The private security industry in Latin America has been associated with human rights abuses, particularly in the context of extractive operations. Most private security guards in the region are poorly trained and do not undergo adequate vetting. These factors combined with serious deficiencies in the rule of law across the region too often enable private security companies to effectively operate outside state control and engage in human rights abusive practices. This article argues that adoption of the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Providers (ICoC) by Latin American private security companies and states, coupled with civil society engagement with ICoC’s Association, may help reduce negative human rights impacts arising out of private security services within the extractive industry.

This paper investigates the relation between media coverage and offering yield spreads using a comprehensive dataset of 5,338 industrial bonds issued from 1990 to 2011. We find that media coverage is negatively associated with firms’ cost of debt. This association is robust to controlling for standard yield determinants, different model specifications, and endogeneity. We identify 4 economic channels through which media coverage influences the cost of debt: Information asymmetry, governance, liquidity, and default risk. Importantly, media coverage has an independent influence beyond the effects of these economic mechanisms and is not a proxy for other firm attributes.

Many believe that employment can be wrongfully exploitative, even if it is consensual and mutually beneficial. At the same time, it may seem third parties should not do anything to preclude or eliminate such arrangements, given these same considerations of consent and benefit. I argue that there are perfectly sensible, intuitive ethical positions that vindicate this “Reasonable View.” The view requires such defense because the literature often suggests that there is no theoretical space for it. I respond to arguments for the clearest symptom of this obscuration: the so-called nonworseness claim that a consensual, mutually beneficial transaction cannot be “morally worse” than its absence. In addition to making space for the Reasonable View, this serves my dialectical goal of encouraging distinct attention to first- and third-party obligations.

Some firms use hidden knowledge facilitators (HKFs) to facilitate knowledge sharing among employees within intrafirm online communities. These firms hope for enhanced knowledge sharing outcomes within their organizations without letting employees know that HKFs exist. Yet, the extent to which HKFs’ interventions are effective remains unknown to researchers and managers. Built on the knowledge sharing (KS) literature, this study explores the unique roles of HKFs as moderators between a company and its employees. We develop several hypotheses to test the impact of the quantity and quality of HKFs’ online interventions on several KS outcomes. By analyzing log data of a Chinese corporation's online R&D community, we find that (1) the quantity of HKFs’ intervention has a mostly positive impact on KS outcomes; (2) the quality of HKFs’ intervention has a mixed impact on several KS outcomes, depending on which aspect of quantity is considered; and (3) the quality of HKFs’ intervention also moderates the positive impact of the quantity of HKFs’ intervention in different ways on different intended KS outcomes. This study makes a clear contribution to the literature on knowledge sharing and knowledge facilitation by demonstrating the impact of HKFs on KS outcomes in a Chinese context.