This article explores the nature of disciplinary decisions of health professional regulatory boards in response to commercial violations by licensees. Decisions of the Virginia Boards of Dentistry, Medicine and Optometry are analyzed to assess the extent to which disciplinary decisions appear to protect the economic interests of professionals versus the health, safety and welfare of the public....

This paper studies the dynamic relationship between returns in the Russian stock market and global equity markets in the aftermath of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis. We apply dynamic the Russian and global equity returns after the crisis outbreak. The Russian stock market clearly decoupled from both de veloped and emerging markets, as shown by a 30–50% decline in returns correlation. In view of dram...

Institutions are systematic patterns of shared expectations, taken-for-granted assumptions, accepted norms and routines of interaction that have robust effects on shaping the motivations and behaviour of sets of interconnected social actors. In modern societies, they are usually embodied in authoritatively coordinated organizations with formal rules and the capacity to impose coercive sanctions...

Kimberly Ann Elliott is a research fellow at the Institute for International Economics and has a joint appointment with the Center for Global Development. She served on the National Academies Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards in 2002–03 and, in 1999, as chair of the Task Force on Civil Society of the State Department Advisory Committee on International Economic Policy. Her p...

This paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western Kenya. The identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement. Ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities, and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance. The theoretical model illustrat...

We review recent work at the interface of economic game theory and evolutionary biology that provides new insights into the evolution of partner choice, host sanctions, partner fidelity feedback and public goods. (1) The theory of games with asymmetrical information shows that the right incentives allow hosts to screen-out parasites and screen-in mutualists, explaining successful partner choice...

The right to health accepted as an essential human right.The US administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal on May 2018, increased attention to the impact of sanctions on the health of more than 80 million Iranians. Sanctions will damage the Iran public health-care system, notably patients suffered from cancer. Cancers are the third cause of death in Iran. Diagnosis of malignancy is ...

Notwithstanding great progress in scientific and economic understanding of climate change, it has proven difficult to forge international agreements because of free-riding, as seen in the defunct Kyoto Protocol. This study examines the club as a model for international climate policy. Based on economic theory and empirical modeling, it finds that without sanctions against non-participants there...

The question of what deters crime is of both theoretical and practical interest. The present paper focuses on what factors deter minor, non-violent crimes, i.e., dishonest actions that violate the law. Much research has been devoted to testing the effectiveness of legal sanctions on crime, while newer models also include social sanctions (judgment of friends or family) and internal sanctions (f...

Weyl et al. (1) used employment contract theory to argue that partner fidelity feedback (PFF) provides a stronger explanation for the evolution of mutualisms than host sanctions (HS). Unfortunately, the article propagates a series of major misunderstandings that require correction. First, their model assumes a single clone of symbiont per host (1). This fundamental assumption is violated in all...