Scholars and politicians in recent years have become concerned with rising levels of inequality among Americans, heightened in the aftermath of the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C. The suspicion over an ever larger influence of corporate and elite interest over public policy has brought about significant public backlash, even becoming a key platform of reformist candidates such as Sen. Bernie Sanders. In large part, these fears have yet to be realized, as many corporations have chosen to remain on the sidelines in American elections and have not fully taken advantage of their newfound rights. At the same time, we have observed a stark rise in corporate lobbying expenditures in recent decades. What explains the puzzle of how corporations choose to engage in new or expanded forms of political activity, and even what drives the spread of corporate norms? This study investigates the conditions under which corporations may come to embrace political action.

Violators of cooperation norms may be informally punished by their peers. How such norm enforcement is judged by others can be regarded as a meta-norm (i.e., a second-order norm). We examined whether meta-norms about peer punishment vary across cultures by having students in eight countries judge animations in which an agent who over-harvested a common resource was punished either by a single peer or by the entire peer group. Whether the punishment was retributive or restorative varied between two studies, and findings were largely consistent across these two types of punishment. Across all countries, punishment was judged as more appropriate when implemented by the entire peer group than by an individual. Differences between countries were revealed in judgments of punishers vs. non-punishers. Specifically, appraisals of punishers were relatively negative in three Western countries and Japan, and more neutral in Pakistan, UAE, Russia, and China, consistent with the influence of individualism, power distance, and/or indulgence. Our studies constitute a first step in mapping how meta-norms vary around the globe, demonstrating both cultural universals and cultural differences.

Retrospective, or ex post, analysis of U.S. federal regulation aims to rigorously document regulatory outcomes using cost, benefit, and distributional metrics. This paper presents nine new case studies involving a total of 34 comparisons of ex ante and ex post estimates from a diverse group of environmentally oriented rules. Despite the potential for selection bias and other limitations of the case study approach, the results suggest a slight tendency to overestimate both costs and benefits (or effectiveness) of regulation. This paper considers various analytic issues relevant to developing credible baselines for comparison, and offers policy lessons regarding the design of emissions trading programs along with approaches for incorporating uncertainty into both preregulatory studies and policy designs. Recommendations to facilitate and support future retrospective analyses are also presented.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. is one of the world’s largest chemical corporations, and its operations are of interest to business historians. This article explores the early history of the firm within the context of early republic political economy in order to show how it came to a place of prominence in the American gunpowder market by the early 1820s. The article utilizes the archival and printed records of DuPont, associated firms, government correspondence, and early War Department and trade statistics to show how the company, unlike other powder mills of that time, had access to both large reserves of foreign capital and the halls of power in the federal government. These resources helped DuPont become a principal supplier of gunpowder to the army, the navy, and a major exporter during the War of 1812 era.

This article investigates the relative roles of formal property rights institutions versus deregulated markets in entrepreneurial development, based on China's market transition. Empirically, it is not yet known which set of institutions matters more for entrepreneurship, particularly in the long run, despite the existence of well-established theoretical arguments for each. Using provincial-level panel data from China's transition economy, this study has the following findings: On average, both formal protection of property rights and deregulated markets have positive effects on entrepreneurial development; yet, as market transition progresses, the effect of formal protection of property rights increases, while that of deregulated markets decreases. These results are robust to both multiple model specifications and an endogeneity test using an instrumental variable approach. Overall, therefore, while both sets of institutions indeed play positive roles in entrepreneurial development, property rights institutions may be more fundamental in the long run.

Networking behaviors toward career and community domains assist individuals in doing their jobs better and advancing their careers. However, few studies investigate and identify how these different types of networking behaviors lead to supervisory promotability evaluations. The current study argues that career- and community-based networking behaviors interact with political skill on promotability. This study surveyed and collected data from 160 financial employees and 103 supervisors working at branches of a large bank in Taiwan. Career-based networking behaviors, particularly maintaining contacts and engaging in professional activities, were found to be positively related to promotability, and political skill strengthened the relationship between community-based networking behaviors and promotability. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of networking behaviors, political skill, and promotability.

Monsanto’s transformation from a chemical firm to a biotechnology business in the 1980s and 1990s reveals that an increasingly small corporate cartel gained dominion over petroleum refining byproducts and that this concentration of ownership had profound implications for the future solvency of Monsanto. As the price of petrochemical feedstocks rose, Monsanto, a company that made 80 percent of its products from fossil fuels, began to pursue an alternative path to profits. In short, concentrated corporate ownership of critical natural resources forced some companies in the chemical commodity production business to pursue radically new ways of generating cash flow. This was especially true for scavenger capitalists such as Monsanto, firms that had historically made their money by scavenging raw material stockpiles produced by booming commercial industries. For firms invested heavily in commodity production but lacking proprietary claims to critical natural resources, the key was finding new ways to make money without depending on fossil fuels. For Monsanto, biotechnology offered a way out.

This article examines conceptions of social justice and economic fairness with regard to employment. It does so through an analysis of the management of deindustrialization in the Scottish coalfields between the 1940s and 1980s. Emphasis is placed on the historical roots and social and political constitutions of labor market practices. The analysis is grounded within Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation; industrial relations within coal mining are conceived through an ongoing conflict between commodifying, liberalizing market forces and a “counter-movement” of worker and community resistance and state regulation, which works to embed markets within social and political priorities. E. P. Thompson’s moral economy provides the basis for an understanding of the formulation of communal expectations and employment practices that acted to mitigate the disruption caused by pit closures. The analysis grounds the historical roots of the moral economy within Poalnyi’s counter-movement and illuminates the operation of specific practices of a Thompsonian character within the nationalized industry, which maintained individual and collective employment stability. This is constructed utilizing interviews with former mineworkers and members of mining families. These are supplemented by archival sources that include the minutes of Colliery Consultative Committee meetings, which took place before pit closures. They reveal the moral economy was fundamentally centered on the control of resources, collieries, and the employment they provided rather than simply elements of financial compensation for those suffering from labor market instability. Resultantly procedure centering on collective consultation was fundamental in legitimating colliery closures.

In recent decades, advocates for police reform on the political left and right have proposed numerous changes to how street-level policing operates. One such proposed reform, which has been adopted in jurisdictions nationwide, is “proactive policing,” that is, policing strategies based on the notion that by proactively regulating minor offenses, the police can reduce both serious crime and fear of crime in the community. Yet, as with many proposed police reforms, researchers have not undertaken a through benefit-cost analysis of proactive policing. This article lays out strategies for estimating the impacts of proactive policing, including direct, indirect, and distributional impacts. First, I describe quasi-experimental approaches, which entail partnerships between researchers and police departments and would be particularly useful when a municipality is considering a move to proactive policing in the first instance, expansion of small-scale proactive policing to a larger area, or the introduction of particular new tactics. Second, I describe nonexperimental retrospective approaches, including conventional regression analysis, which can also allow researchers to estimate the effects of proactive policing. I discuss potential threats to validity for both strategies. I close by describing the data that researchers wishing to engage in benefit-cost analysis of proactive policing would need in order to do so.

Banks have much more leverage than nonbanks. In this article, we use a joint sample of banks and nonbanks between 1965 and 2013 to analyze the determinants of this leverage difference. We find that a single factor, asset risk, is able to explain up to 90% of this difference. Banks’ assets consist of a diversified portfolio of nonbank debt. Therefore, banks have much lower asset risk than do nonbanks. Because asset risk is a major determinant of capital structure choice, this factor is able to explain a large fraction of the difference between bank and nonbank leverage.

This article first catalogs the curious lack of benefit-cost analysis (BCA) in policing, given the increasing use of BCA in other areas of criminal justice. Policing has historically been viewed through a benefit-only lens, focusing almost exclusively on the welfare gains associated with the incapacitation of dangerous offenders and the deterrence of future criminal activity. The benefit-only perspective fails to take into account the significant costs of enforcement. Most saliently, the benefit-only perspective limits the discussion of the costs to policing. We argue that BCA of policing should not be limited to the financial perspective of any municipality, but must include the full nonbudgetary social costs and benefits felt by all those who feel the impact of policing. Social costs should include all direct and indirect costs borne by members of society who are impacted by policing practices in addition to costs that appear in police department budgets.