Expropriation risk and technology

This paper develops a unified framework to analyze the dynamics of firm investment in countries with poor legal enforcement. The firm's technology edge over the government generates endogenous property rights. Industry variation in the technology gap predicts a sectoral pecking-order of expropriations. Long-run investment distortions may be Pareto superior relative to persistent investment at the static optimum. The dynamics of investment and transfers depend on whether incentives (backloading) or efficiency (frontloading) concerns dominate at the initial division of surplus. An increase in government efficiency may reduce its welfare. The model provides a technology-driven rationale for the widespread use of conglomerate structures in emerging market countries.     

The sources of the Kuznets relationship between road fatalities and economic growth

This paper reports the results of an empirical analysis of the Kuznets curve relationship between per capita income and road fatalities across 60 countries over the period 1972-2004. This relationship hypothesizes that the number of road fatalities increases with increasing motorization in the early stages of economic growth. Eventually, due to advances in technical, policy and political institutions, it declines as per capita income increases. The quality of political institutions as well as improvements in medical care and technology are hypothesized to impact road fatalities. Results indicate evidence of a Kuznets curve relationship between per capita income and road fatalities for both highly developed and less developed countries and support our hypothesis that changes in institutional quality and medical improvements underlie the Kuznets relationship. The evidence presented in this study suggests that lowering corruption levels as well as improvements in medical care and technology would help to reduce road fatalities.     

Political Opinion Leadership and Electoral Behavior

SUMMARY

A micro-model that focuses on political opinion leadership within an extended nomological network is developed and tested. Data were gathered from a sample of voters in an election. The results indicate that political opinion leadership played a central role in the voting behavior. Key antecedents to opinion leadership were voter involvement, subjective knowledge, and indirectly, information seeking behavior. Important consequences were voting stability, perceived risk and political satisfaction.     

Strategic niche management of social innovations: the case of social entrepreneurship

Strategic niche management (SNM), a tool to understand and manage radical socio-technical innovations and facilitate their diffusion, has always departed from a technical artefact. Many radical innovations, however, do not revolve around such an artefact. Social entrepreneurship is a new business model that combines a social goal with a business mentality and is heralded as an important new way to create social value such as sustainability. This study examines if and how SNM can be applied to such a social innovation. It identifies theoretical and practical limitations and proposes solutions. The main conclusion is that SNM can be used to analyse radical social innovation, although it requires rethinking the initial entry point for research and management. Exemplifying quotes are proposed as an alternative. Second, this paper suggests using values to describe niche–regime interaction as a better way to anticipate future niche–regime interactions.     

GMO standards,endogenous policy and the market for information

The paper develops a composite index of GMO standards restrictiveness for 60 countries, assigning objective scores to six different regulatory dimensions. Using this index and its components, we empirically investigate the political and economic determinants of GMO regulations for 55 countries, controlling for spatial autocorrelation. Results show that many of the determinants highlighted in the theoretical literature, such as the structure of the agricultural sector and the institutional environment are important determinants of the restrictiveness of the GMO regulation. As a key result there emerges a prominent role of the market for information, showing that the structure of domestic mass media (public vs. private) is an important driver of GMO standards.     

EXPLICIT SOLUTIONS OF CONSUMPTION-INVESTMENT PROBLEMS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS WITH REGIME SWITCHING

We consider a consumption and investment problem where the market presents different regimes. An investor taking decisions continuously in time selects a consumption–investment policy to maximize his expected total discounted utility of consumption. The market coefficients and the investor's utility of consumption are dependent on the regime of the financial market, which is modeled by an observable finite-state continuous-time Markov chain. We obtain explicit optimal consumption and investment policies for specific HARA utility functions. We show that the optimal policy depends on the regime. We also make an economic analysis of the solutions, and show that for every investor the optimal proportion to allocate in the risky asset is greater in a "bull market" than in a "bear market." This behavior is not affected by the investor's risk preferences. On the other hand, the optimal consumption to wealth ratio depends not only on the regime, but also on the investor's risk tolerance: high risk-averse investors will consume relatively more in a "bull market" than in a "bear market," and the opposite is true for low risk-averse investors.     

On the size and number of preferential trading arrangements

This paper uses a multi-country political economy model to investigate the possibility of achieving global free trade through the expansion of Preferential Trading Arrangements (PTAs). It is shown that bloc expansion would result in global free trade if blocs have an open membership. However, that would not be the case if membership were selective: at some point, the members of the bloc would stop accepting new members and this would lead to the creation of a second bloc. The likelihood of such a second bloc would make the members of the first bloc choose a larger bloc size than they would have chosen if only one bloc was allowed to form.     

Emerging Interaction of Political Processes

Abstract

The emerging interaction of political processes sets the stage for the level of macro uncertainty and specific risk events that may occur in an international relationship. Strongly defined social control in Cuba, formal and informal, dominates the dynamics of the relationship, while simultaneously government, formal, action in the U.S. dominates the ability of American individuals to further the relationship. This study examines the development of a long-term relationship between two universities from the U.S. and Cuba. Over a period of eight years the relationship changes considerably as events on the macro stage play out and the environment for détente shifts. The key focus of this relationship lies with developing the study abroad program, taking students from the U.S. to Cuba.     

《公民权利和政治权利公约》与我国的人权保障

中国政府于1998年10月签署《公民权利和政治权利公约》,但至今未报经全国人大批准。主要原因在于我国对人权保障的理解及宪法中的相关规定与该《公约》存在重大差别：对人权来源的认识和规定不同;对＂人民自决权＂的理解存在差异;关于＂平等权＂＂迁徙和选择住所的自由＂＂无罪推定原则＂＂人人有权享受思想、良心和宗教自由＂＂结社的自由＂等方面的规定不同。我国应该加强人权理论研究和宣传教育的力度;完善我国宪法法律关于人权保障的相关制度和机制,逐步推动我国人权保障事业的发展。