The UN Goldstone Report and retraction: an empirical investigation

The United Nations Goldstone Report criminalized self-defense against state-sponsored or state-perpetrated terror. We use voting on the two UN General Assembly resolutions relating to the Goldstone Report to study whether support for the Goldstone principle of criminalization of self-defense against terror was influenced by countries' political institutions. Our results, using two different measures of political institutions, reveal systematic differences in voting by democracies and autocracies: as an example, based on the Chief-in-Executive measure of political institutions, a country with the highest democracy score was some 55 percentage points less likely to vote in favor of the second of the two UN Goldstone resolutions and some 55 percentage points more likely to abstain than a country with the highest autocratic score. The differences between democracies and autocracies in willingness to initiate symmetric welfare are therefore also reflected in differences in sensitivities to loss of life and harm in asymmetric warfare, through broad support by democracies, but not by autocracies, for legitimacy of self-defense against state-supported or state-perpetrated terror. The Goldstone Report is unique among United Nations reports in having been eventually repudiated by its principal author

Incomplete antitrust laws and private actions for damages

Antitrust litigation, Incomplete laws, K21, K42, L40,

The impact of the macroeconomic environment on merger activity: evidence from US time-series data

This article investigates the dynamic impact of the macroeconomic environment on aggregate merger activity in the US economy obtained from firm-level data during the period from January 1980 to December 2004. Applying time-series econometric tools to US Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) data, we find: First, there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the set of macroeconomic variables and four alternative measures of merger activity, implying that the macroeconomic factors plays an important role in determining the trend of aggregate merger activity in the US economy. Second, the most important macroeconomic variables in determining M&A volume include real income for the frequency-based measure of US merger activity, and stock market conditions and monetary policy for transaction value based measures of aggregate mergers. The ascending phase of business cycle provides the most favourable environment for more mergers for all four measures of merger activity. Our subsample period study provides evidence that 'corporate net cash flow' plays a significant role after 1998, which is consistent with the free-cash-flow hypothesis. Third, there are short run adjustment processes to the long-run equilibrium path in US merger activity. The main processes of impulse-response dynamics seem to finish within the 5-6 quarter period. We also discuss policy implications and directions for future extension.