Prosecuting Alleged Terrorists by Military Commission: A Prudent Option

President Obama has announced that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will be closed by January 22, 2010. He has also said that at least some of the detainees facing criminal prosecution will be tried in military commissions. The system of military commissions established by President Bush after the 9/11 attacks, as well as the one which Congress enacted in 2006 following the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, were widely criticized as being unproductive and not meeting international legal standards. The Congress has, very recently, revised the rules and procedures for military commissions to make them fair, effective and much more like those used for courts-martial. This article compares and contrasts trials in revised military commissions with trials in federal district courts. It concludes that a combination of both forums would best serve the President, and that military commissions are still a prudent option for prosecuting some detainees where there are security and admissibility of evidence concerns

Loop amplitudes in maximal supergravity with manifest supersymmetry

We present a description for amplitude diagrams in maximal supergravities obtained by dimensional reduction from D=11, derived from a field theory point of view using the pure spinor formalism. The advantages of this approach are the manifest supersymmetry present in the formalism, and the limited number of interaction terms in the action. Furthermore, we investigate the conditions set by this description in order for amplitudes in maximal supergravity to be finite in the ultraviolet limit. Typically, there is an upper limit to the dimension, set by the loop order, which for an arbitrary number of loops is no larger than two. In four dimensions, the non-renormalisation power of the formalism fails for the 7-loop contribution to the 4-point amplitude, all of which is in clear agreement with previous work.Comment: 53 pp. v2: refs. adde

The role of accessibility for regional innovation systems

The link between proximity and innovation has been dwelled upon extensively in the literature. A regional economic milieu characterized by proximity between relevant actors is maintained to be suitable for establishing and maintaining successful regional innovation system. In this paper it is proposed that the relevant link to be studied is rather that between accessibility and innovation. Although accessibility is a key factor in facilitating the processes stressed to be important for innovations, the relationship between accessibility and innovation is surprisingly unexploited. Scrutinization of the relationship between accessibility and innovation is necessary in order to fully comprehend regional innovative capacity. Furthermore, such scrutinization will shed further light in the issue of the importance of knolwedge spillovers.

Some notes on how to catch a red herring Ageing, time-to-death & care costs for older people in Sweden

In this paper we test the 'red herring' hypothesis for expenditures on long-term care. The main contribution of this paper is that we assess the 'red herring' hypothesis using an aggregated measure that allows us to control for entering the final period of life on the individual level. In addition we implement a model that allows for age specific time-to-death (TTD) effects on Long Term Care. We also account for the problem that mortality, and therefore TTD, are themselves influenced by care expenditure. For our analysis we use administrative data from the Swedish statistical office. In contrast to many previous empirical studies, we are able to use the entire population for estimation instead of a sample. Our identification strategy is based on fixed effects estimation and the instrumental variable approach to achieve exogenous variation in TTD. Our results indicate that although time-to-death is a relevant indicator for long term care, age itself seems to be much more important for the projection of long-term care expenditure.

Only in the Heat of the Moment? A Study of the Relationship between Weather and Mortality in Germany

In this study we analyze the relationship between heat events and mortality in Germany. The main research questions are: Does heat lead to rising mortality and if yes, are the effects persistent or compensated for in the near future? Furthermore, we consider differences between heat effects in urban and rural environments. Cause specific daily mortality and meteorological data is connected on the county level. We allow for static as well as dynamic relations between extreme temperatures and mortality and implement several panel data estimation approaches. We find that heat has a significant positive impact on mortality. The strongest effects can be measured on the day when heat occurs and the first week afterwards. The mortality increase ranges between 0.003 and 3.5 per 100,000 inhabitants depending on the particular death cause. We do not find a significant negative, and thus compensating impact in a medium term, which is in the contrary to the Harvesting Hypothesis. Using a value of statistical life approach we estimate that one additional hot day in Germany induces for the overall population a loss of m € 1,861. Moreover, the environment plays an important role. The heat induced increase in mortality is significantly higher in urban areas.Climate Change, Harvesting Hypothesis, Heat Waves, Mortality, Urban Heat Island effect

Company R&D and University R&D - How Are They Related?

At the same time as we can observe strong tendencies of a globalisation of R&D, we also can observe a strong spatial clustering of R&D and related innovative activities. The standard explanation in the literature of the clustering of innovative activities is that such clusters offer external knowledge economies to innovative companies, since they are dependent upon knowledge flows and that knowledge flows are spatially bounded. Obviously, location is crucial in understanding knowledge flows and knowledge production, since knowledge sources have been found to be geographically concentrated. There are two major performers of R&D: industry and universities. It seems rather straight-forward to assume that industrial R&D might be attracted to locate near research universities doing R&D in fields relevant to industry. Already as far back as in the 1960s a number of case studies confirmed the important roles played by Stanford University and MIT for commercial innovation and entrepreneurship. During the years a large number of formal studies have presented evidences of a positive impact of university R&D on firm performance. The question is, does it also work the other way around? Does industrial R&D function as an attractor for university R&D? We may actually think of several reasons why university R&D may grow close to industry R&D. First of all political decision-makers may decide to start or expand university R&D at locations where industry already is doing R&D. Secondly, we can imagine that industry doing R&D in a region might use part of their R&D funds to finance university R&D. Thirdly, universities in regions with industrial R&D might find it easier to attract R&D funds from national and international sources due to co-operation with industry. Obviously, not all types of university R&D attract industrial R&D. There are reasons to believe that, in particular, university R&D in natural, technical and medical sciences attracts industrial R&D but that there are also strong reasons to believe that there are variations between different sectors of industry regarding how dependent their R&D is to be located close to university R&D. The above implies that there are behavioural relationships between industrial R&D and university R&D and vice versa. However, the litrature contains few studies dealing with this problem. Most studies have concentrated on the one-directional effect from university R&D to industrial R&D and the outputs of industrial R&D in most cases measured in terms of the number of patents and neglected the possible mutual interaction. However, if there is a mutual interaction between university and industry R&D, and if there are knowledge externalities involved, then we can develop a dynamic explanation to the clustering of innovative activities based on positive feedback loops. This would imply strong tendencies to path dependency and that policy initiatives to transfer non-innovative regions to innovative regions would have small chances to succeed. The fact that knowledge flows seem to be spatially bounded implies that proximity matters. Most contributions analysing spatial knowledge flows have used very crude measures of proximity. However, there are some authors that have argued that proximity could be measured using accessibility measures. Accessibility measures can be used to model interaction opportunities at different spatial scales: local, intra-regional and inter-regional. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the locational relationship between industry R&D and university R&D in Sweden using a simultaneous equation approach and to analyse existing differences between different science areas and different industry sectors.

Government Size and Growth: Accounting for Economic Freedom and Globalization

Several recent studies have found a negative relation between government size and economic growth in rich countries. Since countries with big government have experienced above average improvements in both the Economic freedom index and the KOF globalization index, we argue that existing studies suffer from an omitted variable problem. Using Bayesian Averaging over Classical Estimates (BACE) in a panel of OECD countries, we show that the negative effect from government size is very robust and may have been underestimated in previous studies. The dataset is an updated and extended version of the data used by Fölster and Henrekson (2001), covering the period 1970-1995. We find clear evidence that globalization has a positive effect on growth, but find no effect of economic freedom. Finally, we find that the negative effect of government size decreases substantially in size but remains significant when we add the period 1996-2005 to the sample. Our results support the idea that countries with big government can use institutional quality such as economic freedom and globalization to mitigate negative growth effects of taxes and public expenditure.Government size; growth; economic freedom; globalization; taxes

The Effects of Expanding the Generosity of the Statutory Sickness Insurance System

In 1999, in Germany, the statutory sick pay level was increased from 80 to 100 percent of foregone earnings for sicknessepisodes of up to six weeks. We show that this reform has led to an increase in average absence days of about 10 percent or one additional day per employee, per year. The estimates are based on SOEP survey data and parametric, nonparametric, and combined matching-regression difference-in-differences methods. Extended calculations suggest that the reform might have increased labor costs by about EUR1.8 billion per year and might have led to the loss of around 50,000 jobs.Sickness absence, statutory sick pay, natural experiment, Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP)

A Natural Experiment on Sick Pay Cuts, Sickness Absence, and Labor Costs

This study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on various outcome dimensions. A federal law reduced the legal obligation of German employers to provide 100 percent continued wages for up to six weeks per sickness episode to 80 percent. This measure increased the ratio of employees having no days of absence by about 7.5 percent. The mean number of absence days per year decreased by about 5 percent. The reform might have reduced total labor costs by about EUR1.5 billion per year which might have led to the creation of around 50,000 new jobs.