This paper highlights the importance of endogenous changes in the foundations of legitimacy for political regimes. It focuses on the central role of legitimacy changes in the rise of constitutional monarchy in England. It first defines legitimacy and briefly elaborates a theoretical framework enabling a historical study of this unobservable variable. It proceeds to substantiate that the low-legitimacy, post-Reformation Tudor monarchs promoted Parliament to enhance their legitimacy, thereby changing the legislative process from the “crown and Parliament” to the “crown in Parliament” that still prevails in England. The break with Rome permanently altered England’s political development.

Enlightenment values were a necessary adjunct to, although not solely responsible for, the Western legal tradition. This is because the Enlightenment produced a lens through which human relations could be viewed, and this perspective strongly influenced the invention of law in the West.1 Eastern Orthodoxy developed its own philosophical system without reference to Enlightenment values. The East's failure to engage with those values has resulted in a failure to find a common ‘language’ through which East and West can speak to one another. This inability to speak a common language places the Orthodox Church at a distinct disadvantage in its relations with the West, and has done for a very long time.

This manuscript introduces deep learning models that simultaneously describe the dynamics of several yield curves. We aim to learn the dependence structure among the different yield curves induced by the globalization of financial markets and exploit it to produce more accurate forecasts. By combining the self-attention mechanism and nonparametric quantile regression, our model generates both point and interval forecasts of future yields. The architecture is designed to avoid quantile crossing issues affecting multiple quantile regression models. Numerical experiments conducted on two different datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we explore potential extensions and enhancements by incorporating deep ensemble methods and transfer learning mechanisms.

This study conducts an optimal surrender analysis of reverse mortgage (RM) loans offered to elderly homeowners as a financing option. Recent market evidence on borrower early surrenders has raised concerns about the marketability of RM products and their impact on the program viability. In this article, we derive the borrower optimal surrender strategy as a function of the underlying value of the home used as collateral for RM contracts with tenure payment option. Using a probabilistic approach to American option pricing, we present a decomposition result for the value of the contract as the sum of its European counterpart without the surrendering provision and an early exercise premium. The methodology allows policymakers to assess the financial incentive of their policy design, from which we explain the existing market evidence about borrower rational lapse by means of the resulting surrender boundary and reference probabilities.

In this paper, we question the traditional independence assumption between mortality risk and financial risk and model the correlation between these two risks, estimating its impact on the price of different life insurance products. The interest rate and the mortality intensity are modelled as two correlated Hull and White models in an affine set-up. We introduce two building blocks, namely the zero-coupon survival bond and the mortality density, calculate them in closed form and perform an investigation about their dependence on the correlation between mortality and financial risk, both with theoretical results and numerical analysis. We study the impact of correlation also for more structured insurance products, such as pure endowment, annuity, term insurance, whole life insurance and mixed endowment. We show that in some cases, the inclusion of correlation can lead to a severe underestimation or overestimation of the best estimate. Finally, we illustrate that the results obtained using a traditional affine diffusive set-up can be generalised to affine jump diffusion by computing the price of the zero-coupon survival bond in the presence of jumps.

Pursuant to a 2013 faculty, the interior of this mediaeval church was painted in 2014. Instead of the specified limewash paint, the architect selected an alternative paint, which proved to be inappropriate: it was impermeable, damaging the wall fabric and causing the paint to flake off. Following a consistory court hearing in 2017 (reported at [2017] ECC SEI 6), the PCC was ordered to remove the paint, and repaint using the originally specified limewash, the cost to be borne by the architect.

The article focuses on reparations, as ordered by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against a convicted individual. It has long been orthodoxy that such measures fulfil solely compensatory objectives, for they lack any punitive intent. This article offers a rival account. An analysis of the respective regulatory and contextual framework reveals that, by design, reparations are allowed to pursue compensatory and punitive goals equally. An analysis of the reparations orders themselves affirms that, in practice, the ICC utilizes reparations as a means to accomplish compensatory and punitive objectives both. It is maintained that reparations orders are both remedial and punitive in nature. Ignoring this reality has a negative impact on individual prerogatives, and contradicts fundamental sentencing ideals of international criminal justice. It follows that the current reparations order regime should be reformed. The ICC should either explicitly acknowledge reparations as punishment, or detach them from criminal proceedings altogether.

This paper studies optimal defined-contribution (DC) pension management under stochastic interest rates and expected inflation. In addition to financial risk, we consider the risk of pre-retirement death and introduce life insurance to the pension account as an option to manage this risk. We formulate this pension management problem as a random horizon utility maximization problem and derive its explicit solution under the assumption of constant relative risk aversion utility. We calibrate our model to the U.S. data and demonstrate that the pension member’s demand for life insurance has a hump-shaped pattern with age and a U-shaped pattern with the real interest rate and expected inflation. The optimal pension account balance in our model resembles a variable annuity, wherein the death benefits are endogenously determined and depend on various factors including age, mortality, account balance, future contributions, preferences, and market conditions. Our study suggests that offering variable annuities with more flexible death benefits within the DC account could better cater to the bequest demands of its members.

The rise of global history has fundamentally reshaped historical scholarship over recent years. Questions about class structures, however, have rarely been specifically addressed by global historians. Scholars of social history, meanwhile, have traditionally studied social stratification within national frameworks. The introduction to this special issue addresses these shortcomings, exploring global social history as a new field of historical inquiry. Interweaving global and social history, it demonstrates that we cannot understand the emergence and transformation of social groups across the modern world – groups such as the aristocracy, the economic bourgeoisie, the educated middle classes, the peasantry, or nomadic groups – without considering how they were influenced by global entanglements. Moreover, it points out that we have to examine globalization as a social process that was shaped by particular social groups. The special issue will connect the study of global connectivity with that of the emergence and evolution of social structures.