18 research outputs found

    De Facto Judicial Independence and Physical Integrity Rights

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    Economists, political scientists, and legal scholars have argued that independent judiciaries have an important role to play in promoting economic development and protecting property rights. We argue that judicial independence can also have a positive impact on the protection of human rights. To assess the human rights impact of a de facto independent judiciary, we also argue that scholars must account for the potential of endogeneity between judicial independence and protection of human rights. We examine whether greater de facto independence improves government respect for citizens’ physical integrity rights, using a comprehensive dataset of 193 countries from 1981 to 2010. Employing an instrumental variables approach to control for endogeneity, we find strong support for the argument that greater levels of de facto judicial independence improve government respect for physical integrity rights. These findings are robust to changes in measurement, estimation techniques, and model specification. Failing to account for endogeneity will tend to overemphasize the ability of completely independent courts to improve government respect for physical integrity rights

    Trade and Strike Activity in the Postwar United States

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    This paper examines the effect of international trade on strike activity within the United States since World War II. Globalization may influence strike activity through its effects on the bargaining position of labor. Alternatively, if labor and management take their changed bargaining positions into account, the rate of change in openness could create greater uncertainty in negotiations between them and lead to more strikes as a result. Empirical analysis of strike activity in the 50 states over this period supports the argument concerning uncertainty in the bargaining process. Import competition may also indirectly reduce strike activity by decreasing union density
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