Quantitative cross-national studies of economic development: A comparison of the economics and sociology literatures

For more than two decades, economists and sociologists have pursued parallel cross-national quantitative investigations of the determinants of economic development. These investigations have proceeded in mutual ignorance despite the often large overlap in statistical methods and data employed. Apparently contradictory findings have resulted, especially regarding the impacts of international trade and foreign direct investment. We find that there are two factors that account for these inconsistent results. One key factor is the use of different variables to measure international trade and investment, the choice of which is in turn driven by underlying differences in theoretical motivations. A second important difference involves sociologists’ greater preoccupation with more complex multivariate models versus economists’ greater willingness to focus on individual variables in multivariate regressions while viewing others as “controls.” A major finding of our survey is that when thesame variables are used, the results of economists and sociologists tend to be consistent, rather than contradictory (as might have occurred, for example, because of the use of different samples of countries or time periods, or the use of other variables included in the regression equations). We also consider some studies whose purviews go beyond economic growth to consider factors such as income inequality, physical quality of life, demographic change, and basic needs provisioning. Angela Martin Crowly is at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92717. James Rauch is at the department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093. Susanna Seagrave is at the U.S. General Accounting Office, Washington, D.C. 20548. David A. Smith is at the Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California 92717.     

Genotyping the future: scientists' expectations about race/ ethnicity after BiDil

The ongoing debate about the FDA approval of BiDil in 2005 demonstrates how the first racially/ethnically licensed drug is entangled in both Utopian and dystopian future visions about the continued saliency of race/ethnicity in science and medicine. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper analyzes how scientists in the field of pharmacogenetics are constructing certain visions of the future with respect to the use of social categories of race/ethnicity and the impact of high-throughput genotyping technologies that promise to transform scientific practices.     

UGB-Workshop vom 13. und 14. Oktober 2008 in Münster

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Loan only credit default swaps the new European standard form

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. Key points

• European Loan Only Credit Default Swap (‘LCDS’)documentation was published by the International Swaps &Derivatives Association, Inc. in the form of a Standard TermsSupplement and Form of Confirmation for use with Credit DerivativeTransactions on Leveraged Loans on 30 July 2007 (the ‘EuropeanLCDS’).
• This article reviews some of the changes thathave been made since the first circulation of the draft EuropeanLCDS documentation on 2 May 2006 (the ‘Draft LCDS’).
• Acomparison between the Draft LCDS, the current form of the EuropeanLCDS and the US LCDS (defined in the article below) providesan insight into how the development of the European LCDS hasrequired a compromise to be made between the needs and demandsof various market participants and the specifics of the Europeanleveraged loan market (as more fully described in our recentarticle¹) and indicates points of convergence between the . . . [Full Text of this Article]