Regulation on coexisting legal and illegal markets with quality differentiation

European Journal of Law and Economics - This paper considers coexisting legal and illegal markets for goods with undesirable consumption externalities, such as marijuana markets. This paper...     

Making the Financial Sector Work for the Poor

This case study exploits matched firm–employee Tunisian data in order to underline the role played by within-firm human capital in worker remuneration. The estimated returns to human capital in wage equations remain unchanged when the dummies representing firm heterogeneity are replaced in the list of regressors with three firm variables: a textile industry dummy, within-firm mean education, and firm age. We find that part of what is usually considered as return to education may be due to within-firm externalities.     

Network Characteristics and Organizational Structure of Chinese Drug Trafficking Groups

Unlike previous studies of drug trafficking groups that focused on the characteristics of individual members, this study examined the demographic and socioeconomic composition of drug trafficking groups and the types of relationships binding criminal networks. Through an analysis of 144 drug trafficking groups adjudicated in the intermediate and high courts in several provinces of China, this study found a high level of homogeneity in demographic characteristics and socioeconomic status among the offenders who formed the Chinese drug trafficking networks. Results also showed that most Chinese drug trafficking groups were small and lacked a vertical role structure. The concentration of men was associated with a higher likelihood of having a hierarchical role structure in the trafficking group.     

The Techno-Economic: Perspectives for Analysis and Intervention

This paper compares the macro- and micro- analyses of techno-economic change. Arguing for perspectives which are sensitive to the local flexibility of innovation but which can also provide suggestions for policy and intervention, it describes and reviews the two major contributions: work on Techno-Economic Networks, and on Techno-Economic Paradigms. It is argued that the former has greater depth of analytical sensitivity, whilst the latter is more policy-relevant. Whilst there are approaches, such as Constructive Technology Assessment, which attempt to combine the two perspectives, these are seen as failing to retain sensitivity to the power differentials between key actors such as firms, experts, governing agencies or citizens' groups. The paper concludes by advocating attention to the ‘meso-level techno-economic’—the networks of institutions and actors at work in: geographically bounded systems of innovation; scientific and technological disciplines; firms, their strategies and linkages; and the nexus between production and consumption.     

Family formation and everyday travel in Britain since c.1850

This paper focuses on the extent to which everyday travel behaviour in Britain changes in relation to family responsibilities, and examines how this has altered over the past century and a half. It is argued that prior to the mid-twentieth century changes in the family such as increased child-care responsibilities barely influenced the modes of transport used for everyday travel, but that increasingly in the later twentieth century people adjusted their travel behaviour during the family formation phases of the life cycle. In particular, parents of young children have become more car-dependent and less likely to walk or cycle. Data are drawn from two separate projects, one that collected travel life histories from the past half-century as context for research on cycling in later life, and one that uses personal diaries to reveal everyday mobility strategies of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is argued that the observed changes are due not only to increased access to a wide range of different transport forms, especially the motor car, but also to changes in societal perceptions of risk and norms of travel behaviour. In conclusion, it is suggested that more awareness of past travel behaviours could aid the development and implementation of more sustainable transport policies in the UK.     

Three ecologies, transversality and victimization: the case of the British Petroleum oil spill

A number of critiques of the burgeoning field of green criminology have recently been articulated in the literature. The aim of this article is to begin to demonstrate what green criminological work responsive to these critiques might look like. The two primary critiques we are concerned with here are (1) that there has been little intellectual sharing between the fields of green criminology and victimology, and (2) that green criminological work has failed to be reflexive about the modernist assumptions it has largely adhered to. In response to these critiques, we draw on the theorizing of poststructuralist Felix Guattari to analyze the various interrelated layers of victimization in the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill case in the Gulf of Mexico.