Transnational absentee voting in the 2006 Mexican presidential election: The roots of participation

In many of the major migrant-sending countries of the developing world, governments have extended political rights to expatriates, often including the right to vote via absentee ballot. Little is known about the factors that shape transnational electoral participation, however. Using official records provided by the Mexican Federal Electoral Institute, we model the incidence of expatriate ballot solicitations prior to the 2006 presidential election in Mexico. Based on a series of event count regression analyses conducted at the level of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas, we find that transnational involvement in the election depended not only on socioeconomic factors but also on the concentration of Mexican civic associations within the local community, the presence of Spanish-language media, and distance from the Mexican border. This suggests that the roots of immigrant transnational participation include factors familiar to social scientists as well as dynamics uniquely relevant to immigrant communities.     

Toward a definitive antitrust standard for nonprofit hospital mergers

Despite decades of federal and state regulatory efforts to encourage more efficient utilization of hospital resources, recent federal antitrust enforcement actions assert that nonprofit hospital mergers are detrimental to consumers. This policy, however, is derived from misguided attempts to apply the economic assumptions of for-profit industries to the nonprofit hospital sector and to extend statutes enacted to restrain national economic concentration to local nonprofit enterprises. This paper concludes that a rational antitrust enforcement policy that recognizes the unique characteristics of hospital markets can be described within the confines of existing antitrust statutes.