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This paper examines legal rules covering protection of corporate shareholders and creditors, the origin of these rules, and the qual-ity of their enforcement in 49 countries. The results show that common-law countries generally have the strongest, and French-civil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors, with German- and Scandinavian-civil-law countries located in the mid-dle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protec-tions, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified share-holders are unlikely to be important in countries that fail to protect their rights. I. Overview of the Issues In the traditional finance of Modigliani and Miller (1958), securities are recognized by their cash flows. For example, debt has a fixed promised stream of interest payments, whereas equity entitles its

Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is a merger of two declarative paradigms: constraint solving and logic programming. Although a relatively new field, CLP has progressed in several quite different directions. In particular, the early fundamental concepts have been adapted to better serve in different areas of applications. In this survey of CLP, a primary goal is to give a systematic description of the major trends in terms of common fundamental concepts. The three main parts cover the theory, implementation issues, and programming for applications.

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It is widely known that when there are errors with a moving-average root close to −1, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and the BIC tend to select a truncation lag (k) that is very small. We consider a class of Modified Information Criteria (MIC) with a penalty factor that is sample dependent. It takes into account the fact that the bias in the sum of the autoregressive coefficients is highly dependent on k and adapts to the type of deterministic components present. We use a local asymptotic framework in which the moving-average root is local to −1 to document how the MIC performs better in selecting appropriate values of k. In monte-carlo experiments, the MIC is found to yield huge size improvements to the DF GLS and the feasible point optimal PT test developed in Elliott, Rothenberg and Stock (1996). We also extend the M tests developed in Perron and Ng (1996) to allow for GLS detrending of the data. The MIC along with GLS detrended data yield a set of tests with desirable size and power properties.

We describe finite-state programs over real-numbered time in a guarded-command language with real-valued clocks or, equivalently, as finite automata with real-valued clocks. Model checking answers the question which states of a real-time program satisfy a branching-time specification (given in an extension of CTL with clock variables). We develop an algorithm that computes this set of states symbolically as a fixpoint of a functional on state predicates, without constructing the state space. For this purpose, we introduce a -calculus on computation trees over real-numbered time. Unfortunately, many standard program properties, such as response for all nonzeno execution sequences (during which time diverges), cannot be characterized by fixpoints: we show that the expressiveness of the timed -calculus is incomparable to the expressiveness of timed CTL. Fortunately, this result does not impair the symbolic verification of "implementable" real-time programs---those whose safety...