Financial Opening: Evidence and Policy Options

This paper evaluates the empirical evidence of increasing the chances of financial crises induced by opening up developing countries to short-term capital inflows, and appraises the various proposals made for mitigating the severity of financial crises. We point out that there is solid evidence that financial opening increases the chance of financial crises. There is more tenuous evidence that financial opening contributes positively to long-run growth. Hence, there may be a complex trade off between the adverse intermediate run and the beneficial long run effects of financial opening. The literature is abounded with proposals aimed at improving this intertemporal trade-off, reducing the costs of financial crises. A version of the Lucas critic may limit the welfare gain of these proposals. Hence, a better understanding of the structural characteristics leading to exposure and crises is the key for designing a successful restructuring of the global capital market. Some of the reforms may fall short of success due to coordination failure: they may be effective only if they were adopted comprehensively by all the relevant financial centers. Finally, some of the proposals may be too optimistic, ignoring the time inconsistency and political economy considerations, as well as presuming the ability to verify unambiguously the quality of adjustment.

A comparative perspective on reforming the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act

This model grants to legislatures ultimate responsibility for the resolution of controversial rights issues while at the same time seeking to improve the rights sensitivity of the legislative process and increasing the rights protective powers of courts as compared with the traditional institutional form of parliamentary supremacy. Summary As an academic comparative constitutional lawyer, I come to the recent Constitutional Advisory Panel report and the issue of whether and how the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) should be reformed from a particular – perhaps idiosyncratic – perspective. This is viewing the NZBORA as an influential version of a new general model of constitutionalism. This model grants to legislatures ultimate responsibility for the resolution of controversial rights issues while at the same time seeking to improve the rights sensitivity of the legislative process and increasing the rights protective powers of courts as compared with the traditional institutional form of parliamentary supremacy. At least in theory and aspiration, this general model provides an alternative to both the latter, venerable form of constitutional arrangement and its conventional rival, the model of constitutional supremacy, involving a fully constitutionalised regime of supreme, entrenched law enforced by the power of one or more courts to invalidate inconsistent statutes. As an experiment, this new model seeks to create greater balance between courts and legislatures on the resolution of contested rights issues than the traditional alternatives, whilst also providing an effective regime of rights protection. &nbsp

Rationalizing Noneconomic Damages: A Health-Utilities Approach

Studdert et al examine why making compensation of noneconomic damages in personal-injury litigation more rational and predictable is socially valuable. Noneconomic-damages schedules as an alternative to caps are discussed, several potential approaches to construction of schedules are reviewed, and the use of a health-utilities approach as the most promising model is argued. An empirical analysis that combines health-utilities data created in a previous study with original empirical work is used to demonstrate how key steps in construction of a health-utilities-based schedule for noneconomic damages might proceed

Public Support for Economic and Military Coercion and Audience Costs

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Wiley via the DOI in this record.I specify the role public support for economic and military coercion and reactions to executive inconsistencies play in generating and/or weakening approval for executives. In times of international crises, these factors may compete against each other when it comes to determining public approval. To examine this claim, I conducted a survey experiment on a representative sample of adults to determine when audiences will support economic or military coercion, and how this willingness to support specific coercive action affects their evaluation of the executive’s handling of international crises. I find that public policy preferences can have a stronger effect than a preference for having a leader behave consistently. Specifically, I find that, (1) executive inconsistency is not punished when a leader backs down from a military commitment in a non-threatening crisis, (2) executive inconsistencies are not only punished in military disputes but also in cases of economic coercion (punishment is in fact more prominent in sanctions cases), and (3) executive inconsistency can be punished both in major and lesser conflicts.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (SES-1123291). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation

Do Off-Label Drug Practices Argue Against FDA Efficacy Requirements? Testing an Argument by Structured Conversations with Experts

The Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938 with amendments in 1962 is inconsistent regarding FDA certification of a drug’s efficacy. The act requires efficacy certification for the drug’s initial (“on-label”) uses, but does not require certification before physicians may prescribe for subsequent (“off-label”) uses. Are there good reasons for this inconsistency? Using a sequential online survey we carried on a “virtual conversation” with some 500 physicians. The survey asked whether efficacy requirements should be imposed on off-label uses, and almost all physicians said no. It asked whether the efficacy requirements for initial uses should be dropped, and most said no. We then gently challenged respondents asking them whether opposing efficacy requirements in one case but not the other involved an inconsistency. In response to this challenge we received hundreds of written commentaries. This investigation taps the specialized knowledge of hundreds of physicians and organizes their insights into challenges to the consistency argument. Thus, it employs a method of structured conversations with experts to test the merit of an argument. Is the consistency argument a case of “foolish consistency,” or does it hold up even under scrutiny?Food and Drug Administration; drug approval; efficacy requirements; off-label uses; on-label uses; certification; liberalization

Explaining Inefficient Policy Instruments

Distorted incentives, agricultural and trade policy reforms, national agricultural development, Agricultural and Food Policy, International Relations/Trade, F13, F14, Q17, Q18,