International Economic Sanctions: Improving the Haphazard U.S. Legal Regime

The United States has resorted increasingly to economic sanctions as a major tool in its foreign policy. Recent targets include Panama, South Africa, Nicaragua, Libya, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Iran. These sanctions encompass controls on government programs (such as foreign aid), US. exports, imports, private financial transactions, and assistance by international financial institutions. In this Article, Professor Carter demonstrates that the present US. legal regime governing the use of sanctions for foreign policy reasons is haphazard and in need of reform. Current US. laws provide the President with nearly unfettered authority to cut off government programs and exports, but very little nonemergency authority in other areas, such as the regulation of imports and private financial transactions. This imbalance either skews presidential decisionmaking toward the use of easily imposed sanctions that might not be in the best interests of the United States, or encourages presidential declarations of dubious national emergencies to invoke his sweeping emergency powers. Professor Carter proposes thoroughgoing but selective reform of the present legal regime. He recommends correcting the disparity in the President\u27s nonemergency authority by substantially increasing the President\u27s authority over imports and private financial transactions, while reducing the control over exports. He also proposes trimming the President\u27s ability to employ emergency powers for imposing economic sanctions

From Learning Adviser to Coordinator: A Professional Career Arc

A colleague and good friend once remarked to me that as a child, no-one ever plans to grow up to be a Learning Adviser. Indeed, our careers are often haphazard and ad hoc, but it is often easier to impose some semblance of order on them part-way through. A professional vision often has 20/20 hindsight, as well.University Writing Cente

The Power of Strategic Mission Investing

A growing number of foundations are offering low-interest loans, buying into green business ventures, and investing in other asset classes to advance their missions. Yet most mission investing remains haphazard and inconsequential. To bring about real change, foundations need to take a fundamentally different approach, making strategic mission investments that complement their grantmaking. Authors Mark Kramer and Sarah Cooch talk about strategic mission investing in the Fall 2007 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review

Did trade policy foster Italian industrialization evidences from the effective production rates 1870-1930

Trade policy, and its effects oftariffs on structural change and industrialization, is arguably the 1110st contentious topic in Italian economic history. However, so far the discussion has relied almost exclusively on few scattered data and anecdotal evidence. This article builds on a comprehensive data-base of nominal and effective protection rates to test the main hypotheses put forward in the literature. We show that there is little evidence of a deliberate strategy to foster industrialization, or of any consisted strategy at aH. So we argue that the actual lay-out of Italian duties was the somewhat haphazard outcome of several causes, notably the need for revenue and the lobbying by sectional interests

Isolation in the construction of natural experiments

A natural experiment is a type of observational study in which treatment assignment, though not randomized by the investigator, is plausibly close to random. A process that assigns treatments in a highly nonrandom, inequitable manner may, in rare and brief moments, assign aspects of treatments at random or nearly so. Isolating those moments and aspects may extract a natural experiment from a setting in which treatment assignment is otherwise quite biased, far from random. Isolation is a tool that focuses on those rare, brief instances, extracting a small natural experiment from otherwise useless data. We discuss the theory behind isolation and illustrate its use in a reanalysis of a well-known study of the effects of fertility on workforce participation. Whether a woman becomes pregnant at a certain moment in her life and whether she brings that pregnancy to term may reflect her aspirations for family, education and career, the degree of control she exerts over her fertility, and the quality of her relationship with the father; moreover, these aspirations and relationships are unlikely to be recorded with precision in surveys and censuses, and they may confound studies of workforce participation. However, given that a women is pregnant and will bring the pregnancy to term, whether she will have twins or a single child is, to a large extent, simply luck. Given that a woman is pregnant at a certain moment, the differential comparison of two types of pregnancies on workforce participation, twins or a single child, may be close to randomized, not biased by unmeasured aspirations. In this comparison, we find in our case study that mothers of twins had more children but only slightly reduced workforce participation, approximately 5% less time at work for an additional child.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS770 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Emotional Barriers to Job Search Success: Job Search Anxiety during University-to-Work Transitions

No abstract available

When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments

As online shopping becomes ever more prevalent, customers rely increasingly on product rating websites for making purchase decisions. The reliability of online ratings, however, is potentially compromised by the so-called herding effect: when rating a product, customers may be biased to follow other customers' previous ratings of the same product. This is problematic because it skews long-term customer perception through haphazard early ratings. The study of herding poses methodological challenges. In particular, observational studies are impeded by the lack of counterfactuals: simply correlating early with subsequent ratings is insufficient because we cannot know what the subsequent ratings would have looked like had the first ratings been different. The methodology introduced here exploits a setting that comes close to an experiment, although it is purely observational---a natural experiment. Our key methodological device consists in studying the same product on two separate rating sites, focusing on products that received a high first rating on one site, and a low first rating on the other. This largely controls for confounds such as a product's inherent quality, advertising, and producer identity, and lets us isolate the effect of the first rating on subsequent ratings. In a case study, we focus on beers as products and jointly study two beer rating sites, but our method applies to any pair of sites across which products can be matched. We find clear evidence of herding in beer ratings. For instance, if a beer receives a very high first rating, its second rating is on average half a standard deviation higher, compared to a situation where the identical beer receives a very low first rating. Moreover, herding effects tend to last a long time and are noticeable even after 20 or more ratings. Our results have important implications for the design of better rating systems.Comment: Submitted at WWW2018 - April 2018 (10 pages, 6 figures, 6 tables); Added Acknowledgement