The Impending Water Crisis in the MENA Region

In many respects the worsening water scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa has become an object-lesson in the water crisis facing the wider world as climate change becomes a reality. Although northern and southern temperate zones are likely to see increases in precipitation, the equatorial region will face increasing desertification as access to water declines in the face of continuing demographic growth. Competition over increasingly scarce resources will have major geopolitical and security implications and the Middle Eastern and North Africa region will act as a paradigm of what happens in a biome of water scarcity.     

A Bonfire of the Regulations,or Business as Usual? The UK Labour Market and the Political Economy of Brexit

Employment and labour market regulation initially appeared as one of the solid red lines in the UK's renegotiation of the country's place in the EU. The basic argument is that the UK's more deregulated labour market would sit uneasily in the more organised models, based on statutory instruments or collective bargaining, found on the continent. While there is a legitimate problem here, EU employment regulations appear manageable from the point of view of business, while unions see them as important tools for socially responsible economic restructuring. Most of UK employment case law is now deeply entangled with EU law; labour market regulations have, on the whole, become part of the way of doing business in the Single Market; and a simple cost–benefit analysis appears impossible because some costs are not quantifiable and the costs of others are reduced when taken as a bundle. Labour unions agree that transposition of European law needs to be done taking into account local sensitivities, while internationally oriented companies do not see EU regulations on the whole as detrimental to business. Importantly, though, the costs and benefits of EU employment regulations are not symmetrically distributed across different companies: large companies are better able to reap the rewards and accommodate the costs of operating in the Single Market than smaller companies.     

Squaring the speed of light? Regulating market access in algorithmic finance

Abstract

We examine the sociomaterial regulation of algorithmic trading against the background of the European Union’s directives on Markets in Financial Instruments (MiFID/MiFIR). Tracing the purification and translation of regulatory practices within a French brokerage firm, we examine the impact of electronic trading on the nature of market access. Central to our analysis is the ‘Blackbox’, a tool designed to manage market access efficiently by collating trade flows and automatically pairing them with trading algorithms. Our findings show that, through a process of ‘abstracting’, purification and translation are kept strictly separate, allowing the broker to meet the regulatory requirements de jure whilst retaining de facto the unregulated advantages of high-speed materiality. We discuss the implications for both the policy and practice of high-speed financial trading.     

Where do electronic markets come from? Regulation and the transformation of financial exchanges

Abstract

The practices of high-frequency trading (HFT) are dependent on automated financial markets, especially those produced by securities exchanges electronically interconnected with competing exchanges. How did this infrastructural and organizational state of affairs come to be? Employing the conceptual distinction between fixed-role and switch-role markets, we analyse the discourse surrounding the design and eventual approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation of Exchanges and Alternative Trading Systems (Reg ATS). We find that the disruption of the exchange industry at the hands of automated markets was produced through an interweaving of both technological and political change. This processual redefinition of the ‘exchange’, in addition, may provide a suggestive precedent for understanding contemporary regulatory crises generated by other digital marketplace platforms.     

Selling stolen goods on the online markets: an explorative study

Historically, criminologists studied theft from different perspectives, but only a few focused their attention on the reselling of stolen items. The advent of the Internet has boosted stolen good markets by facilitating interactions between vendors (thieves and receivers) and buyers. This study, based on 227 cases reported by news sites in 2015 and 2016, focuses on the markets and methods used to sell stolen goods online. The results suggest that the online selling methods are quite independent from existing offline methods. The findings innovate with respect to the typology provided by Sutton. The online markets for stolen goods are rather a new environment where perpetrators may choose among several methods of disposal. The results reflect a preference for resale through classified ads sites (44.24%), auction sale sites (28.11%) and social media (19.35%). In the light of this study, more research is needed to understand online stolen goods markets and their mechanisms.     

Understanding markers of trust within the online stolen data market: An examination of vendors’ signaling behaviors relative to product price point

Research Summary

The current study examined 1055 stolen data products across 40 vendors on the Open and Dark Web to determine whether different product- and vendor-level behaviors predicted vendors’ trustworthiness as reflected in their product price point. Understanding the mechanisms that convey trust in the underground marketplace is crucial as it could help law enforcement target serious actors and disrupt the larger marketplace. Findings suggest the online stolen data market may resemble an uninformative cost condition where buyers are unable to accurately differentiate credible sellers due to the obscure nature of signaling behaviors.

Policy Implications

Law enforcement would benefit from designing fake shops and deceptive forum posts that transmit mixed signals to complicate market participants’ process of interpreting trust signals as intended. These interventions would generate high levels of risk that encourage both buyers and sellers to exit the online illicit marketplace without needing law enforcement arrests. Law enforcement could also target prominent market facilitators to generate a larger disruption that prevents actors from continuing their illicit behavior.