Capital mobility and the possibilities for international policy coordination

When capital is internationally mobile, small differences in macroeconomic policies generate massive payments imbalances that cannot be managed successfully with the policy tools used during the Bretton Woods era. Monetary and fiscal policy coordination is needed to stabilize the international economy, but is difficult to achieve. This article uses insights from the theoretical literature on international cooperation to account for characteristics of policy coordination in recent years. Examination of the strategic situation helps to explain why governments have rejected proposals for a rules-based regime (e.g., strict multilateral surveillance using quantitative indicators) yet have coordinated policy adjustments on an ad hoc basis in response to crises. A solution to the strategic problem — in which there is one mutually adverse outcome (no adjustment by any government) and a number of Pareto-optimal outcomes preferred by different governments — depends on the exercise of power. Consideration of theories about hegemony and cooperation suggests that the U.S. continues to act as a hegemon in this area, albeit of the coercive rather than benevolent sort. International theories of cooperation, however, neglect the domestic policy making practices and institutions that pose the central problems for international policy coordination.     

Police stress: A conceptual overview

Over the past decade, a sizeable body of literature has developed that examines police stress from a variety of perspectives. The vast majority of the literature is anecdotal in nature and that which is based on research is often inconsistent. As used in the literature, the term stress has widely differing meanings and its measurement has ranged from the artful to the sublime. But of greater importance than the measurement issue is the necessary complexity of any model that attempts to deal with the interrelationships thought to exist between stress and other factors.The variety and complexity of individual differences and the interplay between environmental conditions and the person's unique perception of both objective and subjective situations obscures any simple relationships.The purpose of this note is to examine the nature of stress, its sources and consequences among police, and to identify gaps in the conceptual model within which police stress is normally viewed.     

The Primacy of Race in the Geography of Income‐Based Voting: New Evidence from Public Voting Records

Why does the relationship between income and partisanship vary across U.S. regions? Some answers to this question have focused on economic context (in poorer environments, economics is more salient), whereas others have focused on racial context (in racially diverse areas, richer voters oppose the party favoring redistribution). Using 73 million geocoded registration records and 185,000 geocoded precinct returns, we examine income‐based voting across local areas. We show that the political geography of income‐based voting is inextricably tied to racial context, and only marginally explained by economic context. Within homogeneously nonblack localities, contextual income has minimal bearing on the income‐party relationship. The correlation between income and partisanship is strong in heavily black areas of the Old South and other areas with a history of racialized poverty, but weaker elsewhere, including in urbanized areas of the South. The results demonstrate that the geography of income‐based voting is inseparable from racial context.     

An investigation of two methods of DNA recovery from fired and unfired 9 mm ammunition

Cartridge cases are often recovered from crime scenes involving firearms and, in the United Kingdom (where gun possession is strictly controlled), these are commonly from 9 mm calibre ammunition. The ability to obtain informative DNA profiles from touch DNA on recovered cartridges could have a significant impact on the investigation of that type of offence. However, this avenue may not be routinely considered as investigators in the UK have historically had a low expectation of obtaining useful DNA profiles. This stance may not be unreasonable given that (a) only trace amounts of DNA are likely to have been transferred onto the cartridge cases through handling; and (b) when the cartridge is spent, the potential deterioration of that DNA caused by the act of discharging the weapon.We introduce a novel semi-automatable method using direct lysis for the recovery of DNA from ammunition and compare it with a traditional double-swabbing method (using wet and dry swabs). DNA profiling of the DNA recovered using both methods was carried out using the ESI17 FAST STR system (Promega). This demonstrated a significant increase in DNA recovery using the direct lysis approach, and correspondingly improved STR results.We also investigated the effect on the recovery and profiling of DNA from fired, and unfired, 9 mm cartridges using the direct lysis technique. These results demonstrate that DNA suitable for STR analysis can still be recovered from fired ammunition with only slightly reduced yields compared to unfired ammunition. In these experiments, the handler of the ammunition was most commonly either the sole contributor or the major contributor to the recovered DNA profile.