international relations and political geography scholars have not enquired about the link between territoriality and territorial integrity. In essence the principle of territorial integrity is the elaborated and sophisticated legal expression of territoriality. It is intimately linked to the state as a legal entity the main objective of which is to ensure its perennial existence within a specific territory whose borders have been established in accordance with international law.

I think that the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. So the law as such can be deconstructed and has to be deconstructed. That is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics, and progress. (J. Derrida)     

Do Competing Health Insurance Licensors Provide Pro-patient Effects?

This paper shows that competition among health insurance licensors has strong pro-patient effects, if inter-regulatory competition is allowed. The pro-patient effects of the competition among health insurance licensors do not depend on the need for the patients to form or exercise their political influence, such as, forming cooperatives or voting, as suggested by Backer's pressure group theory. When inter-jurisdictional transactions are allowed, endogenous policy making ensures that the health care licensors pursue public interests at no costs to patients.     

Pricing of non-redundant derivatives in a complete market

We consider a complete financial market with primitive assets and derivatives on these primitive assets. Nevertheless, the derivative assets are non-redundant in the market, in the sense that the market is complete,only with their existence. In such a framework, we derive an equilibrium restriction on the admissible prices of derivative assets. The equilibrium condition imposes a well-ordering principle restricting the set of probability measures that qualify as candidate equivalent martingale measures. This restriction is preference free and applies whenever the utility functions belong to the general class of Von-Neumann Morgenstern functions. We provide numerical examples that show the applicability of the restriction for the computation of option prices.We are indebted to the editor Marti Subrahmanyam and two anonymous referees for very constructive comments. We have also benefitted from conversations with Nour Meddahi. We would like to thank seminar participants at Université de Montréal, Washington University, HEC Montréal, Ecole Polytechnique de Tunisie, Institut Henri Poincaré, Trento Mathematical Finance Conference (1997), Aspet (FIQUAM) Conference (1998) as well as the participants at the Quantitative Methods of Finance Conference, Australia, 1997.This author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of INQUIRE-Europe.     

Do corporations overinvest？ Evidence from Tunisia

The authors study the positive relationship existing between internal net worth and investment. This relationship has been interpreted in the financial literature as evidence showing that the management overinvests the free cash flow available to them in poorly-performing, sub-optimal investment projects. In this paper, the authors empirically tackle this problem in the case of the manufacturing and industrial Tunisian corporations and show that our empirical regularities do not stand for this interpretation. The authors conversely prove that overinvestment does not seem to occur on the basis of the grouping results. Hereby, there do not corroborate the empirical regularities documented in Lamont （1997）.     

埃及经济转型期的会计改革及其借鉴

20世纪 90年代以来 ,埃及向市场经济迈进的经济改革不断深入 ,在经济转型时期 ,埃及的会计体制相应地也进行了重要的变革。本文通过对埃及会计改革的背景、动因的分析 ,阐述了埃及会计改革的主要内容及其现状 ,从中提出对我国经济转型期会计改革的启示和借鉴。     

Leadership Development in the Context of a University Consolidation: An Initial Evaluation of the Authentic Leadership Pipeline Program

University mergers and consolidations are on the rise, and the trend is likely to continue in the near term future. Such a trend is significant, as a university consolidations are inherently challenging and require strong and well‐developed leadership to be successful. In the current paper, a low‐cost leadership development program (the Authentic Leadership Pipeline program) that was initiated and developed to meet the leadership needs of Augusta University, the institutional result of the consolidation of Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University is described. In addition, an initial pilot evaluation of the program that examined reactions and subjective perceptions of learning and behavior change is described. The findings were promising and suggest a high level of satisfaction, significant learning, and new behavior. Implications, applications, and future directions are discussed.     

Antecedents of participation in online brand communities and their purchasing behavior consequences

This study intends to fill some gaps in knowledge about online communities and their influence on consumers’ purchase decisions. A review of the extant literature on online brand communities reveals that most prior studies have focused on identifying the factors associated with joining and participating in online communities. However, limited studies examine the implications of participation in online brand communities in terms of consumer behaviors, such as brand liking and intention to purchase the brand. In addition, these few studies have either focused on the influence of operational elements of the online community on purchase intention or on the influence of community members’ characteristics regarding purchase intention. Therefore, this study aims to provide an integrated framework for operational and user characteristics’ antecedents associated with consumers’ participation in online brand communities and their effect on purchase decisions. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual model. Data were collected via a survey of the Facebook pages of 282 members of Egyptian telecommunication companies. The findings provide insights into how these antecedents should be managed to enhance participation in virtual telecommunication communities.