View from the Trenches: The Struggle to Free William Richards

This article discusses the circumstantial evidence against a wrongly convicted man and the California Innocence Project\u27s efforts to seek his release

View from the Trenches: The Struggle to Free William Richards

This article discusses the circumstantial evidence against a wrongly convicted man and the California Innocence Project\u27s efforts to seek his release

Union Representation in Construction: Who Makes the Choice?

This Article addresses the particular problems inherent in the construction industry that prevent employees from choosing whether to be represented by a union. The author examines three recent Supreme Court decisions that have given employers the freedom to choose whether or not their employees will be represented by a union. The author argues that, while it was motivated by a desire to prevent union domination of employees, the Court failed to perceive the unique role that unions play in the construction industry and the protection that unions provide for the worker. The author further argues that the goal of employee free choice is, in fact, subverted by these decisions and that such subversion is contrary to the National Labor Relations Act

Mind the gap! Social capital, East and West

© 2008 Association for Comparative Economic Studies. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Comparative Economics. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe lags behind that in Western European countries. We analyze the determinants of individual stock of social capital – measured by civic participation and access to social networks – and find that this gap persists when we account for individual characteristics and endowments of respondents. However, the gap disappears completely after we include aggregate measures of economic development and quality of institutions. Informal institutions such as the prevalence of corruption in post-communist countries appear particularly important. With the enlargement of the European Union, the gap in social capital should gradually disappear as the new member states catch up (economically and institutionally) with the old ones

Enabling low-carbon development in poor countries

The challenges associated with achieving sustainable development goals and stabilizing the world’s climate cannot be solved without significant efforts by developing and newly-emerging countries. With respect to climate change mitigation, the main challenge for developing countries lies in avoiding future emissions and lock-ins into emission-intensive technologies, rather than reducing today’s emissions. While first best policy instruments like carbon prices could prevent increasing carbonization, those policies are often rejected by developing countries out of a concern for negative repercussions on development and long-term growth. In addition, policy environments in developing countries impose particular challenges for regulatory policy aiming to incentivize climate change mitigation and sustainable development. This chapter first discusses how climate policy could potentially interact with sustainable development and economic growth. It focuses, in particular, on the role of industrial sector development. The chapter then continues by discussing how effective policy could be designed, specifically taking developing country circumstances into account

The Competition between Relationship-Based Microfinance and Transaction Lending

We empirically analyze the competition between a relationship lender and a transaction lender in the credit business with micro and small entrepreneurs. Drawing on a data set about the customers of the relationship lender ProCredit Ecuador combined with data about all other loans of these customers in the Ecuadorian banking system, we are able to analyze the competition between different banking types. We find that the quality of ProCredit borrowers who have a trans- action loan as well is below average. They also have higher default probabilities. Furthermore, we find evidence that ProCredit customers with payment problems prefer to serve their relationship loan while defaulting on their transaction loan. These findings suggest that customers of a relationship bank value their banking relationship and try to protect it as long as possible. This result stands in contrast to the common presumption that the market entrance of transaction lenders will destroy the market for lenders applying relationship lending techniques