The influence of licence status on Kansas child fatalities due to motor vehicle crashes

The influence of driver licensure on child motor vehicle crash (MVC) deaths in Kansas was investigated. Fatalities from 1994-2000 due to MVCs were extracted from the Kansas State Child Death Review Board and the Fatality Analysis Reporting Systems databases. It was found that 14% (52 of 363) of child fatalities from MVCs in Kansas occurred in vehicles where the driver was not licensed. Driver licence status was associated with use of safety restraints, the victim's age and race, weekend driving and rural county location. All child deaths involving unlicensed drivers were preventable. New legislation on vehicle sanctions may be required to assist law enforcement. Safety restraint laws should be enforced and promoted to the public. Transportation options are necessary for unlicensed drivers, particularly if they have young children and live in a rural community. Thus, a multi-system approach involving law enforcement, accident prevention strategies and transportation options will save the lives of children.     

External assistance and the peace process in El Salvador

The recent experience of El Salvador offers valuable lessons for economic policy in post-conflictual transitions. In the wake of a negotiated settlement to a civil war, economic policy must support the adjustment toward peace. In the short run, policy must promote not only macroeconomic stabilization but also political stabilization. This requires the mobilization of resources and the maintenance of political will for implementation of immediate peace-related needs such as the reintegration of excombatants into civil society and the strengthening of democratic institutions. Long-run policy objectives must encompass not only the attainment of macroeconomic balances, but also equity, that is, balance in the distribution of income and wealth; balanced investment in human, natural, and physical capital; and democratization in the broad sense of a more balanced distribution of power. In the end, policies which fail to build on the crucial complementarities between peace and development are unlikely to achieve either goal.     

Multilateral Contracting in Australian Mining: The Development of Hamersley Iron, 1961-1966

Management theory and transaction cost economics provide fewinsights into the dynamics of multilateral negotiations. A hostof factors suggest that complex transactions—especiallythose that involve government agencies—face a high probabilityof failure. Yet history records many examples of successfulmultiple-party transactions. Using the records of a major Australianiron ore mining venture, Hamersley Iron, this article revealsa number of the tactics that are used to engineer an agreementwhen the parties concerned have conflicting objectives, differentcultural affiliations, and distinctive institutional ties. Theessay also exposes some of the devices that the Japanese steelindustry—Hamersley's main customer—used to securecompetitive advantages in raw material procurement during theindustry's rise to international prominence.     

Property rights out of anarchy? The Demsetz hypothesis in a game of conflict

The Demsetz hypothesis states that secure claims to property arise when the value of creating those rights is sufficiently high. This paper examines the conditions under which this holds in an anarchy equilibrium in which players may allocate labor to production, to conflict, or to the public good of secure claims to property protection. In a simultaneous choice Nash equilibrium, no secure claims to property are created. However, if players play a sequential choice game in which secure claims to property protection occurs in the first stage, then the strategic benefit of reducing others’ subsequent conflict allocation causes secure claims to property to arise. Secure claims to property in a social contract are imperfect, but for sufficiently high productivity of resources, the social contract welfare dominates autocracy.     

Preliminary Injunctions and Damage Rules in Patent Law

This paper shows that preliminary injunctions may be sought in patent cases to obtain market power during the period of the injunction and are likely to be sought only where there is a small probability that the patent will be ultimately found valid. Both patentee and alleged infringer benefit from a preliminary injunction. This is an artifact of the asymmetry of current damage rules. Altering the rules so that an innovator who wins a preliminary injunction on a patent ultimately declared invalid pays both lost profits to the imitator and a fine equal to lost consumer surplus creates efficient incentives.     

Conflict of Interest in Policing and the Public Sector

Abstract

Conflicts of interest are a key factor in the contemporary decline of trust in government and public institutions, eroding public trust in government and democratic systems. Drawing on two unique empirical studies involving policing and the broader public sector, this paper explores the meaning and dimensions of conflict of interest by examining public complaints about conflict of interest and providing distinctive insights into the nature of conflict of interest as a problem for public sector ethics. The paper analyses and explores appropriate regulatory and management approaches for conflict of interest, focusing on three elements: (1) dealing with private interests that are identifiably problematic in the way they clash with the duties of public officials; (2) managing conflicts as they arise in the course of public sector work (manifested in preferential and adverse treatment, and other problematic areas); and (3) developing ethical and accountable organisational cultures. It is concluded that effective and meaningful public sector ethics in the pursuit of the public interest must be based on an ethos of social accountability and a commitment to prioritise the public interest in both fact and appearance.     

Exploration and development of U.S. oil and gas fields, 1955-2002

We study the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the U.S. over the period 1955-2002. We make four contributions to explain the economic evolution of the oil and gas industry during this period. First, we derive a testable model of the dynamics of competitive oil and gas field exploration and development. Second, we show how to empirically distinguish Hotelling scarcity effects from effects due to technological change. Third, we test these hypotheses using statewide panel data of exploration and development drilling. We find that the time paths of exploration, development and total wells drilled are dominated by Hotelling scarcity effects. Finally, we offer an explanation for why fixed costs from exploration can make the contracting equilibrium in the mineral rights market efficient.     

An ‘oil’igopoly theory of exploration

This paper develops a theory of ‘oil’igopoly exploration of an exhaustible resource. Strategic exploration and production are jointly derived in a three period subgame perfect equilibrium. While the ‘oil’igopoly theory of exploration shares many features with non-strategic models of exploration and production, there is one important difference. The ‘oil’igopoly theory of exploration predicts that firms who exhaust their proved reserves before they can convert their unproved reserves into proved reserves have an incentive to over-explore, relative to the Nash equilibrium level of exploration. A simple empirical prediction is that firms holding smaller proved reserves should be observed doing more exploration. This prediction is consistent with country-level production and reserve data in the post-World War II era.     

Do emerging markets with consistent returns have better future performance?

Using monthly data for 25 emerging markets around the world, it is found that emerging markets with recently consistent stock returns tend to have future returns that continue in the same direction. The effects are long-lived for negative consistency, and imply that capital flows are much more sensitive to market downturns than market upturns. Additionally, the longer a market has had consistently negative (positive) stock returns, the more negative (positive) are future returns. These results serve as confirmation that the consistency effects of Grinblatt and Moskowitz [J. Finan. Econ., 2004 Grinblatt, M and Moskowitz, T. 2004. Predicting stock price movements from the pattern of past returns. J. Finan. Econ., 71: 541–579. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], forthcoming] and Watkins [J. Behav. Finan., 2003 Watkins, B. 2003. Riding the wave of investor sentiment: an analysis of consistency as a predictor of future stock returns. J. Behav. Finan., 4: 1–32.  [Google Scholar], 4, 1–32] exist in emerging markets around the world.     

Taking the pulse of accounting education reform: liberal education,sociological perspectives,and exploring ways forward

This paper examines the ‘state of play’ with regard to accounting education reform, which has been advocated for decades but is notable for having failed to produce significant change. We build on prior calls to ‘liberalise’ accounting education, recommending a move to a more relevant curriculum that considers accounting in its social context. Based on an analysis of the accounting curriculum in 31 Australian and 8 New Zealand universities, we find that, despite widespread and continuing calls for a broader educational approach, there are very few examples of systemic curricular-wide change to the traditional technical and vocational focus of accounting education. As a way forward, a sociologically-informed accounting curriculum is proposed to overcome the widely-recognised limitations of current approaches and the apparent failure of efforts to liberalise the curriculum. We argue that our approach would facilitate the broadening of the curriculum, and the development of better-educated, well-rounded, and socially-aware graduates.