This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer journal between 1994 and 2021, as well as other relevant archival sources. The research examines the underlying forces that led these law firm partners to abandon their high-status positions and pursue alternative career paths during these pivotal moments in Hong Kong’s history. The findings suggest that the career trajectories of these elite professionals are not solely based on individual choices but are also shaped by their social origins and the physical and social spaces that influence their careers over time. This study contributes original insights into the complex interplay between individual, spatial and temporal factors that drive career mobility among legal professionals.

I study native-born white men’s internal migration in the United States over all possible 10- and 20-year periods between 1850 and 1940. Inter-county migration rates—after implementing a new method to correct for errors in linkage—were stable over time. Migrant selection on the basis of occupational status was neutral or slightly negative and also largely stable. But the orientation of internal migration changed over time, declining in distance and increasingly driving urbanization. In the 1930s, migration became less common and less urban oriented. These results provide a clearer understanding of historic U.S. internal migration than previously possible.

From 1992 until 2021, SITI Company held an annual summer workshop at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 2012 and 2013, four artists documented their daily experiences at the workshop on social media to share with artists they had met at a Winter Training session in the city earlier that year. From these memories comes an archival script that offers insight into SITI’s pedagogical models and the variety of ways students experienced SITI training.

Two Indigenous long-distance walking performances, by the Mother Earth Water Walkers and by the Standing Rock Youth Runners, employ walking as a performance of Indigenous sovereignty, generating tribal knowledge, resistance, and cultural resurgence. What can these acts of long-distance walking tell us about the ways in which Indigenous people create, embody, and perform cultural sovereignty in North America?

The problem of relations between Church and state has existed from the very beginnings of Christianity and has evolved over centuries. The dominant model today is one of separation between the state and religious communities. In the context of the Roman Catholic Church, the Vatican City State remains the only exception to this principle. This article examines the tensions inherent in the way in which the Roman Pontiff, as head of the Vatican City State, exercises both religious and secular power, and how rule of law principles operate to constrain the operation of power as between the various organs of this state.

Reinsurers may default when they have to pay large claims to insurers but are unable to fulfill their obligations due to various reasons such as catastrophic events, underwriting losses, inadequate capitalization, or financial mismanagement. This paper studies the problem of optimal reinsurance design from the perspectives of both the insurer and reinsurer when the insurer faces the potential default risk of the reinsurer. If the insurer aims to minimize the convex distortion risk measure of his retained loss, we prove the optimality of a stop-loss treaty when the promised ceded loss function is charged by the expected value premium principle and the reinsurer offers partial recovery in the event of default. For any fixed premium loading set by the reinsurer, we then derive the explicit expressions of optimal deductible levels for three special distortion functions, including the TVaR, Gini, and PH transform distortion functions. Under these three explicit distortion risk measures adopted by the insurer, we seek the optimal safety loading for the reinsurer by maximizing her net profit where the reserve capital is determined by the TVaR measure and the cost is governed by the expectation. This procedure ultimately leads to the Bowley solution between the insurer and the reinsurer. We provide several numerical examples to illustrate the theoretical findings. Sensitivity analyses demonstrate how different settings of default probability, recovery rate, and safety loading affect the optimal deductible values. Simulation studies are also implemented to analyze the effects induced by the default probability and recovery rate on the Bowley solution.

This paper studies the relationship between military conflicts and state-building in pre-imperial China. I develop an incomplete contract model to examine rulers’ and local administrators’ incentives in conflict. Defensive wars drive decentralization: landowning local administrators have more to gain from a successful defense and are therefore more committed to it. Offensive wars drive centralization: the landowning ruler has personnel control over the non-land-owning local administrator and can therefore force the latter to participate in less lucrative attacks. Model predictions are corroborated with empirical evidence and historical case studies, and offer broader implications for the political divergence between China and Europe.