Legal enclaves as a test environment for innovative products: Toward legally resilient experimentation policies1

Many countries adhere to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development creed that innovation is good for the economy. Experiments are often used to intentionally create space for innovation. Decisions allowing experiments result in temporary legal enclaves for a few, excluding many others. Therefore, they come with risks. The aim of this article is to provide a set of guidelines that help improve the legal resilience of experimentation policies, so they are better able to withstand legal attacks when they occur. To do so, we first arranged the existing diversity of legal experiments in a theoretical model. Special attention was paid to two archetypes of legal experiments: statutory experiments and regulatory sandboxes. Second, we analyzed the impact of both types of experiments on four core legal principles: legality, certainty, equality, and public accountability. From this assessment, we eventually formulated a set of guidelines to secure or improve legal resilience.     

Disaggregating public-private governance interactions: European Union interventions in transnational private sustainability governance

Transnational private sustainability governance, such as eco-certification, does not operate in a regulatory or jurisdictional vacuum. A public authority may intervene in private governance for various reasons, including to improve private governance's efficient functioning or to assert public regulatory primacy. This article argues that to properly understand the nature of public-private governance interactions—whether more competitive or complementary—we need to disaggregate a public authority's intervention. The article distinguishes between four features of private governance in which a public authority can intervene: standard setting, procedural aspects, supply chain signaling, and compliance incentives. Using the cases of the European Union's policies on organic agriculture and biofuels production, the article shows that public-private governance interaction dynamics vary across these private governance features as well as over time. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the importance of active lobbying by private governance actors in influencing these dynamics and the resulting policy outputs.     

Political Conflict over Time

We study a model of electoral competition in which politicians must decide whether to initiate the provision of some public good and, afterward, how much of the public good to supply. The model illuminates how a project's implementation affects elections and, conversely, how electoral considerations influence decisions about implementation. Under well-defined conditions, politicians will either implement projects that they do not like or delay projects that, absent electoral concerns, they would support. The model further reveals how the perceived benefits of holding office can impede the production of public goods about which there is broad consensus. And depending on facts about the program's structure and the electoral landscape, a policy's implementation can either mitigate or exacerbate political conflict.     

Vladimir the great,Grand Prince of Muscovy: Resurrecting the Russian service state

This article draws on the ideas of continuity theory in order to examine Russia's attempted transition and locate it in the longer duration of Russian history. The argument here begins by outlining the main features of the institutional matrix that evolved in old Muscovy, and proceeds to show how those early choices became path dependent. It presents the imperial ‘age of reform' as a project that introduced far reaching formal changes, but failed to achieve a transformation of supporting norms, and it views the Soviet order as a reversal of those formal changes, resulting in a full return to the Muscovite matrix. The Yel'tsin era is held up as yet another ‘time of troubles', to be followed, under Vladimir Putin, by a resurrection of the traditional Russian ‘service state'.     

On the Design of Efficient Priority Rules for Secured Creditors: Empirical Evidence from A Change in Law

This article assesses the effect of a reduction in secured creditor priority on distributions and administrative costs in liquidating bankruptcy cases by reporting the first empirical study of the effect of a priority change. Priority reform had redistributive effects in liquidating bankruptcy. As expected, average payments to general unsecured creditors were significantly higher after the reform than before the reform and payments to secured creditors decreased. Reform did not increase the size of the pie to be distributed in bankruptcy. Nor did it increase the direct costs of bankruptcy.JEL Classification: K00, K20, G33     

Secured debt and the likelihood of reorganization

Theory suggests that secured creditors may increasingly oppose a debtor’s reorganization as the value of their collateral approaches the amount of their claims. If reorganization occurs and the value of the firm appreciates, the secured creditor receives only part of the gain. But if the firm’s value depreciates, the secured creditor bears all of the cost. Secured claimants, thus, often have more to lose than to gain in reorganizations. This study of Finnish reorganizations filed in districts that account for most of the country’s reorganizations finds that creditor groups most likely to be well-secured are most likely to oppose reorganization. We also find a negative correlation between how well-secured banks and other institutional lenders are and the likelihood of a confirmed reorganization plan. Limiting the priority of secured debt might stimulate reorganizations.     

Corporate Incubators: Industrial R&D and What Universities can Learn from them

The explosive growth of incubation has seen a concurrent and significant increase in research on and knowledge of the incubation phenomenon. However, instead of comprehensively differentiating between non-profit and for-profit incubators, research has described a whole array of partly overlapping archetypes, thus missing out on important aspects. This article first offers two arguments validating a framework of what non-profit university incubators can learn from for-profit corporate incubators before presenting the framework itself. While corporate incubators are for-profit organizations with which to enhance a corporation’s technology development, university incubators try to leverage technological insights from the university in a similar manner. In accordance with their respective missions, organizational structures, incubator processes and resource flows, it is possible to transfer lessons learned from two corporate incubator archetypes—the fast-profit incubator and leveraging incubator—to the world of university incubator. Our empirical findings are based on in-depth case studies of 25 companies through 52 semi-structured interviews with managers of corporate incubators of large technology-intensive corporations in Europe and the U.S., two EU incubator benchmarking surveys and five interviews with the heads of technology transfer offices of two top technology universities.     

A comparison of mothers of adolescent incest vs. non-incest perpetrators

One hundred and thirty mothers of adolescent sexual perpetrators were interviewed. Mothers of incest perpetrators (n = 48) were compared to mothers of non-incest perpetrators (n = 82). Results indicated that significantly more mothers of incest perpetrators reported having been physically and sexually abused, having a sexual dysfunction, and having been in prior psychotherapy. With regard to their sons, a higher percentage of mothers of incest perpetrators reported that they believed their son had committed the sexual offense, was in need of treatment, and had a history of being physically abused. Additionally, a significantly lower percentage of incest perpetrators had involvement with the juvenile justice system.     

The illusion of fiscal illusion: Unsticking the flypaper effect

Recognizing that it is difficult to prove a negative, this paper marshals evidence in support of the hypothesis that the widely documented flypaper effect of federal grants to state and local governments is purely a statistical artifact. A review of previous studies and a monte carlo investigation suggest that the use of an inappropriate functional form may generate an illusory flypaper effect. A local expenditure equation is then estimated in alternative specifications with ten years of state level data. Empirical results confirm the sensitivity of the flypaper effect to specification, and tests of fit unambiguously favor one functional form. That specification yields no statistical evidence of a flypaper effect.