Threatening Sanctions When Engagement Would Be More Effective: Attaining Better Human Rights in China

Leaders use both coercion and engagement as leverage against other nations. Recent literature suggests economic sanctions are more effective than deployed sanctions to attain intended foreign policy goals. This paper examines a case of threatened coercion—the threat to remove China's most favored nation (MFN) status following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989—where engagement would have produced better human rights in China. We show that the American threats to sanction China were counterproductive, while cooperative statements and MFN renewal proved to have a more beneficial impact on Beijing's human rights policies. This paper suggests that economic sanction threats are not directly linked to China's human rights behaviors. Instead, China uses accommodations to manipulate diplomatic relations with the U.S. As a result, engagement with China would have been a more productive policy when dealing with human rights issues.     

Exploring the crime of identity theft: Prevalence, clearance rates, and victim/offender characteristics

Although the crime of identity theft has garnered a great deal of media attention, relatively little empirical research existed on the prevalence of the crime, its clearance rate by arrest, or the demographic characteristics of the victims and the identifiable offenders. The purpose of this article is to expand the knowledge of this growing crime. Using data from a large municipal police department located in Florida as a database, the findings suggested that the number of reported incidents of identity theft appeared to be growing at a greater rate than other theft-related offenses and the clearance rate for identity theft appeared to be declining. The typical apprehended offender was African American, female, unemployed, working alone, and was unknown to the victims, who tended to be White and male.