Participation exemption and tax arbitrage: Italy’s case

This paper studies how participation exemption (PEX) tax rules for stocks owned by companies, which are frequent in EU countries, introduce tax arbitrage opportunities. The focus is on Italy’s PEX rules. PEX enables companies to make manufactured loans that generate tax exempt interest income by combining stocks with forwards or options. Borrowing through similar manufactured loans allows companies to bypass restrictions to deducting the cost of borrowing. PEX induced arbitrage exploitable through stock and options portfolios is available even when put-call parity holds for European options. Derivatives that hedge a stock can “inherit” the PEX regime of the stock they hedge. PEX gives companies that own a stock a tax timing option, which can be exploited through stock straddle strategies, i.e. long-short positions in the same stock, and which can generate valuable tax savings.     

Redressing metropolitan imbalances in service delivery: A time-series intervention analysis of a user charge policy

While a quarter of a century of contributions to the literature on central city-suburb relationships indicates that within a metropolitan context suburban exploitation of central cities may not exist, there is no lessening of the desire to reduce imbalances within a particular urban service delivery sector. This paper assesses the impact of an urban administrative policy intervention aimed at shifting the burden of supporting a municipal service to those who actually use and benefit from it. An interrupted time-series quasi-experimental design is merged with a data analysis strategy employing integrated moving average models. The evidence endorses the adoption of user charges for certain urban services as an effective strategy open to urban bureaucracies for redressing urban public finance imbalances.This paper is a revision of a draft originally prepared for presentation in the session, The Sociologist as Evaluator: Policy Direction from Social Science, at the Southwestern Social Science Meetings, April, 1978 in Houston, Texas.     

Food Price Changes and Household Welfare: What Do We Learn from Two Different Approaches?

The use of a marginal approach can significantly distort the predicted effects of large price variations on monetary welfare over the medium- to longer-term. This paper aims at shedding some light on the differences between a marginal approach and a non-separable agricultural household model with behavioural responses. When behavioural adjustments are allowed, households can adapt their consumption and production patterns by resulting in lower deteriorations in household welfare. The second-order effects introduced in the approach with responses reduce the negative effects due to the first-order consumption effects, with significant differences across quintiles. On average, the second-order effects represent up to roughly 40 per cent of total first-order effects.     

Grassroots democracy and local government in Northern Syria: the case of democratic confederalism

This paper provides a case study regarding an innovative model of grass-roots democracy, called democratic confederalism, which is currently being implemented in Northern Syria. The difference between democratic confederalism and previous experiments with grass-roots democracy is that its evolutionary pattern aims to include heterogeneous local communities living in the same territories, with the objective of becoming an administrative model for the whole Syrian country, without shattering its national constitution. In fact, the evolution of the political and administrative system and the introduction of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria were specifically aimed at including all ethnicities and not focusing on the Kurdish population only. Following a literature review aimed at defining the theoretical background of democratic confederalism, the case study is presented. Data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews and informal talks with key stakeholders in the Kurdish movement; the findings and main implications of the model are described and analysed.     

Paths towards Consensus: Explaining Decision Making within the Swiss Global Justice Movement

We examine the conditions leading social movement organizations to adopt consensus in their internal decision making. To do so, we look at organizations of the Swiss global justice movement, which puts the search for consensus at center stage. Our findings show that the ways in which social movement organizations take decisions and their vision of democracy more generally are not simply a matter of free choice by their leaders and members, but depend on certain organizational characteristics. The most important one is a small organizational size, which is a crucial condition for the adoption of consensus in internal decision making. This condition combines with another one pertaining to the cultural tradition of contention represented by the social movement family to explain consensus. In addition, our findings show that small, transnational organizations following inclusive participatory practices are also more likely to adopt consensus when they make decisions.     

Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, came into being in 1929 as an “integral nationalist” movement that set itself the goal of driving Polish landowners and officials out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, joining hands with Ukrainians in other countries, and establishing an independent state. The OUN defined Jews, along with Russians and Poles, as aliens and enemies. There was no need, wrote an OUN ideologist in 1929, to list all the injuries that Jews caused Ukrainians. “In addition to a number of external enemies Ukraine also has an internal enemy … Jewry and its negative consequences for our liberation cause can be liquidated only by an organized collective effort”. The article examines archival documents, publications by OUN members, and recent scholarly literature to trace the evolution of OUN thinking about Jews from 1929 through the war years, when the German occupation of Ukraine gave the OUN an opportunity to stage pogroms and persecute Jews, and the prime minister of the state that the OUN proclaimed wrote that he supported “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.     

Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat

This paper reassesses the suggestion, advanced among others by David George, that the 1858 failed attentat by the Italian patriot Felice Orsini against Napoleon III can be considered as a paradigmatic instance of “terrorist assassination.” Drawing on a new interpretation of the acts of Orsini's trial, the paper argues that Orsini's motivations were to a large degree “idiosyncratic”; however, it also discusses evidence suggesting that the significant collateral damage caused by the attack was, in Orsini's mind, one of the aims of the action and cannot be portrayed as unintended.