The effects of the IMF on expropriation of foreign firms

This paper seeks to explain the determinants of foreign expropriation in the developing world. We argue that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) helps to reduce the likelihood of nationalization because of the direct leverage the Fund holds over borrowers, especially as expropriation is a blatant violation of international property rights. Using expropriation data from 1961 to 2006, and several different measures for the Fund, we find that countries under IMF agreements are less likely to nationalize foreign firms. We also show that the Fund’s influence is greatest when the IMF loan represents a larger share of the borrower country’s gross domestic product (GDP) as well as in countries with weaker political institutions. The takeaway is that IMF continues to influence policy choices in the developing world.     

Beyond Taphonomy: Exploring Craniometric Variation Among Anatomical Material

Anatomical crania are occasionally encountered in forensic anthropology laboratories when that material is mistaken for forensically significant human remains. Using craniometric analyses and statistical measures of sample homogeneity, we determine whether anatomical material can be described as a single, homogenous group or as a diverse mix of populations. Twenty‐one interlandmark distances were collected from 85 anatomical preparations. Distance measures were calculated between all pairs using a pooled within‐sample variance/covariance matrix and then subjected to a Defrise‐Gussenhoven test between each paired distance to test whether each pair was drawn randomly from the same population. In the Defrise‐Gussenhoven analysis, twenty‐two percent (n = 66) of the 300 pairwise combinations were significant at the 0.05 level or below. The level of homogeneity suggests a majority of that material originated from the subcontinent of India or West Asia. Therefore, anatomical material can be viewed as a moderately homogenous group, but with a shared taphonomic history.     

Legitimacy Chains: Legitimation of Compliance with International Courts Across Social Fields

Political and legal globalization brings into question how to best conceptualize legitimacy and authority in the context of a plurality of potential audiences with distinct standards for evaluating legitimacy. This article proposes legitimacy chains, or the articulation of justifications linked through competitive processes of social evaluation across distinct social fields, as a concept for theorizing supranational authority. The concept is developed through an analysis of World Trade Organization (WTO) disputes over zeroing, a method for calculating import dumping. The article focuses on how the legitimacy work of various interlocutors enabled compliance despite contested legal validity claims, ultimately enhancing the authority of the WTO as final arbiter of legitimate trade practices.     

Training in the Strategic Use of Evidence technique: Improving deception detection accuracy of American law enforcement officers

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) approach is a framework for planning and executing suspect interviews with the aim of facilitating judgments of truth and deception. US law enforcement officers (N = 59) either received training in the SUE approach or did not. Each officer interviewed a mock suspect (N = 59) who had either committed a simulated security breach or had completed a benign task. The officers who received SUE training interviewed in line with the training: They questioned the suspect systematically, withheld the evidence and critical case information until after questioning, and relied on statement-evidence inconsistency to detect deceit. Consequently, SUE-trained interviewers achieved a higher deception detection accuracy rate (65%) compared to untrained interviewers (43%).     

Perceived accountability and public attitudes toward local police

Recent national events have brought the issue of police-community relations into the public eye. Even though a large body of academic research exists on the predictors of public attitude toward police, very little is known about how public perceptions of police accountability influence satisfaction with the police. This study seeks to fill that gap by using ordered logistic regression and multi-year community-level survey data from one Western city (n = 3725) to examine the relationship between satisfaction with police accountability and overall attitudes toward the police. The results indicate that respondent satisfaction with police accountability was a strong, consistent predictor of satisfaction with local police, even after controlling for other important variables, such as race/ethnicity and community context. The findings suggest that public perceptions relating to the control of police officer conduct should be considered when assessing the predictors of attitudes toward the police.     

Budgeting for Social Security Or: When Are Savings Really Savings?

Policy and budgetary debate about Social Security is greatly affected by understandings of how the program is financed and, therefore, what steps would make it more affordable in the future. Unfortunately, both the standard justifications for and criticisms of buildups in the Social Security trust funds do not reflect the extent to which such buildups in fact would help finance future program costs. This article argues for a different standard, based explicitly on the fiscal capacity of the federal government and the effect of the government's obligations to pay interest on that capacity. I explain how both this definition of the role of the trust funds, and a broader understanding of fiscal capacity, would affect analysis of Social Security's condition and of possible reforms.     

Buying in a Businesslike Fashion— And Paying More?

The government, particularly the Department of Defense (DoD), is undergoing yet another wave of acquisition reforms, which are intended to bring commercial buying practices to DoD's purchasing operations. This research shows that, prior to these reforms, the DoD's buying practices were superior to commercial practices in terms of prices paid for a large number of electronic and engine parts. The research compares DoD and purchasing of more than 676,000 identical items costing more than $60 million with commercial purchasing of the identical items. It finds that the DoD's purchasing superiority holds even when purchasing costs are considered. The DoD achieved these results because it was already using commercial practices commonly followed by large firms: aggregating purchases, using cost data, and negotiating aggressively in markets with few suppliers. Some of the recent reforms will undermine the DoD's ability to exploit these common commercial practices and will raise the government's costs.     

Differential taxation of nonprofits and the commercialization of nonprofit revenues

The effects of the favorable tax treatment of nonprofit commercial activities are best understood in a framework that explicitly accounts for a number of interactions. These involve differential taxation of nonprofits and for-profits and of nonprofits’ “related” and “unrelated” activities; the preferences of nonprofit executives who may be averse to commercial activity; donors whose giving may be sensitive to nonprofit organization commercial activity; and cost-complementarities between nonprofit core mission-related activities and their secondary money-raising efforts. Differential taxation encourages nonprofits to pursue otherwise avoided commercial ventures by providing excess financial returns that nonprofits can exploit because of their tax-exempt status. Data from the 1992 Statistics of Income (SOI) public use file of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form-990 returns indicate that the propensity of nonprofit organizations to undertake both tax-exempt and taxable activities depends on their primary mission-related output and size, the relative importance of government versus private contributions, and the size of the excess return created by differential taxation of nonprofit and for-profit business. Additional analyses of SOI data also show that organizations that engage in taxable commercial activities are likely to allocate joint costs in ways that reduce, and in most cases eliminate, their taxable income.