Freedom of Expression and National Security

Society - The threat from terror and religious extremism has seen liberal democracies adopt a raft of measures are intended to restrict freedom of expression. Yet very little focus has been spent...     

THE EFFECT OF RECENT TAX CHANGES ON TAXABLE INCOME: CORRECTION AND UPDATE

This article is a Commentary on Bradley T. Heim ( 2009 ), The effect of recent tax changes on taxable income: Evidence from a new panel of tax returns,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 28, 147–163. doi: 10.1002/pam.20406 . This note provides corrected estimates of the elasticity of taxable income to the net of tax share using a panel of tax returns that follows a random sample of taxpayers from 1999 to 2005, spanning the EGTRRA 2001 and JGTRRA 2003 tax changes. Two errors were corrected: the specification of income splines, and the subtraction of capital gains income from the dependent variable. Though the original results are largely robust to the first change, they are not robust to the second. The corrected estimates suggest that the elasticity of taxable income to the current year's net of tax share is small and statistically insignificantly different from zero.     

Social impact assessment of regional plans: a review of methods and issues and a recommended process

Social impact assessment (SIA) is defined and related to other policy analysis techniques. Conceptual problems in conducting SIA are reviewed. Various SIA methods are identified and evaluated for their probable effectiveness in assessing regional plans. Regional planning conditions are identified and constraints to, and demands on, SIA are examined. A strategy for SIA is proposed which uses public inputs during cyclical planning iterations for efficiently identifying and assessing the most important social impacts.This article is primarily based on earlier work funded by the Kellogg Grant to the University of California at Davis (Kellogg-SRAPC Project). An earlier version of this paper was published by the Sacramento Regional Area Planning Commission (Sacramento, CA) in 1977.     

Police attitudes in assigning responsibility for wife abuse

Prevailing myths concerning wife abuse generally tend to blame the victim. The present study examines the degree of responsibility assigned by police officers to the wife, the husband, as well as the couple's socioeconomic situation in cases of wife abuse. The officer's position (neutral vs supportive) adopted toward the woman is also investigated. The influence of eight characteristics related either to the spouses or to the situation of violence on both the officer's position and the attribution of responsibility is analyzed. The characteristics are: couple's socioeconomic status, type of household, drinking by husband, alleged antagonism on the part of the wife, ambivalence of wife to press charges, type of abuse, history of assault, and violence toward children. The results are based on answers to case vignettes provided by 235 municipal police officers. The data were analyzed by performing a multivariate analysis of variance. Results indicate the type of abuse to be the characteristic with the greatest impact on police attitudes. While the husband is systematically considered more responsible than the wife, police officers always consider the wife somewhat responsible, particularly when there is alleged antagonism by the woman and when threats of violence are present.     

Effect of the broadcast of a television documentary about a teenager's suicide in Israel on suicidal behavior and methods

Portrayals of suicide in the media are controversial because they may impact on suicide rates and methods. The aim of this study was to analyze the effect of the broadcast of a television documentary wherein an adolescent girl is interviewed about her suicide plan and subsequently dies by suicide. National suicide rates during the 8 weeks prior to the program and the 4 weeks following it were compared to the same periods in the previous year. There was no significant difference in the rates of completed and attempted suicides before and after the program. There was a shift toward the method used in the film after the broadcast, but it was found to be nonspecific to that year. A significant decrease was noted in the mean age of suicide attempters in the last promotional week prior to the broadcast compared to the previous year (p = .032). These preliminary findings suggest that the repeated televised promotion of a documentary on suicide may raise the risk of suicide in vulnerable populations. Further investigations in bigger populations are needed.     

Commentary: In Response to the Paper by Konrad von Moltke and Howard Mann,Misappropriation of Institutions: Some Lessons from the Environmental Dimension of the NAFTA Investor-State Dispute Settlement Process (see pp. 103–119)

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics -