Explaining “Pain and Suffering” Awards: The Role of Injury Characteristics and Fault Attributions

The present research explored factors thought to affect compensatory awards for non-economic ham (pain and suffering) in personal injury cases. Experiment 1 showed that the nature and severity of the plaintiffs injury had a strong effect on perceptions of the extent of harm suffered and on award amounts. The parties' relatively active or passive roles in causing the injury affected assessments of their degree of fault, but perceived fault had little influence on awards. Experiment 2 replicated with more varied cases the strong impact of injury severity on harm perception and on awards for pain and suffering. In both studies, the disability and the mental suffering associated with injuries were stronger predictors of awards than were pain and disfigurement.     

Corporate Environmentalism, Regulatory Reform, and Industry Self-Regulation: Toward Genuine Regulatory Reinvention in the United States

Increasingly, corporations are proactively managing environmental impacts in response to pressures from the consumer, business-to-business, financial, and government procurement markets. In many cases, these efforts have produced results well beyond what could be required under public regulations. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began a process of regulatory reinvention in the 1990s as a means of promoting such innovations, the results have been somewhat disappointing. This article examines the recent trends in corporate environmental management and regulatory reform. It concludes with a discussion of changes in regulatory design that could promote ongoing gains in corporate environmental performance through the creation of a hybrid system combining elements of public regulation, government-supervised corporate self-regulation, mandatory information disclosure, and green procurement.     

Political Institutions and Economic Performance: The Effects of Accountability and Obstacles to Policy Change

Numerous analyses have been conducted on how political institutions affect economic performance. In recent years the emphasis has been on a causal logic that emphasizes institutional obstacles to policy change, such as those presented by multiple veto points. This has especially been the case when it comes to the important question of how political institutions influence governments' responses to exogenous economic shocks. We make the case for a substantial broadening of focus and show that when it comes to a major type of exogenous shock, a forced exchange-rate devaluation, variations in the breadth of accountability of the chief executive are more robustly associated with the post-shock growth recovery than variations in obstacles to policy change. We first argue that the size of the winning coalition will be positively associated with growth recoveries following forced devaluations. We then use a newly developed measure of the size of the winning coalition to test our claim. Our statistical analysis is based on a study of the responses of 44 countries to forced exchange-rate devaluations in the late 1990s.     

Risk management for targeting customs controls in developing countries: a risky venture for revenue performance?

Customs authorities in developing countries are often reluctant to forget systematic inspections for fear of risking revenue loss. Such physical inspections however, impede rather than facilitate trade. Control selectivity is therefore a key issue in customs administration reform. This paper shows how a sophisticated risk management method can facilitate trade by automatically and rationally selecting transactions, with the end result of actually enhancing revenue performance. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.