This article is, in part, an editorial introduction to the three other articles that will be addressing the commissioned theme of this issue of Benefits, which is concerned with social security appeals and redress. It briefly outlines the context and substance of those articles. In part,...

The paper analyses the historical events that surrounded the evolution of the world's first exchange for financial options - Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) - one of today's most successful derivative exchanges. The detailed narrative is focused on the relations between the American...

This paper investigates how the rapidly expanding biotech industry is regulated, and how these regulations impact on firms in practice. More specifically, it considers how much is known and understood about the regulations and their provisions, and about the regulatory apparatus in place for...

Little attention has been given to the development and operation of non-state models of global governance and the extent to which they conform to principles of good governance. Focusing primarily on issues of access to justice and secondarily on the independence of such bodies from the...

The exponential growth of hedge funds, their role in financial crises in the 1990s, and examples of fraudulent behaviour have precipitated a heated debate over their regulatory status. The existing approaches of greater disclosure and activity restrictions appear too blunt to be effective and...

his article examines the political impact of economic liberalisation programmes in Venezuela from 1989 to 1998. Venezuela, a long-standing democracy, has experienced a virtual political implosion. The rapid downward spiral has seen an increasing crisis in governability that has been manifested...

We propose a semiparametric single-factor diffusion model for the term structure of interest rate. The This model is highly flexible and encompasses most parametric single-factor models proposed in the literature. We fit the semiparametric model to a proxy of the Eurodollar short term interst...

Order flow has been found to carry information to the market. When assessing how informative order flow is, the VAR methodology is typically employed, using impulse response functions. However, in such analyses, the direction of causality runs explicitly from order flow to asset return. If data...