Public perceptions and bond markets during the Great War: the case of a neutral country

Neutrality during World War I was not assured but depended on the ability of a neutral state to adjust to the major belligerent powers’ interests. How did Switzerland manage to adhere to its neutrality policy under those circumstances? This paper analyzes contemporary perceptions of neutrality by means of a structural break analysis. According to historiography Switzerland was endangered from within rather than by foreign actions. The analysis based on a newly assembled database supports this assessment in parts. In the bondholders’ view, Switzerland’s neutrality was most threatened by the events leading up to the general strike in November 1918.

     

New Scholarship on Peru's Internal Conflict

Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Before the Shining Path: Politics in Rural Ayacucho, 1895–1980. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Map, bibliography, index, 272 pp.; hardcover $60. Maiah Jaskoski, Military Politics and Democracy in the Andes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Maps, bibliography, index, 322 pp.; hardcover $58, ebook $58. Richard Kernaghan, Coca's Gone: Of Might and Right in the Huallaga Post‐Boom. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Bibliography, index, 320 pp.; hardcover $65, paperback $19.95, ebook $19.95. Miguel La Serna, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Maps, illustrations, bibliography, index, 304 pp.; paperback $35; ebook $29.99. Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Glossary, map, bibliography, index, 480 pp.; hardcover $75; paperback $29.95, ebook $29.95.     

Using the Results from Rigorous Multisite Evaluations to Inform Local Policy Decisions

Evidence‐based policy at the local level requires predicting the impact of an intervention to inform whether it should be adopted. Increasingly, local policymakers have access to published research evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions from national research clearinghouses that review and disseminate evidence from program evaluations. Through these evaluations, local policymakers have a wealth of evidence describing what works, but not necessarily where. Multisite evaluations may produce unbiased estimates of the average impact of an intervention in the study sample and still produce inaccurate predictions of the impact for localities outside the sample for two reasons: (1) the impact of the intervention may vary across localities, and (2) the evaluation estimate is subject to sampling error. Unfortunately, there is relatively little evidence on how much the impacts of policy interventions vary from one locality to another and almost no evidence on the implications of this variation for the accuracy with which the local impact of adopting an intervention can be predicted using findings from an evaluation in other localities. In this paper, we present a set of methods for quantifying the accuracy of the local predictions that can be obtained using the results of multisite randomized trials and for assessing the likelihood that prediction errors will lead to errors in local policy decisions. We demonstrate these methods using three evaluations of educational interventions, providing the first empirical evidence of the ability to use multisite evaluations to predict impacts in individual localities—i.e., the ability of “evidence‐based policy” to improve local policy.