The unavailability of information on insurance unavailability: Insurance redlining and the absence of geocoded disclosure data

Abstract

The availability of insurance in urban communities has long been a contested public policy issue. One of the central points of contention has been the value of publicly available data on the geographic distribution of property insurance policies. This debate has intensified since the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which requires geocoded disclosure of mortgage lending activity, was passed. A small number of states have required disclosure of limited data. But precisely what data are available has been unclear, and their utility has been debated.

This survey of all state insurance commissioners documents what is in fact the very limited availability of insurance disclosure data. Only eight states require any disclosure of geocoded data, and just four of them make company‐level data available to the public. Data from one of those states, Wisconsin, are used to show how such data could benefit insurers, consumers, and regulators.     

The Problem with Entrapment

In R v Looseley; Attorney General’s Reference (No. 3 of2000) the House of Lords articulated a legal framework to govern‘entrapment’ in criminal cases. Their Lordshipsregarded the need for judicial intervention to assist entrappeddefendants as uncontroversial. This article argues that thedoctrine they set out, in fact, necessitates substantial, andlargely unarticulated, departures from principles the courtsordinarily stress as fundamental to the criminal law. In particular,entrapment doctrine determines liability for criminal acts byreference to the kind of environment inhabited by their perpetrators,a perspective the law ordinarily attempts to exclude. This articlesuggests that the anomalous treatment of entrapment can be understoodas a device to prevent the police from relocating the temptationto commit crime to environments in which they are not ordinarilyconfronted and to ensure that those from backgrounds in whichserious criminality is not usually a plausible option will escapepunishment if tempted to commit crime by the police.     

New Labour, Gender Mainstreaming and the Women and Equality Unit

New Labour's approach to gender mainstreaming is perhaps best exemplified through the work of the Women and Equality Unit (WEU). In this article we chart the development of the Unit and varied initiatives in which it has been involved and provide a preliminary assessment of the Unit's work. We start with a discussion of Labour's approach to mainstreaming. This provides a context for a profile of the work of the Women's Unit (WU) between 1997 and 2001 and its successor the WEU, between 2001 and 2002. We consider the work of the Units in relation to the government's reforms to the policy-making process, focusing upon location, issue territory and connectivity. Using these three criteria our appraisal of the work of the WEU draws attention to three issues: firstly, the institutional uncertainty surrounding the status of the Unit; secondly, the degree to which the remit of the Unit has been unlike that of other cross-cutting units in addressing a broad gender agenda rather than specific policy areas, but that this is now shifting with the increasing focus on economic issues; and thirdly, the extent to which the Unit is reliant on non-feminist actors within the decision-making elite to help pursue its aims. We will suggest that the Unit may have made a small, but significant, contribution to the development of gender mainstreaming processes. Its contribution has been greatest where gender equality policies coincide with government priorities. Its contribution to the process of mainstreaming gendered perspectives into all policy-making is much harder to discern.     

Introduction: The dynamics of ideas

Abstract

Participants in today's financial markets confront a sea of data. While the availability of market data has benefits it also creates problems, notably those relating to questions of meaning, judgement and intervention: how to make sense of these flows – how to see the ‘market’, its futures, and thus act pre-emptively. Over more recent years financial organizations have been turning to new technologies of representation, in particular the design and application of visualization software in an effort to enable better visual imagination of and interaction with markets as they unfold in real time. ‘What you see is what you risk’ in many respects captures the thinking or at least the desire underlying the employment of the latest visualization software. The more powerful one's vision the better able one is to participate in increasingly complex financial markets, at least in theory.

Based on recent interviews with those involved in developing and using the latest visualization software within some of the key markets of global finance, and developing the influential work of Daniel Beunza and David Stark, and Karin Knorr Cetina, in particular, this paper adopts a cultural-economy-of-finance perspective to examine the implications of these new techniques of representation. The paper argues that the latest visual turn within finance should be afforded a more central position in the study of contemporary financial market practices.