درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. Martin Luther King, Jr. Abstract The following paper will present the theory and possibilities of implication of the phenomenon of civil disobedience understood as one of the most powerful and most effective tools of democratic society when it comes to implementing the necessary and indispensable changes required for the improvement of the political domain and the social public sphere.   In the first part I will present the narrow but orthodox and widely discussed definition of civil disobedience presented by John Rawls in his Theory of Justice (1971). Given such a definition, as well as the major conditions under which the actions undertaken in the name of civil disobedience can be justified, I will focus my analysis on two major aspects of the discussed notion.   Firstly, I will discuss civil disobedience, which is in its essense an unlawful act, paradoxically expresses the highest respect for the positive law by the person performing the civilly disobedient act through one’s submission to the judgment of the law which is an object of one’s protest. This way, civil disobedience presents itself as the phenomenon which, not having a legal recognition (not being legalized), holds super-legal force required to impose the changes on the unjust legal system or on the particular unjust regulation.   Secondly, I will point out that civil disobedience, as a public act performed by the people (the subjects of the particular law), expresses the will of the people and, therefore, it can not be used (by themselves) in the ways contradictory to their best self-interest but always supported by the “the commonly shared sense of justice” (Rawls). From this premise I conclude that the universal human rights, as thier supporters claim, are one of the main ends of the political activism in the recent decade and should be advocated in the civilly disobedient manner.   In the last part I will contrast the Rawlsean definition with a much broader and more relevant understanding of civil disobedience when it concerns today’s globalizing world. In this world, the nation-states cease to be the only political actors when confronted with the transnational public sphere, and, therefore, the understanding of civil disobedience as a transversal arena of public dissent presented by Roland Bleiker (2000) is more appropriate. In this definition civil disobedience becomes, not only a political instrument of particular subjects of a particular society, but it also becomes a tool for the international mobilization of means and of people in the name of presenting and imposing the respect for the universal human rights despite the national borders and societal paradigms. 

This study aims at getting a better performance for optimal stock portfolios by modeling stocks prices dynamics through a continuous paths Levy process. To this end, the share prices are simulated using a multi-dimensional geometric Brownian motion model. Then, we use the results to form the optimal portfolio by maximizing the Sharpe ratio and comparing the findings with the outputs of the conventional model. To examine the robustness of the results, we have evaluated its performance for different investment horizons and various volumes of price information over a long period (approximately twenty years) in the Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). Findings indicate that within the trading dates spanning the interval 24-Mar-2001 to 19-Sep-2020, the return of the portfolios obtained from applying this simulation scheme for maximization of Sharpe ratio is (244% on average) higher and their risk (standard deviation) are lower (1227% on average) than those realized by the conventional methods. Additionally, a comparison of the simulation approach with a performance of the actual market portfolios indicates that the Sharpe ratios of the simulation method are higher (0.055% on average) than those resulting from the total market performances. The results of the stochastic dominance test show that our proposed strategy has a first-order stochastic dominance (FSD) over the conventional one and market portfolios, that means at each level of cumulative distribution, the Sharpe ratio of our method is higher, and as FSD test makes no assumptions about the curvature of investors' utility functions, these results do not depend on the degree of risk aversion of investors, and as long as investors prefer a higher Sharpe ratio, they would be better off if they follow our proposed strategy.