Time for a haircut: political regimes and sovereign debt restructurings

ABSTRACT

Conventional wisdom claims that reputation leads sovereign states to full debt repayment. However, defaults are recurrent, some debtor countries take a lot of time to end them, and some extract costly concessions from investors. This article argues that these differences are largely explained by the political regimes in the borrowing countries. While previous research examines whether democracies make more credible commitments, we analyze how democracies affect bargaining with foreign investors after a default occurs. Democracies, with their institutional checks, electoral uncertainty, greater transparency, and public deliberation, make swift decision-making harder, create incentives to pander and posture, and give leverage to minimize the win set of viable agreements. We test our theory on a comprehensive dataset of debt restructurings with private creditors in the period 1975–2017. The event history analysis indicates that democracies experience longer restructurings and the double-hurdle regression analysis shows that democracies obtain larger creditor losses. Further, there is interesting variation among democracies and autocracies. Our findings suggest that political regimes are crucial to explaining why cooperation fails in international debt markets.     

(Re)Productive Discourses: Media Coverage of Children Born of War in Colombia

Children born as a result of wartime sexual violence have not gained a place in the stories covered by the Colombian media. Based on an extensive content analysis (using the software MAXQDA 12) of newspaper articles published between 1990 and 2015, ethnographic content analysis, and drawing upon feminist critical discourse analysis, this paper explores how information about these children is presented as part of storylines that use the explanatory framework of sexual violence as a weapon of war. In those storylines, children emerge not as independent subjects but as part of social representations of female victims of wartime sexual violence and male perpetrators.     

Chasing ghosts: An investigation of the ghosting phenomenon in footprints

Ghosting is a phenomenon that has been identified in dynamic (walking) footprints. There is sparse research on the occurrence of ghosting; however, due to the forensic value of footprints and their use in other scientific fields, the phenomenon of ghosting warrants further study. Ghosting can be used to determine if a footprint is static (standing) or dynamic, which can help forensic investigators create a sequence of events at a crime scene. Furthermore, this can help in footprint comparisons from this determination, as “like versus like” comparisons of dynamic or static footprints can be made. The purpose of this research was to determine the prevalence and locations of the ghosting phenomena in dynamic footprints.136 dynamic footprints from 68 volunteers were collected using an inkless collection system. Each footprint was visually inspected for ghosting as well as examined using software.Ghosting was present on at least one location in all footprints. The highest prevalence occurred at the tip of the great toe, followed by the second digit and the heel. To a lesser extent, ghosting appeared at the tips of the other three digits. Ghosting often occurred at two or more areas in a given footprint.     

管理视角下的公安民警休息权保障对策研究

在当前社会形势下,公安工作日益趋于繁重,社会环境更加复杂,违法犯罪问题日益严重,这使公安工作面临着更大的挑战和压力。为了维护社会稳定,他们普遍长时间、高强度地工作,对身心健康造成了严重损害。本文在对警察休息权的现状、休息权的重要意义,民警休息权无法得到保障的原因等问题进行分析的基础上,用管理学的视角提出有效保障警察休息权的对策建议,希望有助于公安民警休息权的保障,也有利于提高公安工作效率。     

APK Auditor: Permission-based Android malware detection system

Android operating system has the highest market share in 2014; making it the most widely used mobile operating system in the world. This fact makes Android users the biggest target group for malware developers. Trend analyses show large increase in mobile malware targeting the Android platform. Android's security mechanism is based on an instrument that informs users about which permissions the application needs to be granted before installing them. This permission system provides an overview of the application and may help gain awareness about the risks. However, we do not have enough information to conclude that standard users read or digital investigators understand these permissions and their implications. Digital investigators need to be on the alert for the presence of malware when examining Android devices, and can benefit from supporting tools that help them understand the capabilities of such malicious code. This paper presents a permission-based Android malware detection system, APK Auditor that uses static analysis to characterize and classify Android applications as benign or malicious. APK Auditor consists of three components: (1) A signature database to store extracted information about applications and analysis results, (2) an Android client which is used by end-users to grant application analysis requests, and (3) a central server responsible for communicating with both signature database and smartphone client and managing whole analysis process. To test system performance, 8762 applications in total, 1853 benign applications from Google's Play Store and 6909 malicious applications from different sources were collected and analyzed by the system developed. The results show that APK Auditor is able to detect most well-known malwares and highlights the ones with a potential in approximately 88% accuracy with a 0.925 specificity.     

法教义学的基本功能:从刑法学视域的思考

中国法学界系统地研究法教义学之功能的专门作品目前尚很少见。研究法教义学的功能,旨在回答法教义学的服务对象问题。若其功能不明,则必然会引发立场、方法与主体性之争,导致法教义学成为一种"无底盘的游戏"。法教义学乃是法学家针对规范适用、规范评价、规范塑造展开的理论建构与知识储备,具有司法与立法两个基本面向。其中,司法面向的法教义学具有三重功能:个案的妥当性解决、案件处理之间的协同性与理清社会发展的理想。立法面向的法教义学则是通过教义分析,明确法规范中存在的矛盾之处、有违明确性原则之处或处罚漏洞等,从而促进立法改进,确保法律良善。     

电子商务法中删除权的法经济学分析

大数据时代的到来使得企业、团体、个人都可能获取他人信息,而当代互联网的特性——海量的数据信息、快捷的计算速度以及巨大的储存空间使大数据时代的个人信息保护问题尤为重要。国内外关于删除权的相关法律文本和司法实践已经有较多讨论展开,而从大国博弈、消费者选择和厂商行为三个视角对2019年电子商务法中有关删除权的合理性和前沿性做进一步探讨后,可开启另一认知路径。以法经济学理论和经济学原理进行论证分析后发现,我国需要专门的“个人信息保护法”以确立删除权,而鉴于立法成本和紧迫性,可暂通过完善司法的方式,实现保护公民个人信息的目的。     

江西省餐具、饮具集中消毒服务单位现状调查及分析

目的:了解江西省餐具、饮具集中消毒服务单位现状。方法:对江西省内所有持工商营业执照的餐具、饮具集中消毒服务单位开展问卷调查,并作统计分析。结果:江西省共有166家持证的餐具、饮具集中消毒服务单位,78.92%为私有制,90.96%的单位日产量在1万套以下。厂区选址和内环境合格率分别为14.46%、63.25%,生产车间装修合格率为57.83%,60.24%的单位采用全自动化生产设备。成品仓储、运输过程卫生合格率分别为38.55%、39.76%,生产记录、出厂检验、包装标识合格率依次为37.35%、54.22%、77.71%。结论:江西省餐具、饮具集中消毒服务单位以中小规模的私营单位为主,现场卫生问题突出,建议通过完善法律、前置卫生审核、强化主体责任意识、卫生质量控制等措施,改善行业现状。     

Strategic rebels: a spatial econometric approach to rebel fighting durations in civil wars

ABSTRACT

Recent research on multi-actor civil wars highlights that rebel organizations condition their conflict behavior on that of other rebel organizations, with competition and free-riding constituting the core theoretical mechanisms. We provide a new actor-centric approach to explicitly model strategic interdependence in multi-actor civil wars. We argue that rebel organizations have incentives to remain mobilized until the end of a conflict to maintain their power to negotiate, power to spoil, power to enforce, and power to protect. This induces strategic complements that dominate duration dynamics in multi-actor conflicts. Based on a network game-theoretic model, we derive a spatial econometric framework that allows for a direct test of strategic interdependence. We find that the estimated duration interdependence is positive but partially offset in secessionist conflicts where the public goods nature of the incompatibility also induces strategic substitution effects.     

Adopt or Not and Innovation Variation: A Dynamic Comparison Study of Policy Innovation and Diffusion Mechanisms

Abstract

Policy innovation and diffusion literature mainly focuses on the decision to adopt a new policy, while ignoring the differences among new policies. This study divides the decision-making process of policy innovation diffusion into two phases: in the “innovate or not” phase, governments make the decision to adopt or reject the new policy, while “how to innovate” is the process by which governments formulate specific content for the new policy. A dynamic comparative analysis finds that effects of internal determinants and diffusion mechanisms vary during these two phases and that internal determinants moderate the effects of diffusion mechanisms.