Restraing Regulatory Capture? Anglo America, Crisis Politics and Trajectories of Change in Global Financial Governance

A growing number of respected commentators now argue that regulatory capture of public agencies and public policy by leading banks was one of the main causal factors behind the financial crisis of 2007–2009, resulting in a permissive regulatory environment. This regulatory environment placed a faith in banks own internal risk models, contributed to pro-cyclical behaviour and turned a blind eye to excessive risk taking. The article argues that a form of ‘multi-level regulatory capture’ characterized the global financial architecture prior to the crisis. Simultaneously, regulatory capture fed off, but also nourished the financial boom, in a fashion that mirrored the life cycle of the boom itself. Minimizing future financial booms and crises will require continuous, conscious and explicit efforts to restrain financial regulatory capture now and into the future. The article assesses the extent to which this has been achieved in current global financial governance reform efforts and highlights some of the persistent difficulties that will continue to hamper efforts to restrain regulatory capture. The evidence concerning the extent to which regulatory capture is being effectively restrained is somewhat mixed, and where it is happening it is largely unintentional and accidental. Recent reforms have overlooked the political causes of the crisis and have failed to focus explicitly or systematically on regulatory capture.

Gov 2.0: Towards a User Generated State?

New elements associated withWeb 2.0 relating to interactivity and end-user focus have combined with the availability of newlevels of information to encourage the development of what may be termed a Gov 2.0 approach.This, in combination with recent initiatives in the modernising government programme, has emphasised new levels of public participation and engagement with government as well as a re-engineering of public services tomake them more responsive to their end users. Adopting a governmentality perspective, it is argued that this involves a wider process of governing through constructing and reconstructing ideas of the public, community and individual citizen-consumers who take on a role in their own governance. It is argued that this fundamental re-working of the nature of what is public represents a constitutional change that is perhaps more signi¢cant than the constitutional reform programme directed to formal government which attracts more attention

Playing with the ‘Erbe’: The Legacy of the Songs of the 1848 Revolution in the GDR

After the twelve-year rupture caused by the Nazis, in the Soviet zone after 1945 attempts were made to reconnect with the traditions of workers’ songs and critical folk songs that were viewed as the cultural heritage of the communist movement. One of these ‘repertoires’ of song was that of the 1848 Revolution. In the 1950s GDR researchers such as the Germanist Bruno Kaiser, the musicologist Inge Lammel and in particular the folklorist Wolfgang Steinitz made substantial contributions to the collecting and publication of the 1848 songs. Their work provided an important reference point for the singers of the German folk song revival in the GDR from the late 1970s onwards. As the cases of groups such as Folkländer and Wacholder showed, theirs was a particularly creative appropriation of the revolutionary Erbe that involved performing protest songs of the past as if they were criticising the present.

Legitimacy Through Neutrality: Probation and Conflict in Northern Ireland

The conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles presented numerous challenges for the administration of traditional forms of criminal justice and has led to a variety of adaptations that have been widely discussed in the literature in criminology and transitional justice. The role of Northern Ireland's probation service is often forgotten or ignored in such analyses. This brief article is intended to begin to fill this gap by exploring how the Troubles impacted on probation practice during the Conflict and beyond. In particular, we argue that the 'neutrality stance' taken by probation in the mid-1970s, when officers decided to cease mandated work with individuals charged with 'politically-motivated' offences, has had a lasting impact on the identity and role of probation in the region. The deep immersion into, and engagement with, marginalised communities during this time, facilitated by this neutrality stance, has overlooked implications for probation practice more widely in the United Kingdom and abroad.

On Testing the 'Moral Law'

In a previous article in this journal, Daniel Kelly, Steven Stich, Kevin Haley, Serena Eng and Dan Fessler report data that, according to them, foster scepticism about an association between harm and morality existent in the Turiel tradition (Kelly et al., 2007). This article challenges their interpretation of the data. It does so by explicating some methodological problems in the Turiel tradition that Kelly et al. themselves in a way inherit and by drawing on new evidence coming from a partial replication of their research.

What Did the Lawyers Do During the 'War' ? Neutrality, Conflcit and the Culture of Quietism

Using Northern Ireland as a case study, this paper explores how lawyers responded to the challenges of entrenched discrimination, sustained political violence and an emerging peace process. Drawing upon the literature of the sociology of lawyering, it examines whether lawyers can or should be more than ‘paid technicians’ in such circumstances. It focuses in particular upon a number of ‘critical junctures’ in the legal history of the jurisdiction and uncouples key elements of the local legal culture which contributed to an ethos of quietism. The paper argues that the version of legal professionalism that emerged in Northern Ireland was contingent and socially constructed and, with notable exceptions, obfuscated a collective failure of moral courage. It concludes that facing the truth concerning past silence is fundamental to a properly embedded rule of law and a more grounded notion of what it means to be a lawyer in a conflict.

Unemployment Benefits and Reservation Wages: Key Elasticities from a Stripped-Down Job Search Approach

This paper exploits survey information on reservation wages and data on actual wages from the European Community Household Panel to deduce, in the manner of Lancaster and Chesher, additional parameters of a stylized structural search model; specifically, reservation wage and transition/duration elasticities. The informational requirements of this approach are minimal, thereby facilitating comparisons between countries. Further, its policy content is immediate in so far as the impact of unemployment benefit rules and measures increasing the arrival rate of job offers are concerned. These key elasticities are computed for the United Kingdom and 11 other European nations.

Panel Stationarity Test with Structural Breaks

In this paper, we extend the heterogeneous panel data stationarity test of Hadri [Econometrics Journal, Vol. 3 (2000) pp. 148–161] to the cases where breaks are taken into account. Four models with different patterns of breaks under the null hypothesis are specified. Two of the models have been already proposed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al.[Econometrics Journal,Vol. 8 (2005) pp. 159–175]. The moments of the statistics corresponding to the four models are derived in closed form via characteristic functions.We also provide the exact moments of a modified statistic that do not asymptotically depend on the location of the break point under the null hypothesis. The cases where the break point is unknown are also considered. For the model with breaks in the level and no time trend and for the model with breaks in the level and in the time trend, Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. [Econometrics Journal, Vol. 8 (2005) pp. 159–175]showed that the number of breaks and their positions may be allowed to differ acrossindividuals for cases with known and unknown breaks. Their results can easily be extended to the proposed modified statistic. The asymptotic distributions of all the statistics proposed are derived under the null hypothesis and are shown to be normally distributed. We show by simulations that our suggested tests have in general good performance in finite samples except the modified test. In an empirical application to the consumer prices of 22 OECD countries during the period from 1953 to 2003, we found evidence of stationarity once a structural break and cross-sectional dependence are accommodated.

From Counter-terrorism to Criminal Justice: Transformation or Business as Usual?

The article explores the extent to which criminal justice in Northern Ireland has been reconstructed over the past fifteen years. The focus is on the framework provided in the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the range of transition processes that followed. Post-Agreement Inquiries are reviewed and the findings demonstrate the institutional rigidities facing the transformation of criminal justice. While the ideologies and practices of counter-terrorism no longer dominate the business of criminal justice, the extent of change in terms of social representativeness, scale and expenditure is variable, with the prison service proving the least changed.

The rate of return on equity across industrial sectors on the British stock market, 1825-70

This article assesses the contribution of the various industrial sectors to the growth of the British equity market in the 1825–70 period. It also provides estimates of the rates of return on these industrial sectors in this period. The article then proceeds to examine whether differences in rates of return across the various sectors can be explained by risk or other financial factors. One of the main findings is that the relatively high rates of return in the banking, insurance, and miscellaneous sectors appear to be in some measure explained by the presence of extended liability and uncalled capital.

Europe's New Border Tax.

Instead of abolishing internal border controls in 1993, the European Union (EU) replaced them with VAT and statistical requirements that appear to be just as onerous. For Dutch businesses, the compliance costs of the new requirements are, on average, 5 per cent of the value of their intra-EU trade. The figure is probably higher for other EU Member States. Obviously, the costs constitute a (differentiated) border tax that impedes intra-EU trade. The article analyses the determinants of the compliance costs, as well as their effect on intra-EU trade intensity. The article submits that the differential compliance costs violate the non-discrimination provisions of the EC Treaty. Suggestions are made to reduce them.

Out-of-field cell survival following exposure to intensity-modulated radiation fields

PURPOSE:
To determine the in-field and out-of-field cell survival of cells irradiated with either primary field or scattered radiation in the presence and absence of intercellular communication.
METHODS AND MATERIALS:
Cell survival was determined by clonogenic assay in human prostate cancer (DU145) and primary fibroblast (AGO1552) cells following exposure to different field configurations delivered using a 6-MV photon beam produced with a Varian linear accelerator.
RESULTS:
Nonuniform dose distributions were delivered using a multileaf collimator (MLC) in which half of the cell population was shielded. Clonogenic survival in the shielded region was significantly lower than that predicted from the linear quadratic model. In both cell lines, the out-of-field responses appeared to saturate at 40%-50% survival at a scattered dose of 0.70 Gy in DU-145 cells and 0.24 Gy in AGO1522 cells. There was an approximately eightfold difference in the initial slopes of the out-of-field response compared with the a-component of the uniform field response. In contrast, cells in the exposed part of the field showed increased survival. These observations were abrogated by direct physical inhibition of cellular communication and by the addition of the inducible nitric oxide synthase inhibitor aminoguanidine known to inhibit intercellular bystander effects. Additional studies showed the proportion of cells irradiated and dose delivered to the shielded and exposed regions of the field to impact on response.
CONCLUSIONS:
These data demonstrate out-of-field effects as important determinants of cell survival following exposure to modulated irradiation fields with cellular communication between differentially irradiated cell populations playing an important role. Validation of these observations in additional cell models may facilitate the refinement of existing radiobiological models and the observations considered important determinants of cell survival.

Young People, Conflict and Regulation

Set against the progress claimed since the Good Friday/ Belfast Agreement, this article reflects the reality of life for children and young people as they negotiate the aftermath of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. Their experiences of informal and formal policing, community and State control, demonstrate the need to understand the lasting impacts of the Conflict when developing policies and practices affecting their lives. At a crucial defining period in the devolution of justice and policing, and based on primary research conducted by the authors, the article establishes key rights-compliant principles central to reform of youth justice.