To Elect or Not to Elect: Leaders,Alternation in Power and Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper investigates whether and how multiparty elections, introduced in many African countries since the early 1990s, affect a government’s commitment to welfare policies. We hypothesise that contested multiparty elections and turnovers between different leaders and political forces in government – even when democratic standards are not met – positively impact the promotion of social welfare. We test these hypotheses through a cross-sectional and time-series research design, making use of our new, comprehensive ‘Africa Leadership Change’ (ALC) dataset. Empirical results confirm that leaders elected through multiparty elections and countries that experience political alternations in government are associated with higher levels of social welfare.     

Public debt stabilization: the relevance of policymakers’ time horizons

Policymakers are stuck in time. Political short-termism, policy myopia, policy short-sightedness, and similar words have been coined to emphasize the present-centric policy thinking. Politics tends to produce short time horizons, and as a result, policymakers often fail to use present opportunities to mitigate future harms. Focusing on fiscal and monetary strategic interactions, given different separate decision makers, our paper aims to explore the effects of policymakers’ time horizons on debt stabilization. To formalize our ideas, we use the novel concept of Nonlinear-model-predictive-control Feedback Nash Equilibrium (NFNE) and find that present-centric policy thinking and decision horizons matters under several dimensions.     

Silence of the Innocents: Undocumented Immigrants’ Underreporting of Crime and their Victimization

Do undocumented migrants underreport crimes to the police in order to avoid being deported? And do criminals exploit such vulnerability? We address these questions using victimization surveys and administrative data around the 1986 U.S. immigration amnesty. The amnesty allows us to solve two major identification issues that have plagued this literature: migrants’ legal status is endogenous and unobserved. The results show that the reporting rate of undocumented immigrants is 17 percent, which limits the immigrants’ ability to protect some of their fundamental human rights. However, right after the 1986 amnesty, which disproportionately legalized individuals of Hispanic origin, crime victims of Hispanic origin show enormous improvements in reporting behavior. The implied increase in the reporting rate by amnesty applicants is close to 20 percentage points.     

Gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric analysis of buflomedil hydrochloride in biological samples after acute intoxication.

Two cases of acute intoxication of buflomedil hydrochloride are reported. The analysis of this compound was performed by an Extrelut extraction followed by a gas chromatographic-mass spectrometric determination. Analytical parameters of linearity, reproducibility and specificity were satisfactory.     

The Three Faces of Defeasibility in the Law

Abstract. In this paper we will analyse the issue of defeasibility in the law, taking into account research carried out in philosophy, artificial intelligence and legal theory. We will adopt a very general idea of legal defeasibility, in which we will include all different ways in which certain legal conclusions may need to be abandoned, though no mistake was made in deriving them. We will argue that defeasibility in the law involves three different aspects, which we will call inference‐based defeasibility, process‐based defeasibility, and theory‐based defeasibility. Only the integration of these three perspectives allows us to provide a satisfactory account of the role of defeasibility in legal reasoning.     

The role of information asymmetry in the market for university–industry research collaboration

This study concerns the market for research collaboration between industry and universities. It presents an analysis of the population of all Italian university–industry collaborations that resulted in at least one international scientific publication between 2001 and 2003. Using spatial and bibliometric analysis relating to scientific output of university researchers, the study shows the importance of geographic proximity in companies’ choices of university partner. The analysis also reveals inefficiency in the market: in a large proportion of cases private companies could have chosen more qualified research partners in universities located closer to the place of business.     

The simple economics of class action: private provision of club and public goods

This article uses economic categories to show how the reorganisation of civil procedure in the case of class action is not merely aimed at providing a more efficient litigation technology, as hierarchies (and company law) might do for other productive activities, but that it also serves to create a well defined economic organization ultimately aimed at producing a set of goods, first and foremost among which are justice and efficiency. Class action has the potential to recreate, in the judicial domain, the same effects that individual interests and motivations, governed by the perfect competition paradigm, bring to the market. Moreover, through economic analysis it is possible to rediscover not only the productive function of this legal machinery, but also that partial compensation of victims and large profits for the class counsel, far from being a side-effect, are actually a necessary condition for reallocation of the costs and risks associated with the legal action.