Illegal Evictions? Overwriting Possession and Orality with Law's Violence in Cambodia

The unfolding of a juridico‐cadastral system in present‐day Cambodia is at odds with local understandings of landholding, which are entrenched in notions of community consensus and existing occupation. The discrepancy between such orally recognized antecedents and the written word of law have been at the heart of the recent wave of dispossessions that has swept across the country. Contra the standard critique that corruption has set the tone, this paper argues that evictions in Cambodia are often literally underwritten by the articles of law. Whereas ‘possession’ is a well‐understood and accepted concept in Cambodia, a cultural basis rooted in what James C. Scott refers to as ‘orality’, coupled with a long history of subsistence agriculture, semi‐nomadic lifestyles, barter economies and – until recently – widespread land availability have all ensured that notions of ‘property’ are vague among the country's majority rural poor. In drawing a firm distinction between possessions and property, where the former is premised upon actual use and the latter is embedded in exploitation, this paper examines how proprietorship is inextricably bound to the violence of law.     

Continuous time modeling of panel data: SEM versus filter techniques

Although convincing arguments have been put forward for continuous-time modeling, its use in panel research is rare. In one approach, classical N  = 1 state-space modeling procedures are adapted for panel analysis to estimate the exact discrete model (EDM) by means of filter techniques. Based on earlier less satisfactory indirect methods, a more recent approach uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to get the maximum likelihood estimate of the EDM by the direct method. After an introduction into continuous-time state-space modeling for panel data and the EDM, a thorough comparison is made between the two distinct approaches with quite different histories by means of Monte Carlo simulation studies. The model used in the simulation studies is the damped linear oscillator with and without random subject effects.     

International migration and “educated unemployment”

This paper provides a novel explanation of “educated unemployment”, which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that “educated unemployment” is caused by the prospect of international migration, that is, by the possibility of a “brain drain”. In addition, the analysis shows that a developing country may end up with more educated workers despite the brain drain and educated unemployment.     

Binomial valuation of lookback options

We present a straightforward and computationally efficient binomial approximation scheme for the valuation of lookback options. This enables us to value American lookback options. Previous research on lookback options has assumed that the contracts are based on the extrema of the continuously observed price of the underlying security; in practice, however, contracts are often based on the extrema of prices sampled at a finite set of fixed dates. We adapt our binomial scheme to investigate the impact on the value of the options.     

Do the Rich Save More? A New View Based on Intergenerational Transfers

Do richer people have higher saving rates? The short-run and long-run consumption functions have different answers to this question, which results in the “consumption puzzle” that was a focus of macroeconomic research in the 1950s and 1960s. In a recent empirical contribution, Dynan, Skinner, and Zeldes (2004) revive this old question and make this “consumption puzzle” more intriguing, by showing that the average propensity to consume decreases not only with current income but also with lifetime income. This paper provides a model that helps resolve this puzzle from an intergenerational perspective.     

The Employment Contract: From Collective Procedures to Individual Rights

The article analyses the institutional basis and form of the employment contract in Britain using the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. It assesses the extent to which collective bargaining still regulates pay and non‐pay aspects of employment. While collective procedures have declined in importance, there has been an increase in legal governance of the employment relationship. Logistic regression analysis establishes that both contractual formalization and legal compliance are greater in larger organizations and where trade unions are present. Trade union activity is also associated with superior fringe benefits. Collective bargaining thus appears to facilitate both access to and improvement on statutory rights.     

Five hypotheses concerning the fate of the Singapore issues in the Doha Round

At the Cancún Ministerial Conference, the members ofthe World Trade Organization (WTO) disagreed on whether to launchnegotiations on multilateral disciplines concerning the fourareas of government policy collectively known as the ‘Singaporeissues’. This amounted to a decision not to expand theWTO's boundaries along these dimensions. In this paper, fivehypotheses concerning the treatment of the Singapore issuesby the WTO's membership are described and assessed. The implicationsof this assessment for the likelihood that, at some future date,similar proposals can be successfully advanced in the multilateraltrade arena are also discussed.