Flexibility in International Agreements

This chapter is a contribution to the forthcoming edited volume INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: TAKING STOCK (Jeffrey Dunoff & Mark A. Pollack eds., Cambridge University Press 2012). The chapter provides an overview of flexibility mechanisms in international agreements and the role of such mechanisms in promoting or inhibiting international cooperation. Part I reviews the many flexibility devices available to treaty makers. It divides these tools into two broad categories: formal mechanisms (such as reservations, escape clauses, and withdrawal provisions) and informal practices (such as auto-interpretation, nonparticipation, and noncompliance). Part II reviews the international law and international relations scholarship on the design and use of treaty flexibility mechanisms, focusing on studies of exit and escape clauses. Part III highlights several conclusions that emerge from the burgeoning literature on treaty flexibility and suggests avenues for future research

Lead Pipes and Child Mortality

Beginning around 1880, public health issues and engineering advances spurred the installation of city water and sewer systems. As part of this growth, many cities chose to use lead service pipes to connect residences to city water systems. This choice had negative consequences for child mortality, although the consequences were often hard to observe amid the overall falling death rates. This paper uses national data from the public use sample of the 1900 Census of Population and data on city use of lead pipes in 1897 to estimate the effect of lead pipes on child mortality. In 1900, 29 percent of the married women in the United States who had given birth to at least one child and were age forty-five or younger lived in locations where lead service pipes were used to deliver water. Because the effect of lead pipes depended on the acidity and hardness of the water, much of the negative effect was concentrated on the densely populated eastern seaboard. In the full sample, women who lived on the eastern seaboard in cities with lead pipes experienced increased child mortality of 9.3 percent relative to the sample average. These estimates suggest that the number of child deaths attributable to the use of lead pipes numbered in the tens of thousands. Many surviving children may have experienced substantial IQ impairment as a result of lead exposure. The tragedy is that lead problems were avoidable, particularly once data became available on the toxicity of lead. These findings have implications for current policy and events.

The Role of Public Policy in Skills Development of Black Workers in the 21st Century

This paper discusses the role of public policy in the skills development system of the U.S. It further examines the implications of that policy for the skill development and career progression of black workers. The paper describes the current "system" for skills development in the United States as a two-tiered system: The "first-chance" or conventional system allows individuals to proceed through an extensive public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational sector that is supplemented by private educational institutions and is followed by employer-provided job training and work experience. The "second-chance" system is designed for individuals who do not successfully traverse the first-chance system. The second-chance system includes public job training programs, public assistance, rehabilitation programs for offenders, and educational remediation. The public agency for labor market exchange, the Employment Service, has tended to play a significant role in facilitating employment in the second-chance system. Paradoxically, despite the tremendous success of the U.S. economy, including the fact that it has the world's leading level of worker productivity, there is a pervasive perception that the current system for skills development in the U.S. is failing. Lagging school achievement (particularly in urban areas), high unemployment rates for certain groups of the population, and employer concerns about the quality of entry level workers suggest that the current system may be neither efficient nor equitable. The paper starts out by considering the rationale for public policy intervention in the skills development process. It then reviews public policy at the federal, state, and local levels that fosters skills development. At the federal level, the major policy emphasis currently is the consolidation of job training and labor market exchange programs through the Workforce Investment Act (WIA). State and local entities administer federal programs, but many states have also enacted supplemental programs in the area of skills development. After examining specific federal and state/local policy, the paper reviews recent policy demonstrations in the area of skills development. The review of the evaluative evidence leads to several general "best practice" principles about content, delivery mechanisms, and administrative characteristics. The last section of the paper reviews how well federal WIA programs are likely to fare against the best practices criteria. The major thrusts in skills development policy have been accountability, market-driven choice, decentralization/devolution, emphasis on immediate work, private-sector leadership, and consolidation. The policy characteristics that are in disfavor seem to be eligibility set asides, process regulations, service delivery by administrative agencies, subsidized education and training, technical assistance, and research and development. African Americans, who reside disproportionately in urban areas and who participate in the second-chance system, will be affected by these changes in emphasis. Public policy has evolved from a top-down, centralized system with regulatory protections and emphasis on equal access to an open, decentralized system operated largely by state bureaucrats and governed by individuals at the local level who happen to take an interest and who happen to know the right individuals at the right time. Theoretical arguments can be made that the new system will be more efficient and more equitable and counterarguments can be offered that the system will result in outcomes that are highly varied across localities and racial groups.public policy, skill development, careers, blacks, Bartik, Hollenbeck

Heterogeneity of Research Results: A New Perspective From Which to Assess and Promote Progress in Psychological Science

Heterogeneity emerges when multiple close or conceptual replications on the same subject produce results that vary more than expected from the sampling error. Here we argue that unexplained heterogeneity reflects a lack of coherence between the concepts applied and data observed and therefore a lack of understanding of the subject matter. Typical levels of heterogeneity thus offer a useful but neglected perspective on the levels of understanding achieved in psychological science. Focusing on continuous outcome variables, we surveyed heterogeneity in 150 meta-analyses from cognitive, organizational, and social psychology and 57 multiple close replications. Heterogeneity proved to be very high in meta-analyses, with powerful moderators being conspicuously absent. Population effects in the average meta-analysis vary from small to very large for reasons that are typically not understood. In contrast, heterogeneity was moderate in close replications. A newly identified relationship between heterogeneity and effect size allowed us to make predictions about expected heterogeneity levels. We discuss important implications for the formulation and evaluation of theories in psychology. On the basis of insights from the history and philosophy of science, we argue that the reduction of heterogeneity is important for progress in psychology and its practical applications, and we suggest changes to our collective research practice toward this end

Doing good or doing nothing? Celebrity, media and philanthropy in China

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com. Based on a statistical analysis of 91 celebrity-endorsed charities in the People’s Republic of China, this paper challenges the popular assumption that celebrity involvement with not-for-profit organisations attracts extensive media coverage. Although China is the largest media market in the world, previous studies of celebrity philanthropy have been conducted almost exclusively in a Western context. Such studies argue passionately for and against the role that celebrities can play in attracting attention to humanitarian causes, focusing on the activities of Western celebrities, corporations and consumers as essential or problematic promoters and providers of aid to people in developing countries. We show that – in China, at least – most of this debate is overblown. Rather than arguing in favour of or against celebrity philanthropy, we provide statistical results suggesting that celebrity endorsement has very little impact on press coverage of charities

A Realist Defense of the Alien Tort Statute

This Article offers a new justification for modern litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a provision from the 1789 Judiciary Act that permits victims of human rights violations anywhere in the world to sue tortfeasors in U.S. courts. The ATS, moribund for nearly 200 years, has recently emerged as an important but controversial tool for the enforcement of human rights norms. “Realist” critics contend that ATS litigation exasperates U.S. allies and rivals, weakens efforts to combat terrorism, and threatens U.S. sovereignty by importing into our jurisprudence undemocratic international law norms. Defenders of the statute, largely because they do not share the critics‟ realist assumptions about international relations, have so far declined to engage with the cost-benefit critique of ATS litigation and instead justify the ATS as a key component in a global human rights regime. This Article addresses the realists‟ critique on its own terms, offering the first defense of ATS litigation that is itself rooted in realism—the view that nations are unitary, rational actors pursuing their security in an anarchic world and obeying international law only when it suits their interests. In particular, this Article identifies three flaws in the current realist ATS critique. First, critics rely on speculation about catastrophic future costs without giving sufficient weight to the actual history of ATS litigation and to the prudential and substantive limits courts have already imposed on it. Second, critics‟ fears about the sovereignty costs that will arise when federal courts incorporate international-law norms into domestic law are overblown because U.S. law already reflects the limited set of universal norms, such as torture and genocide, that are actionable under the ATS. Finally, this realist critique fails to overcome the incoherence created by contending that the exercise of jurisdiction by the courts may harm U.S. interests while also assuming that nations are unitary, rational actors. Moving beyond the current realist ATS critique, this Article offers a new, positive realist argument for ATS litigation. This Article suggests that, in practice, the U.S. government as a whole pursues its security and economic interests in ATS litigation by signaling cooperativeness through respect for human rights while also ensuring that the law is developed on U.S. terms. This realist understanding, offered here for the first time, both explains the persistence of ATS litigation and bridges the gap that has frustrated efforts to weigh the ATS‟s true costs and benefits

Essays in Macroeconomics and Financial Economics

This dissertation contains three essays in macroeconomics and financial economics that aim to understand the importance of information and intermediaries on aggregate fluctuations, and consequently, the role of macroeconomic policy. Chapter 1 provides direct evidence of the importance of firm attention to macroeconomic dynamics. This chapter develops a text-based measure of firm attention to macroeconomic news and documents firm attention that is polarized and countercyclical. Differences in attention lead to asymmetric responses to monetary policy: expansionary monetary shocks raise stock returns of attentive firms more than those of inattentive firms, and contractionary shocks lower returns of attentive firms by less. In a quantitative model of rationally inattentive firms with parameters for information frictions calibrated using the text-based measure, firms invest in attention endogenously and face heterogeneous information costs. Less attentive firms adjust prices slowly in response to monetary innovations, which yields non-neutrality. As average attention varies over the business cycle, so does the efficacy of monetary policy. Chapter 2 provides empirical evidence of the causal effects of changes in financial intermediaries' net worth in the aggregate economy. The empirical strategy developed in this chapter identifies financial shocks as the high-frequency changes in the market value of intermediaries' net worth in a narrow window around their earnings announcements, based on tick-by-tick data. News of declines in U.S. intermediaries' net worth leads to significant declines in the market value of nonfinancial firms. These effects are more pronounced for small firms and when the aggregate net worth of financial intermediaries is low. In addition, this chapter discusses channels through which intermediaries affect nonfinancial firms, which provides evidence of the effect of intermediaries on corporate borrowing costs. Chapter 3 provides empirical evidence that economic narratives influence consumer sentiment. It develops a framework that captures news narratives of economic events using natural language processing and traces consumers' exposure to different narratives using retweeting activities. The framework is applied to study the narratives surrounding the yield curve inversion. Exposure to the negative narrative of an imminent recession causes consumers to display a more pessimistic sentiment, while exposure to the positive narrative that recession concerns are overblown leads to no change in consumer sentiment.PHDEconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169936/1/wtsong_1.pd

Technopanics, Threat Inflation, and the Danger of an Information Technology Precautionary Principle

Fear is an extremely powerful motivational force. In public policy debates, appeals to fear are often used in an attempt to sway opinion or bolster the case for action. Such appeals are used to convince citizens that threats to individual or social well-being may be avoided only if specific steps are taken. Often these steps take the form of anticipatory regulation based on the precautionary principle. Such “fear appeal arguments” are frequently on display in the Internet policy arena and often take the form of a full-blown “moral panic” or “technopanic.” These panics are intense public, political, and academic responses to the emergence or use of media or technologies, especially by the young. In the extreme, they result in regulation or censorship. This paper considers the structure of fear appeal arguments in technology policy debates, and then outlines how those arguments can be deconstructed and refuted in both cultural and economic contexts. Several examples of fear appeal arguments are offered with a particular focus on online child safety, digital privacy, and cybersecurity. To the extent that these concerns are valid, they are best addressed by ongoing societal learning, experimentation, resiliency, and coping strategies rather than by regulation. If steps must be taken to address these concerns, education and empowerment-based solutions represent superior approaches to dealing with them compared to a precautionary principle approach, which would limit beneficial learning opportunities and retard technological progress

Between a Rock and a Soft Place: Ecological and Feminist Economics in Policy Debates

The field of ecological economics includes both economic analysis on the one hand, and discussions of normative values and visions for society, on the other. Using feminist insights into cultural beliefs about the relative “hardness” and “softness” of these two sides, this essay discusses how ecological economists can use this unique “between” space in order to better inform policy. The current crisis of global climate change, it is argued, requires that economists move beyond modeling and measurement, while ecological thinkers need to re-examine beliefs about markets and profit