on the effective use of stigma as a crime deterrent abstract stigma affects convicted offenders if employers reduce their wage current research considers this kind of informal sanctioning as an effective means for reducing crime and proposes its fostering by the government in this article i first show that increasing stigma may even enhance crime while stigma enhances deterrence of an unconvicted offender it may drive a stigmatized ex convict towards recidivism secondly i provide a solution for guaranteeing stigma s effectiveness notably a harsh er punishment for repeat offenders is required finally with the theoretical analysis as a background stigmatization policies pursued in the states switzerland and spain are compared

crime rates and local labor market opportunities in the united states 1979 1997 the labor market prospects of young unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s crime rates show a reverse pattern increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s because young unskilled men commit most crime this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship between the two trends previous work on the relationship between labor markets and crime focused mainly on the relationship between the unemployment rate and crime and found inconclusive results in contrast this paper examines the impact of both wages and unemployment on crime and uses instrumental variables to establish causality we conclude that both wages and unemployment are significantly related to crime but that wages played a larger role in the crime trends over the last few decades these results are robust to the inclusion of deterrence variables controls for simultaneity and controlling for individual and family characteristics

land tenure price shocks and insurgency evidence from peru and colombia abstract the paper examines how property arrangements a key determinant of rural income influence armed conflict in the presence of commodity price shocks using detailed data on district level land tenure crop produce and conflict intensity in peru and colombia estimates show that exogenous negative price shocks increase the intensity of conflict in districts with a greater presence of individual ownership relative to other types of land tenure the finding is consistent with small landowners in the export sector experiencing a sharper downturn in labor market outcomes thus reducing the opportunity cost of participating in insurgent groups

inequality and violent crime abstract we investigate the robustness and causality of the link between income inequality and violent crime across countries first we study the correlation between the gini index and homicide and robbery rates within and between countries second we examine the partial correlation by considering other crime determinants third we control for the endogeneity of inequality by isolating its exogenous impact on these crime rates fourth we control for measurement error in crime rates by modeling it as both unobserved country effects and random noise finally we examine the robustness of this partial correlation to alternative measures of inequality the panel data consist of nonoverlapping 5 year averages for 39 countries during 1965 95 for homicides and 37 countries during 1970 94 for robberies crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and particularly between countries and this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates even after controlling for ot

the logic of political violence this paper offers a unified approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil war we formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can use violence to maintain or acquire power to study which political and economic factors drive one sided or two sided violence repression or civil war the model predicts a hierarchy of violence states from peace via repression to civil war and suggests a natural empirical approach exploiting only within country variation in the data we show that violence is associated with shocks that can affect wages and aid as in the theory these effects are only present where political institutions are non cohesive

street crime and street culture a model shows how reputation concerns can support widespread street crime a street culture where the direct incentives for such behavior are weak there are social benefits to street reputations but those benefits are dominated when reputation concerns draw into crime those who obtain no direct gain from it the model matches facts about violent crime that a standard model cannot easily explain including low monetary returns disproportionate victimization of the young and poor and high variance in rates across small distances the model generates novel implications for policy and social science including a negative effect of social capital

urban poverty and juvenile crime evidence from a randomized housing mobility experiment this paper uses data from a randomized housing mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high to low poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime outcome measures come from juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data our e ndings seem to suggest that providing families with the opportunity to move to lower poverty neighborhoods reduces violent criminal behavior by teens

crime and erosion of trust evidence for latin america crime has tangible economic costs it also has less understood and likely sizable intangible costs in particular widespread crime has the potential to weaken trust between citizens and institutions undermine government reform efforts and become an obstacle to development yet the impact of crime on trust remains relatively unexplored in the literature this paper analyzes the potential interrelationship between individual victimization and several measures of trust including trust in formal public institutions and trust in informal private networks it is based on a representative sample of individuals in 19 countries in latin america the empirical strategy is intended to mitigate overt biases and assess sensitivity to hidden biases the results show that victimization has a substantial negative effect on trust in the local police but no robust effect on informal institutions governments may henceforth need to redouble efforts to reduce victimization and the resulting erosion of trust in public institutions

the implicit price for fair trade coffee does social capital matter abstract this study aims to ascertain whether the implicit price paid for fair trade coffee in regular supermarkets is influenced by the stock of social capital in the territory where consumers live a hedonic regression set up is adopted based on italian scanner data taken at nuts3 level regressors include attributes described on the label which include separate certifications for fair trade and organic eco label status plus various indicators of social capital and their interactions with the fair trade and organic eco label attributes the implicit consumer price paid for the fair trade attribute is significantly and positively affected by a social capital proxy the ratio of co op members to total employment

assessment of government funding of business angel networks in flanders collewaert v manigart s and aernoudt r assessment of government funding of business angel networks in flanders regional studies the paper evaluates whether government intervention through the subsidization of business angel networks bans enhances regional economic growth in flanders belgium it shows that firstly bans reduce the information and financing problems entrepreneurial companies face secondly that these companies contribute to economic development and growth thirdly that there are positive indicators of future potential such as an upward evolution in value creation and the ability to raise follow on financing finally the programme has many positive indirect effects this leads to a tentative conclusion that public ban support is warranted however to make this conclusion more robust requires a longer term evaluation collewaert v manigart s et aernoudt r une evaluation des finances publiques en faveur des reseaux de bailleurs de fonds en flandres regional studies on cher

is success hereditary evidence on the performance of spawned ventures a common phenomenon in entrepreneurship is that employees turn away from employment to found their own businesses prior literature discusses the former employers characteristics that influence the creation of entrepreneurial ventures an investigation of whether these characteristics also affect the success of the spawned ventures is missing so far this paper contributes to the literature by showing that entrepreneurial ventures spawned by well performing firms are financially more successful than ventures stemming from poorly performing firms this suggests that spawned entrepreneurs are able to exploit valuable knowledge from their previous employers which impacts their ventures performance positively the analysis is based on a linked employee employer data set for the netherlands for the period 1999 2004

what accounts for the decline in crime in this article we analyze recent trends in aggregate property crime rates in the united states we propose a dynamic equilibrium model that guides our quantitative investigation of the major determinants of observed patterns of crime our main findings can be summarized as follows first the model is capable of reproducing the drop in crime between 1980 and 1996 second the most important factors that account for the observed decline in property crime are the higher apprehension probability the stronger economy and the aging of the population third the effect of unemployment on crime is negligible fourth the increased inequality prevented an even larger decline in crime overall our analysis can account for the behavior of the time series of property crime rates over the past quarter century

international commodity prices growth and the outbreak of civil war in sub saharan africa to learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war we examine whether sub saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries main export commodities the data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the outbreak of civil wars we also find that sub saharan countries are more likely to see civil wars following economic downturns in their main oecd export destinations

the slave trade and the origins of mistrust in africa in a recent study nunn 2008 examines the long term impacts of africa s slave trade he finds that the slave trade which occurred over a period of more than 400 years had a significant negative effect on long term economic development although the article arguably identifies a negative causal relationship between the slave trade and income today the analysis is unable to establish the exact causal mechanisms underlying this reduced form relationship in this article we examine one of the channels through which the slave trade may affect economic development today combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we ask whether the slave trade caused a culture of mistrust to develop within africa initially slaves were captured primarily through state organized raids and warfare but as the trade progressed the environment of ubiquitous insecurity caused individuals to turn on others including friends and family members and to kidnap trick and sell each other into slavery sigismund wilhelm koelle 1854 p e h hair 1965 charles piot 1996 we hypothesize that in this environment a culture of mistrust may have evolved which may persist to this day we show that current differences in trust levels within africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and indian ocean slave trades combining contemporary individual level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that the relationship is causal examining causal mechanisms we show that most of the impact of the slave trade is through factors that are internal to the individual such as cultural norms beliefs and values jel j15 n57 z13

the origins of state capacity property rights taxation and politics economists generally assume that the state has sufficient institutional capacity to support markets and levy taxes this paper develops a framework where policy choices in market regulation and taxation are constrained by past investments in legal and fiscal capacity it studies the economic and political determinants of such investments demonstrating that legal and fiscal capacity are typically complements the results show that among other things common interest public goods such as fighting external wars as well as political stability and inclusive political institutions are conducive to building state capacity some correlations in cross country data are consistent with the theory

the legacies of forced freedom china s treaty ports abstract this paper investigates the long run development of china s treaty ports from the mid eighteenth century until today focusing on a sample of prefectures on the coast or on the yangtze river i document the dynamic development paths of treaty ports and their neighbors in alternate phases of closedness and openness i also provide suggestive evidence on migration and sector wise growth to understand the advantage of treaty ports in the long run

organized crime corruption and punishment we analyze an oligopoly model in which differentiated criminal organizations globally compete on criminal activities and engage in local corruption to avoid punishment when bribing costs are low that is badly paid and dishonest law enforcers work in a weak governance environment and the rents from criminal activity are sufficiently high we find that increasing policing and sanctions can generate higher crime rates indeed beyond a threshold further increases in intended expected punishment create incentives for organized crime to extend corruption rings and ensuing impunity results in a fall of actual expected punishment that yields more rather than less crime

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

poverty political freedom and the roots of terrorism this article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level in contrast with the previous literature on this subject which focuses on transnational terrorism only i use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism in line with the results of some recent studies this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries once the effects of other country specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account political freedom is shown to explain terrorism but it does so in a non monotonic way countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes this result suggests that as experienced recently in iraq and previously in spain and russia transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism finally the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

thou shalt not covet prohibitions temptation and moral values abstract this paper proposes a theory of the relationship between prohibitions and temptation in the presence of self control problems moral values may increase individual material welfare and utility by serving as a self commitment device the model investigates the relationship between morality and temptation the individual gains from morality the interaction between external sanctions and moral self punishment and the spread and strength of individually optimal moral values the empirical analysis based on survey data for a large set of countries documents a hump shaped pattern of morality in social class which supports the theoretical predictions of the model

does social capital reduce crime abstract we investigate the effects of civic norms and associational networks on crime rates civic norms may attach guilt and shame to criminal behavior thus increasing its opportunity cost associational networks may increase returns to noncriminal activities and raise detection probabilities but they may also work as communication channels for criminals and may offer official cover to criminal activities the empirical assessment of these effects poses serious problems of endogeneity omitted variables measurement error and spatial correlation italy s great variance in social and economic characteristics its homogeneity in policies and institutions and the availability of historical data on social capital in its regions allow us to minimize the first two problems to tackle the last two problems we use report rate adjusted crime rates and estimate a spatial lag model we find that both civic norms and associational networks have a negative and significant effect on property crimes across italia

identifying the effect of unemployment on crime abstract in this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and crime using u s state data we estimate the effect of unemployment on the rates of seven felony offenses we control extensively for state level demographic and economic factors and estimate specifications that include state specific time trends state effects and year effects in addition we use prime defense contracts and a state specific measure of exposure to oil shocks as instruments for unemployment rates we find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime rates that are stable across model specifications our estimates suggest that a substantial portion of the decline in property crime rates during the 1990s is attributable to the decline in the unemployment rate the evidence for violent crime is considerably weaker however a closer analysis of the violent crime of rape yields some evidence that the employment prospects of males are weakly related to state rape rates

the role of social capital in financial development to identify the effect of social capital on financial development we exploit social capital differences within italy in high social capital areas households are more likely to use checks invest less in cash and more in stock have higher access to institutional credit and make less use of informal credit the effect of social capital is stronger where legal enforcement is weaker and among less educated people these results are not driven by omitted environmental variables since we show that the behavior of movers is still affected by the level of social capital of the province where they were born

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

regional transformation through technological entrepreneurship abstract what does it take for a region to foster technological entrepreneurship recently there has been significant interest in this topic most writers on this topic emphasize the tangible infrastructure such as sound legal systems transparent capital markets advanced telecommunications and transportation systems etc sound legal systems capital markets and other structural features are necessary prerequisites for technopreneurship however what i am calling the intangibles of entrepreneurship are the sufficient conditions that allow specifically for schumpeterian entrepreneurship to thrive in a locality often governments attempt to promote technopreneurship by injecting risk capital they distribute these funds through small business development centers and several regions and countries have even attempted public venture capital funds however my hypothesis is that if only risk capital is injected it flows straight to low quality entrepreneurship focusing on only risk capital the investing government assumes that the risk capital itself will create all other prerequisites for growth this is a major supposition if risk capital is expected to produce extraordinary wealth it must be accompanied by seven other intangibles including access to novel ideas role models informal forums region specific opportunities safety nets access to large markets and executive leadership

crime in europe and the united states dissecting the reversal of misfortunes contrary to common perceptions today both property and violent crimes with the exception of homicides are more widespread in europe than in the united states while the opposite was true thirty years ago we label this fact as the reversal of misfortunes we investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes incarceration abortion unemployment and immigration on crime for this we use time series data 1970 2008 from seven european countries and the united states we find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in europe our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether such a policy would also be efficient from a cost benefit point of view we leave this to future research paolo buonanno francesco drago roberto galbiati and giulio zanella

social closure surnames and crime this paper studies the effect of social closure on crime and tax evasion rates using disaggregated data for italian municipalities we propose an original and innovative measure of social closure based on the diversity of surname distribution which reflects a community s history of migration and inbreeding we find that all else equal communities with a history of social closure have lower crime rates and higher tax evasion rates than more open communities the effect of social closure is likely to be causal it is relevant in magnitude statistically significant and robust to changes in the set of included controls in the specific measures of dependent and independent variables in the specification of the regression equation and in the possible sample splits our findings are consistent with the idea that social closure strengthens social sanctions and social control thus leading to more cooperative outcomes in local interactions but it reduces cooperation on a larger scale

a structural model of crime and inequality in colombia economic theory suggests that inequality should influence crime positively yet the evidence in favor of that hypothesis is weak pure cross sectional analyses show significant positive effects but cannot control for fixed effects time series and panel data point to a variety of results but few turn out being significant the hypothesis maintained in this paper is that it is a specific part of the distribution rather than the overall distribution as summarized by conventional inequality measures that is most likely to influence the rate of property crime in a given society using a simple theoretical model and panel data in seven colombian cities over a fifteen year period a structural model is proposed that permits identifying the precise segment of the population whose relative income best explains time changes in crime jel k42 d63 o15

crime inequality and unemployment there is much discussion of the relationships between crime inequality and unemployment we construct a model where all three are endogenous we find that introducing crime into otherwise standard models of labor markets has several interesting implications for example it can lead to wage inequality among homogeneous workers also it can generate multiple equilibria in natural but previously unexplored ways hence two identical neighborhoods can end up with different levels of crime inequality and unemployment we discuss the effects of anti crime policies like changing jail sentences as well as more traditional labor market policies like changing unemployment insurance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a matter of location the role of regional social capital in overcoming the liability of newness in r d acquisition activities laursen k masciarelli f and reichstein t a matter of location the role of regional social capital in overcoming the liability of newness in r d acquisition activities regional studies external knowledge acquisition is a precondition for firms competitive advantage however young firms exhibit a lower propensity to acquire external research and development r d than their older counterparts the paper explores the role of regional social capital in moderating this aspect of the liability of newness the results show that young firms operating in regions with low levels of social capital are less likely to acquire r d externally however this is not the case in regions with high levels of social capital suggesting that the liability of newness in terms of acquisition of external r d does not play a role in these regions

foreign direct investment in the uk evidence from a disaggregated panel of the uk food sector most empirical studies of foreign direct investment fdi typically use either a cross sectional capturing ownership specific and industry determinants or time series capturing the determinants of fdi over time approach panel data techniques however have the advantage of combining both aspects of the data using disaggregated panel data for the uk food sector a leading recipient of fdi in the uk the results in this paper highlight the predominance of ownership specific and industry characteristics in determining the presence of foreign owned firms in this sector while macro economic factors have a more marginal effect

strong and weak ties in employment and crime this paper analyzes the interplay between social structure and information exchange in two competing activities crime and labor we consider a dynamic model in which individuals belong to mutually exclusive two person groups referred to as dyads there are multiple equilibria if jobs are badly paid and or crime is profitable unemployment benefits have to be low enough to prevent workers for staying too long in the unemployment status because they are vulnerable to crime activities if instead jobs are well paid and or crime is not profitable unemployment benefits have to be high enough to induce workers to stay unemployed rather to commit crime because they are less vulnerable to crime activities also in segregated neighborhoods characterized by high interactions between peers a policy only based on punishment and arrest will not be efficient in reducing crime it has to be accompanied by other types of policies that take into account social interactions

was weber wrong a human capital theory of protestant economic history max weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of protestant regions to a protestant work ethic we provide an alternative theory protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity we test the theory using county level data from late nineteenth century prussia exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the reformation to use distance to wittenberg as an instrument for protestantism we find that protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity but also to better education our results are consistent with protestants higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity

can cultural norms reduce conflicts confucianism and peasant rebellions in qing china abstract can culture mitigate conflicts triggered by economic shocks in light of the extraordinary emphasis that confucianism places on subordination and pacifism we examine its role in possibly attenuating peasant rebellion within the historical context of china circa 1651 1910 our analysis finds that while crop failure triggers peasant rebellion its effect is significantly smaller in counties characterized by stronger confucian norms as proxied by confucian temples and chaste women this result remains robust after controlling for a long list of covariates and instrumenting confucian norms using ancient confucian sages 500 b c a d 550 to address concerns of measurement error and reverse causality

does social capital matter in corporate decisions evidence from corporate tax avoidance we investigate whether the levels of social capital in u s counties as captured by strength of civic norms and density of social networks in the counties are systematically related to tax avoidance activities of corporations with headquarters located in the counties we find strong negative associations between social capital and corporate tax avoidance as captured by effective tax rates and book tax differences these results are incremental to the effects of local religiosity and firm culture toward socially irresponsible activities they are robust to using organ donation as an alternative social capital proxy and fixed effect regressions they extend to aggressive tax avoidance practices additionally we provide corroborating evidence using firms with headquarters relocation that changes the exposure to social capital we conclude that social capital surrounding corporate headquarters provides environmental influences constraining corporate tax avoidance

innovative opportunity pursuit human capital and business ownership experience in an emerging region evidence from ghana this study explores whether an entrepreneur s ability to assemble and leverage human capital particularly specific human capital relating to prior business ownership experience is associated with seven types of product and work practices innovation in an emerging region namely ghana logistic regression estimation revealed that portfolio entrepreneurs were more likely than novice entrepreneurs to report innovation tried multinomial logistic regression analysis revealed that portfolio entrepreneurs were more likely than other entrepreneurs to report innovation tried and introduced if the goals of policy are to increase the quality of new business start ups and maximize investment returns there is a case to target assistance to portfolio entrepreneurs

locational advantage and us foreign direct investment in uk manufacturing the relationship between foreign direct investment fdi and international trade is examined with specific reference to us fdi in the uk four complementary hypotheses are tested on a cross section of uk industries there is evidence of us fdi being located in uk industries which have a revealed comparative advantage and that large market size effects are important on the other hand little evidence was found for the protection jumping and industrial concentration hypotheses

market wages and youth crime to study the problem of widespread youth crime i analyze a timeallocation model in which consumers face parametric wages and diminishing marginal returns to crime the theory motivates an econometric model that i estimate using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth my estimates suggest that youth behavior is responsive to price incentives and that falling real wages may have been an important determinant of rising youth crime during the 1970s and 1980s moreover wage differentials explain a substantial component of both the racial differential in criminal participation and the age distribution of crime

diffusing knowledge while spreading god s message protestantism and economic prosperity in china 1840 1920 we provide an account of how protestantism promoted economic prosperity in china a country in which protestant missionaries penetrated far and wide during 1840 1920 but only a tiny fraction of the population had converted to christianity by exploiting the spatial variation in the missionaries retreat due to the boxer uprising to identify the diusion of protestantism we

violent crime does social capital matter this paper examines empirically the effect of some commonly used indicators of social capital such as the prevalence of trust on community members and the participation in voluntary secular and religious organizations on the incidence of violent crimes this is a cross country study whose basic sample consists of 39 developed and developing countries and whose dependent variable is the national intentional homicide rate the paper identifies and deals with three challenges in the empirical estimation of the effect of social capital on the incidence of violent crimes the omittedvariable problem is dealt with by including income inequality and economic growth as additional determinants of a country s violent crime rate the joint endogeneity or reverse causation problem is accounted for by using instrumental variables for social capital in the crime regression the specificity problem that is the potentially opposite effects of group specific and society wide social capital is noted and addressed only indirectly by emphasizing the results applied to the social capital indicators that have application for society as a whole the main result of the paper is that only the component of social capital measured by trust on community members has the effect of reducing the incidence of violent crimes the results regarding measures of other indicators of social capital are rather unclear this may be due to a combination of limited samples inability to fully control for reverse causation and most likely the opposite effects that society wide and group specific social capital may have on violent crime lederman and menendez are economists with the office of the chief economist for latin america and the caribbean of the world bank loayza is a senior economist with the research department of the central bank of chile and he is currently on leave from the development economics research group of the world bank the opinions expressed herein should not be attributed to the world bank the authors are grateful to ed glaeser jeff grogger gale johnson sanjay marwah steve messner nicholas sambanis and an anonymous referee for invaluable comments and suggestions the authors are responsible for any remaining errors

the role of freedom growth and religion in the taste for revolution a fundamental question about the determinants of civil conflict is the relative importance of political freedoms versus economic development this paper takes a new approach to provide an answer by using micro data based on surveys of revolutionary tastes of 130 000 people living in 61 nations between 1981 and 1997 controlling for personal characteristics country and year fixed effects more freedom and economic growth both reduce revolutionary support losing one level of freedom equivalent to a shift from the us to turkey increases support for revolt by 4 percentage points to reduce support by the same amount requires adding 14 percentage points onto the gdp growth rate being muslim in a free country has no effect on the probability of supporting revolt compared to a non religious person however being muslim in a country that is not free increases it by 13 percentage points being christian in a free country decreases the chance of supporting revolt by 4 percentage points compared to a non religious person and in a not free country by 1 percentage point

foreign and domestic multinational presence in the uk the determinants of multinational presence in uk manufacturing industry in 1979 are analysed it is argued that maultinational presence may result from strategic interaction as well as other firm and industry characteristics the determinants of both foreign and uk multinational presence are estimated using a dataset that enables both types of multinational to be indentified results show an important effect of both scale and concentration on multinational presence

population size and civil conflict risk is there a causal link does an expansion of the population size expose nation states to a higher risk of suffering from civil conflict obtaining empirical evidence for a causal relationship is difficult due to reverse effects and omitted variable bias this article addresses causality issues by using randomly occurring drought as an instrumental variable to generate exogenous variation in population size for a panel of 37 sub saharan countries over the period 1981 2004 instrumental variable estimates yield that a 5 increase in population size raises the risk of civil conflict by around six percentage points

determinants of foreign direct investment a tale of nine theoretical models abstract this paper presents a review of nine theoretical models of foreign direct investment fdi discussed are early studies of determinants of fdi 1 as well as determinants of fdi based on the neoclassical trade theory 2 ownership advantages 3 aggregate variables 4 the ownership location and internalization advantage framework 5 horizontal and vertical fdi models 6 the knowledge capital model 7 diversified fdi and risk diversification models 8 and policy variables 9 from each of the nine theories the relevant determinants of fdi are derived empirical studies indicate the importance of these determinants in the real world the paper shows that there is not one single theory of fdi but a variety of theoretical models attempting to explain fdi and the location decision of multinational firms therefore any analysis of determinants of fdi should not be based on a single theoretical model instead fdi should be explained more broadly by a combination of factors from a variety of theoretical models such as ownership advantages or agglomeration economics market size and characteristics cost factors transport costs protection risk factors and policy variables

climate shocks state capacity and peasant uprisings in north china during 25 1911 ce china provides an interesting case study of civil conflict because of her long history and rich records using a unique dynastic panel dataset for north china during 25 1911 ce this study finds that severe famines and dynastic age were positively correlated with peasant uprisings whereas government disaster relief as a proxy for state capacity played a significant mitigating role negative climate shocks e g severe drought locust plagues affected peasant uprisings primarily through the channel of severe famines the effects of population density temperature and other climate shocks e g flood levee breaches snow disasters and frost were either not robust or insignificant

neighborhood effects on crime for female and male youth evidence from a randomized housing voucher experiment the moving to opportunity mto demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities we use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by mto to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency the offer to relocate to lower poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes relative to a control group for males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime at least in the short run but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests the gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments

information costs and location of fdis within the host country empirical evidence from italy the literature on foreign direct investments fdis has analysed the location strategies of multinational enterprises across national borders but there have been few studies of location decisions by foreign investors within the borders of a single country the paper argues that the driving factors of these location choices have differing influences on indigenous and foreign investors specifically foreign investors suffer from a condition of adverse asymmetry in information costs compared to insiders thus foreign investors decisions on the location of their activities within a host country mainly reflect a rational responses to the existence of information costs

long lasting differences in civic capital evidence from a unique immigration event in italy a range of evidence exists demonstrating that social capital is associated with a number of important economic outcomes such as economic growth trade and crime a recent literature goes further to illustrate how historical events and variation can lead to the development of differing and consequential social norms this paper examines the related questions of how persistent initial variations in social capital are and the extent to which immigrant groups do or do not converge to the cultural and social norms of their recipient country by examining a unique and geographically concentrated immigration event in 16th century italy we demonstrate that despite the substantial time since migration these communities still display different behavior consistent with higher civic capital than other comparable italian communities moreover we demonstrate that this difference does not appear to have changed over the last 70 years for instance differences in voter turnout apparent in the late 1940s remain in the 21st century this latter finding has implications for our view of the likelihood of assimilation of immigrant groups to local norms particularly in cases of large scale migration

sharing cities and sustainable consumption and production towards an integrated framework calls for a transformation towards more sustainable consumption and production scp have been intensifying as urban populations swell across the planet cities are faced with increasing pressure on infrastructure economic and ecological systems yet with their high population densities and ubiquity of information and communication technologies cities are becoming breeding grounds for a new circular economy driven by emerging and long standing sharing activities this research provides a comprehensive view of scp systems in cities by integrating and examining sharing economy activities in the context of two continuums i e scp and private public orientation based on these two analytical dimensions the paper evaluates and plots five groups of 18 sharing activities to create a sharing cities scp typology comprised by five ideal types each of these five types represents a unique form of scp activity with the potential to directly impact scp systems in the context of urban environments by enabling diversity and hybridity in the scp analysis we allow for a theoretical expansion of scp models and a new way of understanding how they may play out in cities