Monopoly Money: Foreign Investment and Bribery in Vietnam,a Survey Experiment

Prevailing work argues that foreign investment reduces corruption, either by competing down monopoly rents or diffusing best practices of corporate governance. We argue that the mechanisms generating this relationship are not clear because the extant empirical work is too heavily drawn from aggregations of total foreign investment entering an economy. Alternatively, we suggest that openness to foreign investment has differential effects on corruption even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. We argue that foreign firms use bribes to enter protected industries in search of rents, and therefore we expect variation in bribe propensity across sectors according to expected profitability. We test this effect using a list experiment embedded in three waves of a nationally representative survey of 20,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam, finding that the effect of economic openness on the probability to engage in bribes is conditional on policies that restrict investment.     

A Clinical-Corrections Approach: The Failure of a Residential Juvenile Delinquency Treatment Center

Abstract With the incidence of violent juvenile crime and the increasingly limited funds for residential treatment of the adolescent offender, one court jurisdiction (16th Judicial Circuit, Kane County, Illinois) attempted to develop and administer its own residential treatment facility within the walls of its detention facility. This article documents the problems encountered in this endeavor and provides recommendations for other jurisdictions which might be tempted to try to balance the fiscal and rehabilitative demands of this growing population by administering their own residential treatment facilities. The problems addressed in this article pertain to the following areas of difficulty: developing a therapeutic milieu; attracting, training, and evaluating a competent child care staff; and implementing a consistent philosophy of change designed to drive all decision-making within the center.     

The Rise and Fall of Capital: Corporate Malaysia in Historical Perspective

This article argues that better informed insights into the benefits and repercussions of the form of development of East Asian economies could be obtained when the theoretical perspectives from two different bodies of literature are employed collectively. If the concepts from the discipline of political economy – specifically the body of literature dealing with the developmental state now commonly deployed in analyses of East Asian economies – are used in combination with concepts from the literature on business history based on the work of Alfred Chandler, the reasons for the rise and fall of major enterprises in East Asia can be better understood. A case study of enterprise and economic development in Malaysia is presented to substantiate this argument.     

OBSTACLES TO SEEMINGLY SIMPLE REFORM: A CASE STUDY OF BAIL REFORM

This study involves analysis of the implementation of a new release on recognizance (ROR) policy governing misdemeanor cases in a small, mid- western county. The case study is interesting because the policy seems to be characterized by several factors that might lead to predictions of high compliance with policy intent. The findings, however, suggest that consid- erable slippage between intent and implementation occurred. It is argued that this slippage is the product of communication problems, the disposition of street-level implementors, and the failure to include implementors in decision making. These obstacles are then compounded by the lack of performance monitoring. The problems are viewed as interrelated and revolve around the top-down implementation strategy that failed to involve those responsible for implementation – the street-level implementors.     

Application Districts: An Emerging Spatial Form in the Computer Software Industry

This paper presents a stylized theory of the geography of the computer software industry. It is timely because countries around the world, and at different stages of development, have targeted that industry for attention because of its growth and stability, and the quality of the jobs it provides. I demonstrate that the software industry is decentralizing away from the centers that were first established in the 1970s, but there is no process of de-concentration underway. Old clusters are losing their share of national employment, but they are being replaced by new clusters, and not by a generalized dispersal of the industry. I explain this pattern in terms of a spatial division of labor emerging in the software industry. This division is not based on a low-skill/high-skill labor dichotomy, as in high tech manufacturing, but on a distinction within high-skilled labor between those working on general-purpose technology and those developing applications for specific uses. I call the new clusters where specialized applications are developed application districts.