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To explain a set of recent US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) administrative settlements targeting fund administrators and to alert fund administrators and other financial service providers to their growing “gatekeeper” obligations.

This article explores the factual and legal contours of SEC administrative settlements with a fund administrator, as well as related enforcement actions against investment managers, to better understand the affirmative steps the SEC is expecting financial service providers to take to help root out fraud and misappropriation in the financial services sector.

The SEC’s administrative settlements with this fund administrator illustrate the SEC’s expanding focus on the “gatekeeper” function and signal the intent of the SEC to impute culpability for wrongdoing to fund administrators and other financial service providers simply for not doing enough to root out fraud and misappropriation in the financial services sector.

This article contains valuable information about recent SEC enforcement activity and practical guidance from experienced white collar, securities, and investment management lawyers.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize and provide commentary on the US Department of Treasury's Blueprint for a Modernized Financial Regulatory Structure, issued on March 31, 2008.

The paper summarizes and comments on the short‐, intermediate‐, and long‐term recommendations laid out in the Blueprint. The short‐term recommendations are to modernize the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, principally by broadening its focus to include the entire financial sector; to address gaps in mortgage origination oversight, principally though creating a federal Mortgage Origination Commission; and to enhance the Federal Reserve Board's current temporary liquidity provisioning process. The Treasury's intermediate‐term recommendations are intended to modernize the regulatory structure and to eliminate duplication. They are to phase out and transition the thrift charter to the national banking charter; to merge the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC); to establish a uniform, comprehensive regulatory system for, and create a federal charter for, “systemically important” payment and settlement systems; and to create an optional federal charter for insurers. The Blueprint's long‐term optimal regulatory structure envisions an “objectives‐based” regulatory approach in which three primary regulators would be established to focus individually on market stability regulation, prudential financial regulation and business conduct; three types of charters for financial institutions: federal insured depository institutions, federal insurance institutions, and federal financial services providers; the Federal Reserve Board assuming the role of market stability regulator; a prudential federal regulatory agency to regulate financial institutions with some type of explicit government guarantee associated with their business operations; and a conduct‐of‐business regulatory agency to regulate the business conduct of all financial institutions. In addition to the three objectives‐based regulators, the Blueprint recommends establishing two other regulatory entities: a federal insurance guarantee corporation and a corporate finance regulator.

The Blueprint finds that substantial regulatory reform is necessary to respond to significant developments including globalization of the capital markets, innovative and sophisticated new financial products and trading strategies, growing institutionalization of the capital markets, and convergence of financial service providers and financial products. Among the areas where one may see action and debate in the near future are: broadening the scope and membership of the President's Working Group on Capital Markets, adoption of uniform minimum licensing standards and the creation of a mortgage origination commission, further discussion of the terms and conditions attached to non‐depository institutions' access to the Federal Reserve discount window, continuing debate around the possible merger of the SEC and the CFTC, and updating by the SEC of the self‐regulatory organization (SRO) rule‐making process.

The paper is a clear and concise summary with commentary from expert securities lawyers.

The article reports the results from a natural resourcenegotiation model, the Legal-Institutional Analysis Model (LIAM), in two Mexican case studies: the Lerma River-Lake Chapala water system and water concerns in the Paso del Norte region. Although the LIAM was designed for use with U.S. based natural resource issues, this paper discusses results of the LIAM in non-U.S. cases. Results reveal limitations surrounding the assumption that economic and ecological values are mutually exclusive, and the need for greater assessment of power sources. Findings show that the general assumptions behind the LIAM were applicable to Mexico, and that the model produced helpful assessments of the two situations. It is recommended that limitations in the model should be addressed to achieve more accurate analyses.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore whether the nature of innovation is accumulative or radical and to what extent past year accumulation of technology stock can predict future innovation. More importantly, the authors are concerned with whether a change of policy regime or a variance in the quality of technology will moderate the nature of innovation.

The authors examined a dataset of 3.6 million Chinese patents during 1985–2015 and constructed more than 5 million citation pairs across 8 sections and 128 classes to track knowledge spillover across technology fields. The authors used this citation dataset to calculate the technology innovation network. The authors constructed a measure of upstream invention, interacting the pre-existing technology innovation network with historical patent growth in each technology field, and estimated measure's impact on future innovation since 2005. The authors also constructed three sets of metrics – technology dependence, centrality and scientific value – to identify innovation quality and a policy dummy to consider the impact of policy on innovation.

Innovation growth is built upon past year accumulation and technology spillover. Innovation grows faster for technologies that are more central and grows more slowly for more valuable technologies. A pro-innovation and pro-intellectual property right (IPR) policy plays a positive and significant role in driving technical progress. The authors also found that for technologies that have faster access to new information or larger power to control knowledge flow, the upstream and downstream innovation linkage is stronger. However, this linkage is weaker for technologies that are more novel or general. On most occasions, the nature of innovation was less responsive to policy shock.

This paper contributes to the debate on the nature of innovation by determining whether upstream innovation has strong predictive power on future innovation. The authors develop the assumption used in the technology spillover literature by considering a time-variant, directional and asymmetric matrix to model technology diffusion. For the first time, the authors answer how the nature of innovation will vary depending on the technology network configurations and policy environment. In addition to contributing to the academic debate, the authors' study has important implications for economic growth and industrial or innovation management policies.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the effect of radical innovation and incremental innovation on the competitive advantage of Jordanian industrial companies and identify the moderating role of technological intensity.

For this study’s purposes, 303 questionnaires from employees of 30 manufacturing firms were analysed. Convergent validity and discriminant validity tests were performed through structural equation modelling in the Smart-PLS programme. Data reliability was confirmed. A bootstrapping technique was used to analyse the data. Multi-group analysis was performed to investigate the moderating role of technological intensity.

Empirical results showed that both radical innovation and incremental innovation explain 60.2% of the variance in competitive advantage and that both constructs have a statistically significant effect on competitive advantage. The results also revealed that the relationship between radical innovation and competitive advantage is modified through the high-tech industries. Meanwhile, the relationship between incremental innovation and competitive advantage is modified through the low-tech industries.

This cross-sectional study provides a snapshot at a given moment in time, a methodological limitation that affects the generalization of its results and the results are limited to one country, Jordan.

This study promotes the idea of focusing on radical and incremental innovation to enhance competitive advantage in the Jordanian manufacturing sector and knowing the effect of technological intensity in this relationship.

This study has important implications for leaders in the Jordanian manufacturing sector in general, as the study highlights the importance of radical innovation and incremental innovation to enhance the competitive advantage, especially in light of the technological intensity in this sector, and thus, increase the innovative capabilities of this firms, which leads to an increase in the level of competitive advantage.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a commercialization model based on gaining economic benefits through the transfer of technological capabilities in the oil and gas industry. Since commercialization models are mostly based on the implement of technology to produce and sell new products, this study focuses on developing a specific independent technology commercialization model.

The method of this research is qualitative based on the grounded theory. For this purpose, general variables with content analysis were extracted by reviewing documents (Literature review) and then for identifying special components, interviewing experts in the Iranian oil and gas industry. Participations were selected using snowball sampling for semistructured interviews.

The findings of this research were extracted based on grounded theory with data analysis in MAXQDA software. In this research, first, 210 open codes were identified based on qualitative content analysis of relevant documents and results of interviews with experts. Then the classification of open codes was done, and 46 subcategories (variables) were determined in the commercialization model. Finally, 46 subcategories were classified into 10 categories as axial codes in grounded theory as components of the commercialization model.

The results of this research have led to the creation of new practical and theoretical implications. In this research, a new perspective of commercialization with the aim of transferring technology and obtaining its economic benefits for oil and gas industry companies was discussed. Also, based on the practical implications explained in this research, policymakers can use the suggested model to effectively implement independent technology commercialization to acquire economic benefits.

This study is purely original and the outcome of the research conducted by the authors. The research findings are the outcome of in-depth study on technology commercialization in the Iranian oil and gas industry.