This paper looks at speculative behavior in the international oil market. Much of the blame for oil-market turbulence has been placed on speculators, particularly hedge funds. Speculative capital has been characterized as “hot money,” with capital flows driven by “herding,” “flocking,” and “contagion.” Policies to deal with volatility by weakening, or even disabling speculation, have been based...

Although American health policy debates address similar problems to other developed nations, it has factual and ideological specificities. I agree with Chinitz and Rodwin on the dominance of micro-economics thinking. However, I am not certain that learning from management theory or modifying medical education will be powerful enough to change the system. The vested interests of the stakeholders...

A longitudinal analysis (1984-2005) of media language in Norway is presented, demonstrating how the current globalized capitalist market ideology is now permeating this long-established Scandinavian welfare state. This ideological shift carries powerful implications for community psychology, as traditional welfare state values of equal services based on a universalistic principle are set aside,...

Growing income inequality within a country is caused by socioeconomic factors and inadequate government policies and ultimately leads to social and political instabilities. The ideology of supply-side economics in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1980s, for instance, induced policies of inequality which were then perceived as a way to stimulate economic growth. The demise of ...

We provide evidence that increased political influence, arising from CIA interventions during the Cold War, was used to create a larger foreign market for American products. Following CIA interventions, imports from the US increased dramatically, while total exports to the US were unaffected. The surge in imports was concentrated in industries in which the US had a comparative disadvantage, not...

Is government ideology important for fiscal policy? I study this question with data from all German States over the period 1975-2005. To identify the effect of ideology, I rely on a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. I find that left-wing state governments spend more than state governments with right-wing and mixed ideology. Deficits of left-wing governments are larger than those of right-w...

This paper analyzes the founding rates of two types of Jewish agricultural cooperatives, the moshav and the kibbutz, to show how political ideology intersects with resource requirements to produce competition and mutualism between organizations. These two populations, which share ideology and a resource base, competed with each other. They both enjoyed mutualism with the population of credit co...

This essay examines personal narratives and gender-sensitive fictional representations of the Partition between India and Pakistan to contribute to a counterhistory that takes centrally into account the ways in which nation formation was written on the bodies of women. The juxtaposition of my mother’s stories, the oral histories gathered by feminist historiographers, and critical analyses of Pa...

BACKGROUND Studies on political ideology and health have found associations between individual ideology and health as well as between ecological measures of political ideology and health. Individual ideology and aggregate measures such as political regimes, however, were never examined simultaneously. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Using adjusted logistic multilevel models to analyze data on ...

Studies have largely examined the association between political ideology and health at the aggregate/ecological level. Using individual-level data from 29 European countries, we investigated whether self-reports of political ideology and health are associated. In adjusted models, we found an inverse association between political ideology and self-rated poor health; for a unit increase in the po...