People should have some say over the results that pop up when they conduct a vanity search online, Europe’s highest court said Tuesday.  In a landmark decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union said Google must listen and sometimes comply when individuals ask the Internet search giant to remove links to newspaper articles or websites containing personal information. Campaigners say the ruling effectively backs individual privacy rights over the freedom of information.

Should US citizens be more sensitive to privacy issues?

Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan writes:  It’s 2014, and women are still paid less than men.  Yet academically, girls have not merely caught up with boys in performance: they have overtaken them.

Boys actually underperform in school in the first place. The prime suspect for this underperformance is boys’ shortage of what social scientists call noncognitive skills. They have trouble sitting still, focusing and exerting self-control.

Employers demand these same noncognitive skills. Those that it takes to succeed in college — time management, writing ability, structuring tasks on your own, working in teams — are also needed in the modern workplace.

There are two reasons to believe that the trend seen in schools may not translate to the workplace. First, some evidence points to other gender differences in psychology.  Men fare better in competitive environments, in part because they are more confident and men show less risk aversion.

These differences — competitiveness, overconfidence and risk-seeking — could conceivably have greater benefits in the workplace, at least in some jobs, than they do in school.

A second factor is that jobs and society are still structured for traditional gender roles. Family commitments and household responsibilities will not disappear.

For the gender gap to reverse, these norms — or, at least, women’s responses to them — would have to change. Ms. Bertrand notes that in Asia, “where gender norms are particularly strong, successful women are opting out of traditional family structures to focus on work.” Rates of marriage and fertility are particularly low for successful Asian women. Of course, this may not be the way we would like to see norms change.

Maybe we shouldn’t be asking when women will catch up. Maybe they’ve already caught up, and we should instead ask whether society is holding them back.

Lili Fuhr and Johnny West write:  Most oil contracts are structured so that the investor recovers costs first, with the remaining profits then divided between the producer and the government that granted it the concession. This means that, if carbon pricing reduces oil’s profitability, as intended, the loss in government revenue could be larger than the drop in overall profits.
Making matters worse, the details of these agreements are largely hidden, thereby preventing citizens from holding their governments accountable, which in turn undermines democracy and facilitates corruption.
To remedy the situation, ongoing efforts to increase transparency should go beyond revenue flows – which are set to face new transparency requirements in the United States and the European Union – to include contracts. Once a contract is public, future carbon-pricing scenarios can be modeled to demonstrate that most governments will earn less than they expect and, more important, that many potential projects and new discoveries could become stranded assets.

Sushmi Dey writes;  Indian drug makers, slammed for months in the US over issues related to quality and intellectual property rights, might soon get to breathe easy. The US regulator is set to expedite from October the approval process for generic drugs by lowering the application scrutiny period from three years to 11 months.

This is expected to translate into major gains for domestic drug makers like Sun Pharma, Lupin, Glenmark, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Cadila Healthcare and Torrent Pharma, which have a significant presence in that country’s $30-billion generic drug market.

According to a survey by America’s National Community Pharmacists Association, prices of some of the medicines spiked more than 1,000 per cent in 2013.

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (US FDA’s) proposed move to fast-track clearances to generic drug applications from October is aimed at bringing in more products to the market, so that more competition governs prices, says sources and industry officials in the know of the latest developments.

However, foreign generic drug makers like Teva, Mylan and Sandoz, which already have a considerable presence in the American market with extensive product pipelines across segments, are likely to face competition with other generic players entering early and vying for larger market share.

“Early penetration of more generic players will also allow faster price erosion. That will help bring down healthcare cost in favour of Obamacare, but might hurt existing players’ interests,” the senior executive said.

Indian companies, which account for 10-12 per cent of the total US generic market, will also benefit from the move because these companies have been paying hefty fees to the regulator since 2012 while applying for generic drug approvals there. However, instead of expediting approvals, US FDA prolonged the clearance time for applications to be filed before 2017. This disappointed generic drug makers, which planned to launch products during the patent cliff.

During US FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg’s visit to India earlier this year, representatives from domestic companies like Sun Pharma, Ranbaxy, Cadila Health and Torrent Pharma had also raised the issue of delay in product approvals hurting their revenues.

Also, generic drug makers were concerned that once they applied for approvals, their products were vulnerable to potential patent infringement litigation, which might add to their cost, while sales of these products were yet to take off.

Given that India is the largest foreign supplier of generic medicines to the US, which in turn is the biggest market for domestic companies, faster generic drug approvals will help both sides.

Industry estimates show, major domestic drug makers like Sun Pharma, Lupin, Glenmark, Dr Reddy’s and Cadila Health annually file 15-20 generic drug applications each. Even smaller companies like Torrent Pharma and Alembic file five to 10 ANDAs every year.

Adair Turner writes:  Improved market discipline in China does have an important role to play in addressing the structural causes of imbalance. Wasteful construction investment is encouraged by the under-pricing of rural land. The lack of a normal ownership relationship between the central government and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) allows the latter to pay minimal dividends and over-invest in business expansion. Caps on interest rates on bank deposits result in household savers supplying a large subsidy to corporate borrowers. And SOEs have better access to credit from state-owned banks than private companies do.

Two distinctively Chinese factors and one inherent feature of all banking systems interact.  The first Chinese factor is the authorities’ focus on “urbanization” as an end in itself, rather than as a byproduct of industrialization. The second is China’s decentralized approach to economic development, with strong competition between regions and cities often focusing on prestige urban infrastructure projects.

Jonathan Weil reports:  Proxy advisers, like anyone else, can get pretty emotional. Take Dominique Biedermann. He runs Ethos, the largest proxy adviser in Switzerland, which recently recommended that Credit Suisse Group AG shareholders reject the bank’s compensation plan.

“It is shocking that management compensation has been increasing ever more for two consecutive years,” Biedermann said.  “It is high time to show the board of directors that many shareholders have lost their trust in them. We are no longer willing to support the way our bank is being managed.”

Ethos’s clients hold 3 percent of Credit Suisse shares.

Last year, Brady Dougan, the Credit Suisse chief executive officer, received a 26 percent pay increase to 9.8 million Swiss francs ($11.1 million). And for what? Well, if the Justice Department has its way, Credit Suisse or a subsidiary may soon have to plead guilty to criminal charges because it got caught helping thousands of wealthy Americans evade their taxes. And pleading guilty requires a lot of hard work. So maybe that explains it.

Dougan also gets bonus points for claiming to be unaware of any such activity while it was going on, notwithstanding that he joined Credit Suisse in 1990, has been on the bank’s executive board since 2003 and has been the CEO since 2007. As he told the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations: “While that employee misconduct violated our policies, and was unknown to our executive management, we accept responsibility for and deeply regret these employees’ actions.”

According to the Senate panel’s report, Credit Suisse employed 1,800 bankers in eight different areas of the bank to open and service Swiss accounts for U.S. clients. Yet heavens no, Dougan had no inkling that some of those clients were using Swiss bank accounts to hide money from the Internal Revenue Service.  Eight-one percent of the shareholders backed Credit Suisse’s compensation plan in a non-binding vote at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Zurich.

There is much we can learn from this vote: 1) Credit Suisse shareholders don’t care if the bank committed crimes. 2) They don’t care if the bank pleads guilty to criminal charges, because it’s not as if the Justice Department is going to try putting Credit Suisse out of business. 3) They appreciate the raw skill and talent that are necessary for a CEO to both run a Swiss bank and stay oblivious to the widespread tax evasion going on around him.

It has been almost three years since the Justice Department first told Credit Suisse that it was the target of a criminal investigation. The bank spent the intervening years dragging out the probe. It delayed handing over information, hiding behind Swiss bank-secrecy laws. Meanwhile, its Swiss rival, UBS AG, signed a deferred-prosecution agreement with the Justice Department’s tax division in 2009, paid $780 million and got the matter over with.

If Dougan had been smarter about this, Credit Suisse almost certainly could have settled this case without the bank having to plead guilty to anything. But now the times and prosecutorial fashions have changed. After years of handing out deferrals and non-prosecution agreements like candy, the Justice Department is looking to make an example of a big bank (preferably a foreign one) and convince the American public that large financial institutions can’t break the law with impunity. Credit Suisse may become that poster child. And it all happened on Dougan’s watch.