What can Post‐Democracy tell us about TNCs and Extraterritorial Violations of Human Rights?

This article considers the problem of extraterritorial human rights violations committed by transnational corporations (TNCs), and draws on Crouch's framework in Post‐democracy to illustrate why the issue has proved so difficult for states to regulate. I begin by examining the problem of corporate regulation more generally, and set out Crouch's analysis to show why and how corporations have become so influential. The second section considers the area of business and human rights, and explains why there is ‘a governance gap’ in relation to extraterritorial human rights violations committed by corporations. The third section describes efforts at the international and domestic levels to regulate corporations in relation to this issue. It concludes that while new international principles and innovative hybrid schemes are playing a valuable role in norm creation and standard‐setting, the enforcement of these principles remains limited. Corporations have largely succeeded to date in their lobbying efforts to remain free of any direct obligations under international law.     

Intergenerational Transmission: Physical Abuse and Violent vs. Nonviolent Criminal Outcomes

In this paper we test several specific hypotheses derived from the intergenerational transmission of violence thesis to see if exposure to physical abuse has a special role in the etiology of violence. We employ a systematic statistical approach using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Our findings suggest that a history of physical abuse is strongly associated with frequency of violence, but the association is not specific to violence and is mediated by their common association with nonviolent offending. Further, the association between physical abuse and violence is not significantly larger than the association between neglect or sexual abuse and violence. In summary, the data suggest that the association between abuse and violence is not unique to physical abuse and that the impact of physical abuse is not specific to violent behavior.     

Compensation rules for climate policy in the electricity sector

Most previous cap and trade programs have distributed emission allowances for free to incumbent producers. However, in the electricity sector the value of CO₂ allowances may be far in excess of costs to industry and giving them away to firms diverts allowance value from other purposes. Using a detailed simulation model, this paper shows that compensation to firms losing asset value under a climate cap and trade policy can be achieved for a small fraction of total allowance value, if targeted carefully. However, the economic efficiency cost of providing incremental compensation to reach the fully compensated level is many multiples of that incremental compensation. These considerations might move policymakers away from free allocation of CO₂ emission allowances in the electricity sector. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.