Politics,Economic Crises and Corporate Governance Reforms: Regulatory Capture in Malaysia

Following the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the regulatory system involving governance of the corporate sector was subjected to major legislative and institutional reforms, primarily in response to exposures of serious cases of corruption and abuse in the financial sector by well-connected businesspeople. However, the 2008 global financial crisis indicated continued occurrence of irresponsible forms of corporate development and practices, underscoring structural weaknesses within the regulatory system in spite of these reforms. This article argues that the reforms that had been introduced ignored how state-business nexuses shape the way firms operate, a core reason for the persistence of unproductive and speculative forms of corporate development, grand corruption and cronyism. Utilising Malaysia as a case study, this article indicates that institutional reforms involving devolution of power to regulatory institutions are imperative to provide them with the autonomy to objectively institute prudential controls and indict errant firms that violate legislation overseeing corporate activities.     

The Mandatory Bid Rule: Efficient,After All?

The mandatory bid rule has its origins in the UK and now applies throughout the EU and in many other jurisdictions. Under a mandatory bid, an acquirer of a controlling stake in a listed company has to offer to the remaining shareholders a buy‐out of their minority stakes at a price equal to the consideration received by the incumbent controller. While the rule warrants that no value‐destroying control transfers take place, it is often criticised for preventing value‐increasing transactions. This paper challenges some of the claims made by critics of mandatory bids. Highlighting the effects of synergy gains in private sale‐of‐control transactions, it is shown that mandatory bids prevent inefficient control transfers, where minority shareholder protection rules provide inadequate protection. Furthermore, mandatory bids help facilitate transfers to the most efficient bidders in multi‐bidder settings. The mandatory bid is justifiable, on economic grounds, in wider circumstances than is commonly assumed by law and economics scholars.     

Testing a promising homicide reduction strategy: re-assessing the impact of the Indianapolis “pulling levers” intervention

Since the publication of analyses suggesting the significant impact on youth homicide of the Boston “pulling levers” intervention, a series of studies of similar strategies have indicated promise in reducing homicide and gun assaults. One of these studies was an assessment of a pulling levers strategy in Indianapolis, where trend analyses indicated a significant reduction in homicide following the intervention, while six other similar Midwestern cities did not experience a significant decline in homicide. We re-assess the results of the Indianapolis study by disaggregating the offenses into gang- and non-gang homicides. Given that the pulling levers program focused on influencing gangs and networks of chronic offenders, the impact of the intervention should be more apparent for gang homicides than for non-gang homicides. Alternatively, should the impact be similar for non-gang homicides, then it is more likely that the downward trend would be caused by unmeasured external forces. Coefficient-difference tests relying on estimates obtained from autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time–series models indicate that gang homicides declined significantly more than did non-gang homicides following the Indianapolis intervention. These findings suggest ‘something happened’ to gang homicides that did not happen to non-gang homicides, which adds further support that the pulling levers initiative was the driving force behind the overall reduction in homicide in Indianapolis.

DNA profile evidence in complex disputed paternity cases: The analysis of 300 real cases

In disputed paternity cases where the putative father is unavailable DNA from one or more of his relatives could be used. However, interpreting results is often difficult, because of the partial information regarding the parental genotype obtained from his relatives. We analyzed results obtained in 300 real paternity cases performed through close relatives of the real father (sib, half-sibs, one grandparent and/or uncle). DNA was typed with PowerPlex (Promega) and the LR estimated with the Software BDGen. As expected the higher LR values were achieved with sibs and half-sibs (in such cases where his/her mother was available for testing). The LR values were tight related to the number of uninformative loci, which varied between 0 and 13. In 10% of the reviewed cases, 10 or more non-informative loci were observed; all of them associated LR values below 0.01. Thus, providing evidence in favor of no relatedness.     

Government Companies as Regulators

In 2016 the government established a new sectoral regulator, with power to grant and withdraw licences, set performance standards, and impose sanctions, not as a statutory authority but in the form of a company wholly owned by the Secretary of State: the Oil and Gas Authority.  This article critically examines this and other uses in the UK of government‐owned or ‐ controlled companies to discharge public regulatory functions, against the background of current government practice regarding arm's length public bodies in general and government companies in particular. It assesses the acceptability of the company form by reference to criteria of democratic control, independence and accountability of regulatory institutions.     

Survival of Atherosclerotic Calcifications in Skeletonized Material: Forensic and Pathological Implications

Atherosclerosis is a chronic inflammatory disease creating calcifying plaques in the arterial walls. Because its paleopathological diagnosis remains little studied on skeletal remains, its impact on forensic and archeological data is completely underestimated. Here, 24 skeletal remains from the Milano Cemetery Skeletal Collection have been studied to evaluate the chance of atherosclerotic calcification survival, retrieval, and identification. Through direct comparison with a known autopsy collection and literature, the identification and categorization of several types of calcifications were performed. Clothing elements such as tights or socks played a definitive role in the preservation of the calcifications; hence they are more likely to be found in forensic cases than in archeological ones. Therefore, vascular calcifications are possible to collect and identify in skeletal remains if sufficient care is given to their recovery. Consequently and as markers of the disease, such identification can provide valuable pathological information for forensic and archeological cases.     

Can the AML system be evaluated without better data?

The Anti-Money Laundering regime has been important in harmonizing laws and institutions, and has received global political support. Yet there has been minimal effort at evaluation of how well any AML intervention does in achieving its goals. There are no credible estimates either of the total amount laundered (globally or nationally) nor of most of the specific serious harms that AML aims to avert. Consequently, reduction of these is not a plausible outcome measure. There have been few efforts by country evaluators in the FATF Mutual Evaluation Reports (MERs) to acquire qualitative data or seriously analyze either quantitative or qualitative data. We find that data are relatively unimportant in policy development and implementation. Moreover, the long gaps of about 8 years between evaluations mean that widely used ‘country risk’ models for AML are forced still to rely largely on the 3rd Round evaluations whose use of data was minimal and inconsistent. While the 4th round MERs (2014–2022) have made an effort to be more systematic in the collection and analysis of data, FATF has still not established procedures that provide sufficiently informative evaluations. Our analysis of five recent National Risk Assessments (a major component of the new evaluations) in major countries shows little use of data, though the UK is notably better than the others. In the absence of more consistent and systematic data analysis, claims that countries have less or more effective systems will be open to allegations of ad hoc, impressionistic or politicized judgments. This reduces their perceived legitimacy, though this does not mean that the AML efforts and the evaluation processes themselves have no effects.     

Does Treatment Quality Matter?

Research Summary

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice has implemented a process to evaluate the treatment quality of interventions provided statewide in all long‐term residential programs. In the current study, we examine the predictive validity of this treatment quality component in the prediction of recidivism of youth (N = 2,397) who completed juvenile justice residential programs from July 1, 2013 to June 30, 2014. We use hierarchical linear modeling to assess the effects of treatment quality (as youth are nested within programs), controlling for demographic and criminal history factors. The results indicate that higher average treatment quality scores of interventions received within a residential program decreased the likelihood of subsequent arrest, conviction, and reincarceration, whereas the highest treatment quality score of any specific intervention provided within the program decreased the odds of reincarceration only.

Policy Implications

In this study, we confirm the importance of fidelity and implementation quality in the provision of crime prevention treatment interventions to serious, deep‐end juvenile offenders. Additionally, our results shed light on the ability of a juvenile justice agency to measure treatment quality in a substantively meaningful way with the use of limited additional resources. The services provided to keep communities safe, prevent future offending, and rehabilitate juvenile offenders must be held accountable for producing such outcomes, and one method of measuring such compliance is to evaluate the quality of the interventions with respect to staff training, fidelity adherence, evaluation, and corrective action processes.     

The measurement of family process variables: The effect of adolescent and parent perceptions of family life on delinquent behavior

Both adolescent and parental perceptions of how family members interact with and feel about one another are examined to determine their relationship to official and self-reported delinquent behavior. Consistent with prior research, adolescent perceptions of family processes were weakly related to those of their parents. Both parental and adolescent family process measures made independent and significant contributions to the explanation of self-reported and official delinquent behavior. Parental measures contributed more to the explanation of official data than did adolescent measures when compared to the results for self-reported delinquency. Methodological and substantive reasons for these findings are discussed. The importance of taking into account parental perceptions of family interaction, as well as the perceptions of adolescents, is emphasized.