Agency in Social Context

Many political philosophers argue that interference threatens a person’s agency. And they cast political freedom in opposition to interpersonal threats to agency, as non-interference. I argue that this approach relies on an inapt model of agency, crucial aspects of which emerge from our relationships with other people. Such relationships involve complex patterns of vulnerability and subjection, essential to our constitution as particular kinds of agents: as owners of property, as members of families, and as participants in a market for labor. We should construct a conception of freedom that targets the structures of our interpersonal relations, and the kinds of agents these relations make us. Such a conception respects the interpersonal foundations of human agency. It also allows us to draw morally significant connections between diverse species of unfreedom—between, for instance, localized domination and structural oppression

Critically Assessing the Invalidity of Race Realism and Finding Solutions to Educate Society on Racial Theory

With race being a hard concept to grasp, many competing theories have arisen to explain what race is and how to categorise someone by race. The dominant explanation for race in early history has been characterised by race realism. Colloquially, race realism is the theory that scientific evidence proves race to be objectively definable by trends in geography, appearance, and most prominently, genetics. Previous research from Stanford geneticist Noah Rosenberg (2005) that looked to support this topic has relied on small sample sizes and data that had otherwise been misconducted. When Sarah Tishkoff (2009) of the University of Pennsylvania conducted the same experiments more thoroughly and with larger sample sizes, evidence contradictory to earlier experiments arose and invalidated the findings supposedly supporting race realism. Considering this, we used data from an extensive public survey to assess society’s underlying beliefs and attitudes towards race while looking to confirm that race realism had been invalidated at a social level. In alignment with the newer findings, the data we collected suggests that people of younger generations have been less and less exposed to the ideas of race realism, and all have come to the conclusion on their own that it is arbitrary to objectively define someone by race. The study showed that while these generations still socially group themselves into races as a result of ancestral and geographic history, there is no genetic property that ties them to their personal sense of identity. Thus, the study concludes by providing ways to further educate the population and avoid the pitfalls of race realism, as certain social groups in the media still back the obsolete ideas of race realism to this day

\u3cem\u3eAchilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character\u3c/em\u3e by Jonathan Shay [Review]

Review of Jonathan Shay, MD, Ph.D., Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. New York: Antheneum, 1994

Tax Complexity and Inward Investment

The negative relationship between host-country tax rates and FDI has been tested in a large number of papers. This paper looks at a different channel through which tax systems could affect FDI, namely the complexity of the tax system. Complying with tax authority requirements can be extremely time consuming for business and this implies an additional cost for more complex tax systems. We use measures of the time taken to deal with tax obligations and the number of tax payments for a representative firm compiled by the World Bank to examine their effect on FDI selection and flows from 16 OECD FDI-source countries to 57 host countries. We find a negative and significant effect of tax rates in line with other studies. In addition, the tax complexity measures are found to have a significant inhibiting effect on the presence of FDI for a country pair, but have little impact on the level of the FDI flow once it is established. In other words, the complexity measures affect FDI primarily through the extensive margin. A 10% reduction in tax complexity is found to be comparable in its effect on FDI to a one percentage point reduction in the effective corporate tax rate. The results are robust to the inclusion of other proxies for bureaucracy in the host country.

Measurement Issues and International Comparisons of Output and Productivity Growth

Since the mid-1990s the average growth rates of real GDP and labour productivity in the European Union have fallen behind those in the United States. This development has led to questions about the potential contribution of the differences in measurement methodologies to GDP and productivity growth between the EU and the US. This paper outlines the issues regarding one of the measurement differences between the US and EU, that of using quality-adjusted or hedonic price indices for high technology sectors. We also estimate their contribution to the observed output and productivity differentials. We find that differences in measurement of high technology sectors cannot account for the widening productivity growth difference between the EU and the US. These measurement differences are estimated to have contributed between one and three tenths of a percentage point to differences in growth rates. Ireland proves to be an exception from this general finding however. The application of hedonic price indices for Ireland resulted in an increase of approximately 1.3 per cent in the growth rates of both GDP and labour productivity. This can be explained by the much higher relative importance of high-technology sectors in the Irish economy relative to the rest of the EU. Adjustments to the measurement of these sectors therefore have a larger effect on economy-wide measures of output and productivity.Productivity growth; hedonic index; high-technology sectors

Firm Export Participation: Entry, Spillovers and Tradability

This paper analyses the choices made by individual firms to enter the export market. It uses data on a sample of Irish firms over seventeen years to test whether sunk costs influence the decision to export. A probit specification tests the probability of exporting in the current period given past exporting experience, controlling for the firm’s initial export status. Methodologically, the contribution of this paper is the use of a two-step estimation procedure suggested by Orme (1997), which controls for the influence of initial conditions. In addition, this paper tests for the existence of spillover effects in exporting, in particular if the levels of export activity in a sector increase the probability of a firm participating in the export market. Significant evidence of sunk costs was found, based on the observed persistence of export activity and the explanatory power of previous exporting experience on current export status. A measure of sector tradability was also used, and as expected firms in more easily traded sectors were most likely to be exporters. However, little evidence of spillovers was found in determining export market participation.

Measurement Issues and Int. Comparisons of Output and Productivity Growth

This paper outlines the issues regarding one of the measurement differences between the US and EU.

Firm Export Dynamics and the Geography of Trade

Two recent trends in international economics have been an increased focus on the geography of trade (e.g. what factors determine where a country exports to) and the emergence of empirical work examining firm-level data on exporting activity. However, data limitations have prevented there being much progress in combining these two areas, because very few countries provide firm-level data breaking down firm exports by their destination. Eaton, Kortum and Kramarz (2004) have analysed such data for French frms but their study only uses a single cross-section of data. This paper uses a unique survey of Irish exporting firms over a five year period to fill some of the gaps in this empirical literature. With information on over fifty destinations, firm-level changes in market coverage and their contribution to net export growth are investigated. Firm involvement in individual export markets is found to be much more dynamic than export status. Entry and exit to markets is shown to be a quantifiably important component of overall export ows, with this factor becoming more important for less popular markets. The paper also shows how the patterns of entry and exit into export markets combine to determine the overall firm-level distribution of number of markets entered.Firm exports; market entry and exit; transition matrix