The Spirit of Making Do

Ireally wanted to go home for Christmas in December. Even though I’ve lived abroad before, I’ve always managed to make it back to the United States in time for the holidays. This year, when my parents generously booked me a ticket just in time for New Year’s, I was grateful to be able to go back to the States at all.     

Can we insure against political uncertainty? Evidence from the U.S. stock market

I show that shares currently traded on U.S. stock markets can be used to hedge political uncertainty. Focusing on the 2000 U.S. presidential election, I construct two “presidential portfolios” composed of selected stocks anticipated to fare differently under a Bush versus a Gore presidency. To construct these portfolios I use data on campaign contributions by publicly traded corporations and identify the major contributors on each side. Using daily observations for the six months before the election took place, I show that the excess returns of these portfolios with respect to overall market movements are significantly related to changes in electoral polls.     

Exploring white-collar crime and the American dream: A partial test of institutional anomie theory

Institutional anomie theory (IAT) suggests that high crime rates in America can be attributed to the commitment to the goal of material success. In this regard, particular emphasis is placed on the motivations derived from the profit goal of economic institutions that dominate the American culture. To date, IAT was only applied to property and violent crime. This study used Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and Census Bureau data to examine the applicability of IAT to a form of white-collar crime, embezzlement, as defined by the UCR. Results provided mixed support for IAT. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.     

Cultural Diversity and Education: the Dilemma of Political Stability

In their recent work both John Rawls and Joseph Raz have shown a keen awareness of the need to address the challenges associated with the cultural diversity so characteristic of many liberal democracies. However, a number of the issues raised by non-liberal minorities in Britain in relation to educational policy suggest that these prominent liberal responses ultimately fail to address the complexities of the problems posed by cultural pluralism. Nonetheless, these two approaches identify important considerations which will have to be taken into account by any adequate response to cultural diversity. Viewed together, Rawls' emphasis on political stability and Raz's recognition of the pervasiveness of cultural membership imply that a genuine accommodation of cultural membership can only be achieved within the context of a dynamic political community.     

Real Property, Spontaneous Order, and Norms in the Gold Mines

This article contributes to the current debate about why people follow the law even when they are not subject to legal sanctions, as when there are no police and little danger of a lawsuit. Most recent scholarship in this area takes the form of norms theories, suggesting that social norms rather than laws shape behavior and that deviations from the norm are punished by either social or internal sanctions. Robert Sugden, however, proposes that order may develop "spontaneously" in the many areas of life where abiding by the rules minimizes the risk of costly confrontations with others and is thus in the interest of all parties. When this is true, the threat of little or no sanctions plays no role in regulating behavior. This article tests Sugden's theory against a simple property system, that of the California gold mines, in which individual miners held small claims subject to strict work requirements. The evidence of eyewitnesses shows that the stability of the regime did not depend on norms, but on the reasonable prediction that other claim holders would themselves stand up for their rights under the local mining code. Disputes about the rules and their application were submitted to arbitrators, whose decisions were accepted by the parties and did not need to be enforced. The California experience thus provides an example of a stable property regime for which game theory has a more satisfying explanation than do any of the norms theories.     

Spectacles of military urbanism in online representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro: a multimodal approach

This paper presents a multimodal analysis of online self-representations of the Elite Squad of the military police of Rio de Janeiro, the Special Police Operations Battalion BOPE. The analysis is placed within the wider context of a “new military urbanism”, which is evidenced in the ongoing “Pacification” of many of the city's favelas, in which BOPE plays an active interventionist as well as a symbolic role, and is a kind of solution which clearly fails to address the root causes of violence which lie in poverty and social inequality. The paper first provides a sociocultural account of BOPE's role in Rio's public security and then looks at some of the mainly visual mediated discourses the Squad employs in constructing a public image of itself as a modern and efficient, yet at the same time “magical” police force.     

Dissecting Thoracic Aortic Hematoma Masquerading as Blunt Force Injury of the Neck

Discoloration of the skin of the anterior and lateral neck may raise suspicion for blunt force injury, particularly cervical compression, in an unwitnessed death. We present a case of an elderly woman with an unwitnessed death at home which highlights an external examination finding of blue/purple discoloration of the skin of the neck and links this finding with those from internal examination at autopsy. Pertinent negatives include absence of conjunctival and mucosal petechiae, absence of cutaneous abrasions of the neck, and absence of contusions of the anterior neck musculature. This case illustrates a natural disease entity, spontaneous dissection of a thoracic aortic hematoma, masquerading as blunt force injury externally and highlights the importance of having an appropriate index of suspicion when triaging jurisdictional cases for postmortem examination to accurately determine cause and manner of death.     

Mal dato, ma ben ricevuto

Mal dato, ma ben ricevuto is a rather untranslatable Italianexpression which refers to acts that are based on wrong assumptionsbut whose final results (might) make everybody better off. MsSueffert's article is a good example. In her article, Ms Sueffertsuggests that the USPTO might reduce patent examiners' workloads—andthe resulting tendency towards granting patents that shouldnot be granted in the first place—by using ‘softscientists’ (psychologists, economists, political scientists,     

All for one and one in all: private military security companies as soldiers,business managers and humanitarians

With governments increasingly contracting private military and security companies (PMSCs) to perform military and police-related tasks, international relations scholars have made attempts to better understand PMSCs and to investigate the reasons for the boom of private security. Rather than focusing on the services these companies offer, which has been a common approach, we offer an identity-based explanation for their surge. We show that PMSCs eclectically assume identities related to the military, business managers and humanitarians, independent of the services they perform, their market segment or their location on the battlefield. This finding points to an important yet little-noted dimension in the private security industry. Although companies are heterogeneous, they also appear increasingly homogeneous because they incorporate a similar set of identities. On the one hand, this enables PMSCs to adapt to any context, client or employee, and, on the other hand, it has constitutive qualities, contributing to an important source of power for the respective companies. These multiple identities contribute to a norm of what a superior security provider should look like.