Making Drones to Kill Civilians: Is it Ethical?

A drone industry has emerged in the US, initially funded almost exclusively for military applications. There are now also other uses both governmental and commercial (in the US and abroad). Many military drones are still being made, however, especially for surveillance and targeted killings. Regarding the latter, this essay calls into question their legality and morality. It recognizes that the issues are complex and controversial, but less so as to the killing of non-combatant civilians. The government using drones for targeted killings maintains secrecy and appeals to non-traditional justifications. Most scholars who assess these killer drone practices support citizen immunity, either by favoring a modified just war theory that prioritizes civilians’ right to life or by challenging official deviations from applicable laws. They accordingly declare such killing immoral if not a war crime. The manufacturers of these killer drones are not themselves the killers, but they are abetters, i.e., sine qua non facilitators. So, I argue that any company concerned about its corporate social responsibility should cease manufacturing them.     

The Effect of Environmental Corporate Social Responsibility on Environmental Performance and Business Competitiveness: The Mediation of Green Information Technology Capital

With the emergence of environmental sustainability and green business management, increasing demands have been made on businesses in the areas of environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR). Furthermore, the influence of ECSR on green capital investment, environmental performance, and business competitiveness has also been the subject of attention from enterprises. However, in previous studies, the mediating role of green information technology (IT) capital in the relationship between ECSR, environmental performance, and business competitiveness, has not been investigated by researchers. In order to bridge this gap in the ECSR literature, this study aims to examine the influence of ECSR on green IT capital, and the consequent effect of green IT capital on environmental performance and business competitiveness. Data were collected from 358 companies from the top 1000 manufacturers in Taiwan. The results confirmed that ECSR has significant positive effects on green IT human capital, green IT structural capital, and green IT relational capital. Green IT structural capital and green IT relational capital have positive effects on environmental performance and business competitiveness, and environmental performance has a positive effect on business competitiveness. In addition, green IT structural capital and green IT relational capital have partial mediating effects on ECSR, environmental performance, and business competitiveness. The implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Interethnic relations,informal trading networks,and social integration: imitation,habits, and social evolution

The ethnically homogeneous middleman groups (EHMGs), which are informal trading networks, are ubiquitous in less-developed economies where the legal infrastructure for contract enforcement is not well developed. This paper develops a formal model of social interaction among members of the EHMG as well as in more general situations in a multi-ethnic or multi-cultural society consisting of identifiable ethnic or linguistic groups. Behavioral patterns are transmitted between generations and altered via imitation in social contacts. The model demonstrates how different discriminatory behavioral patterns can evolve and persist over time. One result is that the trust between such groups can increase due to a higher frequency of inter-group contacts. In concluding the paper, we speculate about how the model can be expanded to include changes in legal structures, especially contract law. This could lead to an increase in the trust between the different groups.     

Mehr Schutz vor ausländischen Direktinvestitionen?

Currently, there is no comprehensive legal framework at EU level to screen foreign direct investments (FDI) into the EU. In September 2017, the European Commission proposed a framework for screening foreign direct investments into the European Union. The reform will likely come into force at the end of 2018. This paper describes the political background and key concepts of the FDI screening framework and analyses potential economic effects of the new regulation.     

How many educated workers for your economy? European targets,optimal public spending,and labor market impact

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the total employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to three different public taxation strategies. We calibrate our model using evidence from thirteen European countries, and compare our results with the target from the Europe 2020 Agenda for achievement in higher education. We show that, with current labor market characteristics, the target set by governments seems compatible with the social surplus maximization objective for some countries, while being too high for other countries. For all countries, maximizing employment would imply higher educational spending than that required for the social surplus to reach its maximum.     

On Measurement of Economic Growth

This article continues the discussion raised in the pages of the journal on the methodological problems of justifying economic policy [1]. Problems of measuring the inflationary component of economic growth and in product competitiveness in the internal market and external markets are considered. A procedure to measure economic growth, taking into account the balance of interests of the current and future generations, is proposed.     

Aufdeckung von Versicherungsbetrug bei Kfz-Schäden mit Hilfe des Benford-Tests

The German Insurance Association estimates a yearly amount of damage of € 1.5?bn to German motor vehicle insurance companies because of systematic fraud by insurance holders. It is supposed that about 10% of submitted claim applications contain manipulated data, therefore insurance companies are forced to complete a detailed and cost intensive case-by-case review of each single application. An alternative method to detect fraud in empiric data is the method of digital analysis based on Benford’s law. The Benford method uses a mathematical law of specific logarithmic distribution attributes of first digits. According to this approach, the data of a Benford set confirm with the expected digit distribution, if the data is not manipulated, whereas fraudulent interventions lead to a deviation from Benford’s law. Hence, until now there has not been any investigation whether the Benford method can also be applied on insurance data. The present article analyses a dataset consisting of more than 120,000 damage claim applications to answer this question as well as to identify the impact of specific characteristics on the probability of fraud contained in claim applications, such as the repair of the vehicle in a franchised or an independent workshop, the vehicle brand or the examination by insurance companies experts. Indeed it could be shown that Benford’s Law is only applicable on second digits of insurance data, but delivers very strong results here: All results of the considered characteristics could be verified by plausible arguments. For this reason insurance companies can benefit from making use of the Benford method to identify those claim applications with a high probability of fraud, which should then be reviewed in more detail so that resources can be allocated in a much more cost efficient way.     

An experimental analysis of tax avoidance policies

Policies to reduce aggressive tax avoidance are increasingly being implemented or discussed in many countries around the world. Tax authorities hope that such policies will generate new tax revenue by increasing overall tax compliance. We present an experimental design to investigate the effect of a stylized anti-avoidance tax policy on tax compliance behavior. We highlight that anti-avoidance tax policies that reduce tax avoidance can also induce an increase in tax evasion (“substitution effect”), which limits the additional tax revenue these policies will generate. We show that the degree of substitution depends crucially on behavioral factors such as tax morale. Policymakers therefore also need to consider behavioral features while designing such policies and estimating their potential effects.     

Unemployment as an Adverse Trigger Event for Mortgage Default

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics - There is limited evidence of the role of household-level adverse trigger events in driving mortgage default, and the evidence based on proxies,...