Worker Training in a Restructuring Economy: Evidence from the Russian Transition

We use 1994-1998 data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to measure the incidence and determinants of several types of worker training and to estimate the effects of training on workers' interindustry, interfirm, and occupational mobility, their labor force transitions, and their wage growth in Russia compared to the U.S. We hypothesize that the shock of economic liberalization in Russia may raise the benefits of training, particularly retraining for new jobs, but uncertainty concerning the revaluation of skills may raise the costs, with an overall ambiguous effect on the amount of training undertaken. The RLMS indicates a lower rate of formal training than studies have found for the U.S., suggesting that the second effect dominates. Previous schooling is estimated to affect the probability of training positively, but the relationship is much stronger for additional training in the same field than for retraining for new fields, consistent with the hypothesis that schooling and training are complementary but become more substitutable in a restructuring environment. Foreign ownership of the firm also positively affects the probability of undertaking training, providing evidence of active restructuring by foreigner investors. Additional training in workers' current fields is estimated to reduce mobility and earnings, suggesting inertial programs from the pre-transition era. Retraining in new fields increases all types of worker mobility and has higher returns than those typically observed for training in the U.S., but it also raises the variance of earnings and the probability of employment, consistent with a search view of such retraining. Given the large returns to retraining, the efforts of Russian workers to learn new skills may increase as uncertainty is resolved and restructuring proceeds.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39715/3/wp331.pd

Legislating Confession Law in Great Britain: A Statutory Approach to Police Interrogations

Part I provides an overview of the development of British confession law, including the changes under PACE. Part II examines PACE\u27s impact on related subjects, such as detention conditions, access to legal advice, and waiver of the right of access to a solicitor. Finally, Part III suggests that the British experience in developing a statutory framework to regulate these issues can serve as a model for undertaking such reforms in the United States

The Paradoxes of Paramountcy: Regional Rivalries and the Dynamics of American Hegemony in East Asia

The US plays a pivotal role in the contemporary international system and is able to shape that system to reflect its own interests. At a time when the contemporary international order is in a period of flux, and when the position of the US itself is subject to a range of internal pressures and external challenges, it is useful to try and gauge both the character of, and limits to, US hegemony. We shall examine the dynamics of US power in the context of East Asia, the region most likely to generate a challenge to US hegemony in the coming century. The first part of the paper considers the concept of hegemony. Following this, we place America's relationship with East Asia in historical context, before considering its current relationships with China, Japan and the region as a whole. The central argument we advance is that the character of US hegemony is changing and this is closely connected to the wider transformation of the nation-state system

Lineages of Liberalism and Miracles of Modernization: The World Bank, the East Asian Trajectory and the International Development Debate

Until recently the World Bank, arguably the most prestigious and one of the most powerful producers of international development knowledge, played an important role in encouraging the perception that the East Asian trajectory was a veritable miracle of capitalist development. This article begins with a brief discussion of the changes in the World Bank's understanding of development over the past 30 or 40 years. This is followed by an examination of the Bank's efforts to accommodate the East Asian trajectory within the dominant Anglo-American narrative on international development. It is argued that, in the context of the shifting contours of the international political economy and of important changes to the dominant international discourse on development, the World Bank has played a crucial role in domesticating the East Asian Miracle to the dominant liberal narrative of progress and in facilitating the wider reinvention of liberalism in the post-1945 period