LAND VALUES AND ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION

Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use,

People power from Liberation Square to Aleppo: a comparative analysis of nonviolent resistance in the Arab Spring

2017 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Beginning with Gene Sharpe's seminal work The Politics of Nonviolent Action (19741) strategic nonviolent action has been touted as an alternative to violent insurrection against repressive regimes, and, in its earliest hours, many touted the Arab Spring as a powerful example of nonviolent resistance in the face of longstanding and well-armed bastions of power. However, the epithet "Liberation Square" imprinted on the architectural center of the protests that overthrew Hosni Mubarak has faded, while the architectural centers of Aleppo, Manama, and Misrata no longer exist. However, the Arab Spring should not be forgotten by nonviolent actors. By mapping the methods, both the successes and failures, and the dynamics of resistance as it spread across the region this project forwards three central arguments regarding nonviolent action. First, participants in civil resistance do not maintain uniform agency across cases, and structural conditions play a significant role in determining the success of nonviolent resistance. Second, nonviolence should not be an ultimatum, and integrating violent strategies of resistance can bolster resiliency and strength. Finally, nonviolence is not a panacea, and should be contextualized within the political and economic contexts of resistance

Property and Contract Rights in Autocracies and Democracies

We present and test empirically a new theory of property and contract rights. Any incentive an autocrat has to respect such rights comes from his interest in future tax collections and national income and increases with his planning horizon. We find a compelling empirical relationship between property and contract rights and an autocrat's time in power. In lasting -- but not in new -- democracies, the same rule of law and individual rights that ensure continued free elections entail extensive property and contract rights. We show that the age of a democratic system is strongly correlated with property and contract rights.property rights, contract rights, autocracy, democracy

Contract Intensive Money

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it introduces a new, easily accessed and objective measure of the enforceability of contracts and the security of property rights. Second, it uses this measure to provide additional and more direct evidence about the importance of secure property and contract rights for economic growth and investment. In the analysis below, we briefly review the arguments that link the quality of third-party contract enforcement to growth and investment. We then show how the new measure, which we call “contract-intensive money” or CIM, relates to the subjective measures employed in the literature. We test empirically the proposition that this variable, as a measure of the security of contract and property rights, is positively related to income, growth and investment.contract enforcement, property rights, governance, growth

Export Planning and Performance: An Organizational Culture Perspective on Small Firms

Sample results indicate that significant relationships exist between export planning values and practices, and between the planning practice of using advisors and export performance

The evidence for automated grading in diabetic retinopathy screening

Peer reviewedPostprin

Don't Mistake Business Plans for Planning (It May Be Dangerous to Your Financial Health)

Most academic research concerning business plans suggests that business plans  improve the performance of new firms, and virtually all textbooks related to small business advise ent repreneurs to prepare plans before sta rting a business. A survey of the chief executive officers (CEO) in the INC. 500 (America's 500 fastest growing, privatel y held  small  firms )  suggests  otherwise-fewer  than  twenty percent of the respondents indicated that  they had prepared complete business plans before start-up. Furthermore, firms which prepared business plans were less profitable when entering the rapid  growth phase  than those which did not. This article explores benefits and limitations of  business plan preparation

Interdependent policy instrument preferences: a two-mode network approach

In policymaking, actors are likely to take the preferences of others into account when strategically positioning themselves. However, there is a lack of research that conceives of policy preferences as an interdependent system. In order to analyse interdependencies, we link actors to their policy preferences in water protection, which results in an actor-instrument network. As actors exhibit multiple preferences, a complex two-mode network between actors and policies emerges. We analyse whether actors exhibit interdependent preference profiles given shared policy objectives or social interactions among them. By fitting an exponential random graph model to the actor-instrument network, we find considerable clustering, meaning that actors tend to exhibit preferences for multiple policy instruments in common. Actors tend to exhibit interdependent policy preferences when they are interconnected, that is, they collaborate with each other. By contrast, actors are less likely to share policy preferences when a conflict line divides them