Premature repayment of fixed interest mortgage loans without compensation,a case of misguided consumer protection in the EU

European Journal of Law and Economics - Consumer protection shifts risks from consumers to businesses. This raises marginal costs and equilibrium prices. It is justified when markets are not strong...     

Environmental Policies and The Reproduction of Business as Usual: How Does It Work?

This paper aims to advance knowledge about corporate environmentalism by using new concepts and methods. We broaden the concept of the firm as “differentiated composite actor” by including not only managers but workers and unionists as actors. We descend into the “hidden abode of production” using Lefebvre’s concept of “everyday life” to explore the barriers environmental policies experience in this sphere. We base our explorations on life-history interviews to understand how the imaginaries of production are embedded in people’s self-conceptions. We identify seven barriers to the implementation of environmental practices: deficient regulations, collusion between controller and controlled, de-prioritisation, hierarchism, compartmentalisation, specialisation, and social unsustainability. A “necessity discourse,” legitimating the priority of efficiency and product quality over environmental sustainability, subjugates alternative sustainable practices. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results in the light of previous investigations, suggesting that the concept of the everyday could enrich future research.     

Partisanship,Ministers, and Biotechnology Policy

Research in public policy and political economy has provided many insights in the evolution of public resistance against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the last two decades. But how does the partisan composition of a government, its programmatic orientation and the allocation of cabinet offices affect policy making in this specific area? We argue that the regulation of GMOs is determined by the ideological orientation of governments and the presence of parties with a specific ideological background in the cabinet. In addition, we hypothesize that the parties' control over relevant cabinet posts matter for GMO regulation. We test our hypotheses by using an innovative dataset that contains information on biotechnology regulation outputs of European governments in the time period from 1996 until 2013, the partisan composition and policy‐area specific positions of governments, and the party affiliation of key cabinet actors. The results show that the presence of a Christian democratic party in a cabinet increases the chances of a ban on biotech crops, in particular if it controls the Ministry of the Environment.     

Lived citizenship as the locus of political agency in participatory policy

Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participatory policies.     

Identification of group affinity from cross-sectional contours of the human midfacial skeleton using digital morphometrics and 3D laser scanning technology

Identifying group affinity from human crania is a long-standing problem in forensic and physical anthropology. Many craniofacial differences used in forensic skeletal identification are difficult to quantify, although certain measurements of the midfacial skeleton have shown high predictive value for group classifications. This study presents a new method for analyzing midfacial shape variation between different geographic groups. Three-dimensional laser scan models of 90 crania from three populations were used to obtain cross-sectional midfacial contours defined by three standard craniometric landmarks. Elliptic Fourier transforms of the contours were used to extract Fourier coefficients for statistical analysis. After cross-validation, discriminant functions based on the Fourier coefficients provided an average of 86% correct classifications for crania from the three groups. The high rate of accuracy of this method indicates its usefulness for identifying group affinities among human skeletal remains and demonstrates the advantages of digital 3D model-based analysis in forensic research.     

Clinical forensic examination findings and legal outcome in cases of suspected sexual child abuse

The clinical forensic examinations conducted at the Institute of Legal Medicine of the Hanover Medical School between 1999 and 2008 in cases of suspected sexual abuse of children were evaluated retrospectively and analysed with regard to their legal outcome. In total, the study included 223 children (172 girls, 51 boys) with a median age of 8.6 years. In 34 children (15.2%), forensically relevant diagnostic findings due to anogenital injury and/or detection of semen were recorded. Perpetrators were convicted more often when they were not a member of the victim's family. In cases with victims aged seven years or older, conviction was more common. The study shows that medical findings can best be preserved by an immediate clinical forensic examination. Suspected sexual child abuse can often not be proved by medical examination results, but in some cases diagnostic findings are not mandatory for conviction.     

Semen analysis using methods of molecular genetics--a case report

The presented case report describes the exclusion of the suspect of a sexual offence by means of methods of molecular genetics. Pretests for prostate-specific antigen performed at the beginning of the investigation and cytological sperm tests were negative. Nevertheless, by combining the methods of differential lysis and DNA quantification a small number of spermatozoa could be demonstrated in the trace evidence. Subsequently, the profile of the woman's boyfriend, with whom she had had unprotected vaginal intercourse two days before the incident, could be detected in the fraction of the hard lysis.     

Bullying behaviour and criminality: a population-based follow-up study of adolescent psychiatric inpatients in Northern Finland

The recent school shootings in Europe and the USA have raised the question of whether victims of bullying run an increased risk of committing violent crimes later in life, but scientific research in this area is scarce. The aim of this work was to investigate whether bullying behaviour is associated with later criminal offences committed in adolescence and young adulthood. We studied a sample of 508 Finnish adolescents (age 12-17 years) admitted to psychiatric inpatient care between April 2001 and March 2006. Data on crimes committed and the age of onset of criminal activity were extracted from the official criminal records of the national Legal Register Centre in October 2008. The Schedule for Affective Disorder and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children, Present and Lifetime (K-SADS-PL) was used to define bullying status, and to obtain DSM-IV-based psychiatric diagnoses for the adolescents. Violent crimes were statistically significantly associated with bullying behaviour, but not non-violent crimes. Furthermore, being a bully was predictive of an early onset of severe violent offences. When controlled for the psychiatric diagnoses of the adolescents, we observed decreased likelihood of criminality among victims. Thus bullying others may increase the risk of violent offences, while being a victim is not a risk factor for criminality.