Victim interdependence in the accident setting

This paper considers the case in which potential victims affect each other by taking care. Analyzing standard liability rules, we show that the rule of strict liability with a defense of contributory negligence is in the best position to induce the efficient outcome, i.e., this liability rule ensures efficiency if victims affect each other negatively, that is care by one victim increases the accident exposure of other victims. This rule also makes attainment likely if victims affect each other positively, that is if care by one victim decreases the accident exposure of other victims. In contrast, other standard liability rules fail to induce first-best care.     

Agriculture,the state and class formation in Turkey's First Republic (1923–60)

This article examines the extent to which social change in Turkey's First Republic (1923–60) conforms to, or deviates from, patterns of European development outlined by the sociologist Michael Mann. Of primary interest is the role that the state played in the changes which emerged from the industrialisation process. The particular focus here is on the political and economic responses by the different Turkish regimes to issues arising from labour organisation and class formation.     

The gender agenda: NGOs and capitalist relations in highland Cambodia

Cambodia’s mountainous northeastern province of Ratanakiri, which only twenty years ago was home to mainly indigenous minority groups largely focused on subsistence production, has undergone rapid ecological, social, and economic transformation. Deforestation and land alienation in the context of large-scale plantation agriculture, land speculation, and smallholder cash cropping have led to concerns that indigenous communities are being alienated from their land and not benefitting from economic changes. This has resulted in a significant number of NGO and government programs that attempt to protect and “empower” indigenous people, particularly women. This article examines a one-year research project which explored the relationship between indigenous women and land change in two indigenous villages. It discusses how indigenous women as well as Khmer and landless Cham immigrants have dealt with the commoditization of land and labor. It focuses on the differentiated way capitalist relations have pushed men, women, landless laborers, and increasingly wealthy landowners on increasingly divergent life trajectories. Compelled by donors to focus on gender and indigenous women as an object of governance, the NGO that directed this project struggled to keep up with the realities of capitalist relations on the ground.     

Fruit at the Hands of Labor

Steven Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Miriam J. Wells, Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.     

Tacit collusion and liability rules

This paper demonstrates that the likelihood of tacit collusion in a given oligopolistic industry may depend on the kind of liability rule applied to the industry. We study typical settings for the analysis of product liability and environmental liability. For the latter, it is established that tacit collusion is more likely under strict liability than under negligence. However, the two liability rules are equivalent with regard to their effects on tacit collusion in the model pertaining to product liability. This context-dependent impact on tacit collusion can be traced back to a difference in the shape of firms’ cost functions.