明确证券犯罪立案追诉标准——从“操纵证券市场罪”概念的视角分析

证券领域的经济犯罪案件屡屡触目,已成为当前经济犯罪侦查理论与实践中的难点和热点问题。而经济犯罪侦查与其他公安业务工作相比尚显稚嫩,无论是在实践中还是在理论上,都存在诸多亟待研究解决的问题。操纵证券价格是证券市场中十分普遍的一种违法行为,然而操纵证券市场罪却又是司法实践中较少见的罪名。因此从“操纵证券市场罪”概念的视角进行分析,以明确证券犯罪立案追诉标准,从而加深实践中司法人员的感性认识。     

Issue opacity and sustainability standard effectiveness

Many voluntary sustainability standards govern opaque environmental and social issues, which are difficult to understand and address. Extant studies show mixed evidence around the effectiveness of such standards. We develop a theoretical framework that relates different degrees and types of opacity to standard effectiveness. Systemic opacity results from issues embedded in complex, diverse, and dynamic settings, whereas behavioral opacity stems from human challenges in interpreting and acting upon focal issues. Rigid sustainability standards, oriented toward compliance, are effective for addressing issues that are transparent or enshrouded by behavioral opacity, but are counterproductive for issues with systemic opacity. The trade-off between rigidity and flexibility leads to optimal effectiveness when standards governing systemically and behaviorally opaque issues are moderately rigid. Our ideas are illustrated with two leading sustainability standards in the fisheries and real estate sectors, which effectively address transparent issues but show limited success when facing opacity. We conclude that unpacking issue opacity is instrumental in designing and implementing more effective sustainability standards.     

When private governance impedes multilateralism: The case of international pesticide governance

Private standards play an increasingly important governance role, yet their effects on state-led policymaking remain understudied. We examine how the operation of private agricultural standards influences multilateral pesticide governance with a particular focus on the listing of substances under the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, a treaty-based information-sharing mechanism that allows countries to refuse hazardous chemical imports. We find that private agricultural standard-setting bodies use the Rotterdam Convention's pesticide list to develop their own lists of banned substances. This alters the Rotterdam Convention's intended role, impeding efforts to add substances to the treaty, as attempts by private actors to impose stricter governance than state actors can undermine the potential for international state-based governance to become more stringent. We characterize this as a “confounding interaction” whereby institutional linkages between actions by public and private actors with broadly aligned goals results in unexpected negative consequences for governance.