The size of human capital externalities: cross-country evidence

Human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities. However, the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive. The missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return, by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients, or by an inappropriate level of aggregation. Our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate, which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model. We ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view (Paldam 2002) is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality.     

A review of tools to comply with the Fourth EU anti-money laundering directive

The aim of this paper is to present tools that are used by financial institutions to implement legal requirements with regard to anti-money laundering (AML) and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT). The fight against money laundering and terrorist financing is a two-stage procedure, where state authorities outsource a major part of their tasks and responsibilities to private entities. The bulk of the task falls to financial institutions, which have to monitor the transactions of their customers pursuant to international, European and national laws as well as internal policies. To comply with the legal requirements, they use sophisticated surveillance software and collect large amounts of personal data. The European Union introduced two Proposals (COM(2013) 45 final and COM(2013) 44 final) to update the European Union's AML/CFT regime. Even though the Proposals have not yet become legal acts, it is quite obvious that new tools to support financial institutions will emerge. The amendments foreseen by the Proposals as well as already existing tools, which will remain relevant, shall be examined and privacy considerations will be discussed.     

Rezension

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Legitimizing American Indian Sovereignty: Mobilizing the Constitutive Power of Law through Institutional Entrepreneurship

Extensive sociolegal scholarship has addressed the utility of law as a mechanism through which marginalized groups may promote social change. Within this debate, scholars employing the legal mobilization approach have thus far highlighted law's indirect impact, beyond the formal arenas of law, via effects on the "legal consciousness" of reformers and would-be reformers. This article contributes to this debate, and the legal mobilization framework in particular, by theoretically identifying and empirically documenting ways through which the constitutive power of law may be effectively used by challengers to more directly pursue changes in institutionalized practices themselves. The article examines the strategic use of law by a set of American Indian tribal leaders in the state of Washington who, over a 13-year period, consciously meshed or "cohered" legal and extrajudicial efforts to gain recognition of their sovereign political status. Through a mode of agency known as "institutional entrepreneurship," they utilized the multiplicity of law and exploited resources and opportunities inhering within the state itself, but outside the courts. In the context of ambiguous legal precedent and widespread local challenges to tribal rights, they mobilized latent discourses of federal Indian law that legitimated the sovereign governmental status of tribes. Importantly, they circulated tribal sovereignty discourses well beyond the field of law, but through the authoritative activity and voice of the state, and in doing so, generated a precedent-setting recognition of tribal sovereignty.     

Neumeyer, Dieter: Hessisches Stra?engesetz (HStrG)

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Accuracy of comparison decisions by forensic firearms examiners

This black box study assessed the performance of forensic firearms examiners in the United States. It involved three different types of firearms and 173 volunteers who performed a total of 8640 comparisons of both bullets and cartridge cases. The overall false-positive error rate was estimated as 0.656% and 0.933% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, while the rate of false negatives was estimated as 2.87% and 1.87% for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The majority of errors were made by a limited number of examiners. Because chi-square tests of independence strongly suggest that error probabilities are not the same for each examiner, these are maximum-likelihood estimates based on the beta-binomial probability model and do not depend on an assumption of equal examiner-specific error rates. Corresponding 95% confidence intervals are (0.305%, 1.42%) and (0.548%, 1.57%) for false positives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively, and (1.89%, 4.26%) and (1.16%, 2.99%) for false negatives for bullets and cartridge cases, respectively. The results of this study are consistent with prior studies, despite its comprehensive design and challenging specimens.     

Reuniting families: an online database to aid in the identification of undocumented immigrant remains

The Reuniting Families project attempts to aid federal, state and local agencies currently working towards the identification of deceased undocumented immigrants. This initiative has created a distributed on-line database, accessible by public officials and private citizens interested in searching for missing individuals based on both phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. This broad effort includes the exhumation of individuals from geographically disparate pauper graves, the classification of their physical characteristics, and the cataloging of observed metric traits in a local relational database, to include associated articles of possession and related metadata. Concurrent with the documentation of physical forensic evidence is the analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences. Computational techniques and scoring parameters are applied to automate the process of discovery and identification as well at to preserve information on the missing. The result is a prototype knowledge base that may serve as a model for future efforts in international forensic science collaborations.