1. Introduction and Overview. 2. Detecting Influential Observations and Outliers. 3. Detecting and Assessing Collinearity. 4. Applications and Remedies. 5. Research Issues and Directions for Extensions. Bibliography. Author Index. Subject Index.

Regression Diagnostics: Identifying Influential Data and Sources of Collinearity

Informal institutions have grown in relevance for the analysis of new ‘third wave’ democracies. The research strategy receives its impetus from the debate on neo‐institutionalism theory, which offers a productive perspective for structuring the field of analysis. This article explains the distinguishing factors between formal and informal institutions. It addresses five basic types of informal institutions, examines the ways in which they function and discusses their relevance in terms of democracy theory. Each type is characterized by the way in which it enacts its respective means of political influence. The study distinguishes between forms of specific relationship (clientelism), of material exchange (corruption), of violent exertion of influence (putsch threat), of civil resistance (civil disobedience) and of legal practice (custom law), and discusses their relevance to democracy. The central argument maintains that a differentiated study of informal institutions is crucial to addressing this question...

Informal Institutions and Democracy

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and “othering” of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes – situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia – have operated to “other” Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

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Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality

We are pleased to confirm that any doubt our article (McCullough and Vinod, 2003; hereafter “MV03”) may have cast on Ron Shachar and Barry Nalebuff (1999; hereafter “SN99”) must be removed. We are especially pleased because we thought it quite unfair that other researchers were able to exempt themselves from such detailed scrutiny. It appears that such researchers no longer will have the luxury of reneging on their agreement to honor the replication policy, as this journal now requires authors of accepted empirical papers to provide all programs and data files for posting on the AER Web site as a precondition of publication. The primary aim of our article (MV03) was to provide a four-part methodology for verifying the solution from a nonlinear solver: check the gradient, examine the trace, analyze the Hessian, and profile the likelihood. We adduced copious evidence (MV03, p. 873) that solvers used by economists can produce inaccurate answers, gave examples of different packages giving different answers to the same nonlinear problems (MV03, p. 874), and showed (MV03, pp. 873–74), at least in this journal, that researchers make no effort to verify the solutions from the solvers that they use. We believe this uncritical acceptance of solutions from nonlinear solvers to be a systemic problem in economic research; that is why we wrote the article—certainly, econometrics texts do not show how to verify the solution from a nonlinear solver. In passing, we also showed how a problem can be too large for conventional PC methods, and indicated the failure of replication policies in this journal and other journals. We used the data and likelihood function from SN99 to illustrate the methodology. In the course of this illustration, we noted that the Hessian was ill-conditioned, suggested that there might exist multiple optima, and that inference based on the Wald statistic was not appropriate. We concluded that the solution we found was, at best, a tentative solution. However, as shown in Shachar and Nalebuff (2004; hereafter SN04), when the problem is rescaled the Hessian is not ill-conditioned; they have correctly identified the difference between the condition number of the badly scaled version of the problem that we analyzed in MV03 and the well-scaled problem that they have analyzed. When the problem is correctly scaled, the Hessian is well-conditioned, the model is locally identifiable, the problem can be solved on a PC, a solution to the problem exists, and SN present it in their Table 1. Though we were aware that rescaling could ameliorate ill-conditioning (MV03, p. 882), we were unaware of the distinction between artificial ill-conditioning and inherent ill-conditioning, so the method we suggested for analyzing the Hessian contained an error of omission. This error caused us to reach an incorrect conclusion concerning the existence of a solution to the problem. We apologize to Professors Shachar and Nalebuff, and we thank them for their gracious understanding in this regard. Accordingly, we have amended our prescription for analyzing the Hessian—see our nearby exchange with David M. Drukker and Vince Wiggins (2004; hereafter “DW”) for complete details. Our

http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~bdm25/aer.pdf

Verifying the Solution from a Nonlinear Solver: A Case Study

The problem this article focuses on is not the isolated individual act of corruption, but the systematic, pervasive sub-system of corruption that can and has existed across historical periods, geographic areas, and political-economic systems. It is important to first understand how corrupt and unethical subsystems operate, particularly their network nature, in order to reform and change them while not becoming what we are trying to change. Twelve key system elements are considered that include case examples from Asia, Latin America, the Mediterranean, and North America. A key operating feature of corruption sub-systems is that they are relatively stable networks rather than exceptional, independent, individual events. Drawing on social network, social movement, and action-learning theories, six theory building propositions concerning ethical corruption reform are developed.

Corruption Networks and Implications For Ethical Corruption Reform

INTRODUCTION When universities receive federal funding to conduct research, they make a number of promises to the U. S. Government. They promise, of course, to carry out a plan of research, and they promise to do so in a fiscally responsible manner. When the research involves human subjects, they also promise to ensure that the rights and welfare of human subjects who participate in this research are adequately protected through an Institutional Review Board ("IRB") mechanism. IRB review is a requirement of a university's Federal- Wide Assurance ("FWA") contract with the government,1 which binds it to administer any federal research funds it receives by federally mandated standards. At first glance it seems self-evident that institutional efforts to protect human subjects in compliance with these regulations can only be a good thing. At most universities, however, the reach of the IRB mission as well as its bureaucracy has now superseded by far the visions of the designers. Universities in the United States are replete with regulatory systems and bureaucracies, covering everything from grant accounting and accreditation to fire codes.2 Among them, however, the IRB system is the only one that has the direct power to stop, delay, or change the character of research, the most prized product in the university system. IRBs have disrupted student careers, set back tenure clocks, and blunted the essence of many intellectual traditions. Facing demands that spiral to the level of sheer impracticality, faculty and students at many institutions face a stark choice: to conduct innovative research in their fields or to meet the requirements of their institutions' IRBs. Nor is there any persuasive evidence that research subjects' rights or welfare have benefited, overall, in exchange for this damage. From our own experience, which we document below, we know that there are specific instances in which IRB panel members spot potential risks for subjects that are overlooked by investigators. Since no other research regulatory system in history has ever approached the U.S. IRB system in scale or in the kinds of demands it makes, however, meaningful controlled comparisons are out of the question. Indeed, as far as we know, no credible assessments have been conducted that could determine whether IRB review actually protects people or in what ways. The specter of IRB sanction pervades all that students and faculty do in fields deemed to be IRB-relevant. IRB offices are the institutional executors of concern for human research subjects by the U.S. government, the financial lifeblood of most universities. Yet in enacting what they see as their responsibility of ethical oversight of research, they affect everything from imagining a study's scope and significance to the choice of words in a survey. It is little wonder that many researchers, fearing not just obstacles to their own research but the suspension of all federal funding to their university, appear to lead lives either of resentful compliance with IRB or of fearful avoidance of it. The purview of IRB control has expanded broadly as well as deeply. IRB has been generalized from the medical world to a wide range of social science and, in some cases, humanities research.3 The major American professional scholarly associations, in their ethics statements, tend to urge their members to obtain IRB approval as a matter of professional ethics.4 Although most approved FWAs are in the U.S., IRBs have inserted themselves into the research codes of one or more institutions in nearly all countries in the world.5 And although most educational institutions with IRBs are universities or medical research organizations, a growing number of high schools, though they do not appear to have formal FWAs, have been drawn into IRB requirements,6 or at least the language of IRB compliance, through an organization called Science Service, which sponsors the International Science and Engineering Fair program. …

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REGULATING CREATIVITY: RESEARCH AND SURVIVAL IN THE IRB IRON CAGE[dagger]

I. INTRODUCTION The stereotype of Asian Americans as a "Model Minority" appears frequently in the popular press and in public and scholarly debates about affirmative action, immigration, and education. The model minority stereotype may be summarized as the belief that "Asian Americans, through their hard work, intelligence, and emphasis on education and achievement, have been successful in American society."1 As critiqued in the scholarly literature, however, this positive image of Asian Americans as a model minority conceals a more sinister core of beliefs about Asian Americans and other racial minorities in America: a view of Asian Americans as foreign and unpatriotic; a belief that there is little racial discrimination in America; a feeling that racial minorities have themselves to blame for persistent poverty and lags in educational and professional attainment; a hostility to foreigners, immigrants, and immigration; and a hostility to government programs to increase opportunities for Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities.2 It is surely true that some people have positive views of Asian Americans as smart and hard working, and some people have negative views of Asian Americans as foreign and threatening. But is it true that the same people tend to hold both views? It would indeed be worrisome if those who thought Asian Americans were smart and hard working tended to be hostile to people of Asian heritage, immigrants, and other minorities. Does the model minority stereotype really have both a positive and a negative side such that negative views inhere in the positive ones (as in the "Yellow Peril")? Or, instead, do the same people who think Asian Americans are smart or hard working tend to like Asian Americans, immigrants, and minorities in general, and support programs that benefit them? That both negative and positive stereotypes about Asian Americans circulate in American society has been well documented by Asian critical scholars3-a fact we confirm and document here. While we do not question that negative images and depictions of Asian Americans are used in debates about social and political issues, we have wondered just how the negative and positive portrayals are linked in the minds of the public. Are people who express a belief in the positive aspects of the model minority stereotype masking their hostility to Asian Americans? A close analysis of that linkage in the minds of the dominant ethnic group-non-Hispanic white Americans-is the main task of this Essay. We have treated the two-edged model minority stereotype as a hypothesis and tested it: Do positive views of Asian Americans as smart, hard working, and relatively successful tend to be found with other positive or negative views of Asians, immigrants, and African Americans?4 Using data from the General Social Survey, we focused our investigation on several fronts. First, we wanted to know how non-Hispanic white Americans see Asian Americans. Do they view Asian Americans as a group as more intelligent, harder working, and richer than average? If whites see Asian Americans in such superficially positive terms, we wondered whether these seemingly positive beliefs might be accompanied by negative opinions, such as a perception that Asian Americans are unpatriotic, foreign, or inassimilable. Moreover, if the model minority stereotype actually masks white hostility to Asian Americans, we wondered whether people who held model minority views also opposed immigration. We also wanted to probe the extent to which model minority beliefs engendered hostility toward, or eroded sympathy for, other minority groups. Do model minority beliefs, for example, correlate with certain opinions on affirmative action and government assistance to non-Asian minority groups? Our findings turned up some surprising results. In very general terms, we found that the model minority stereotype is not correlated with hostility to Asians, immigrants, African Americans, or government programs to increase opportunities for minorities. …

Testing the "Model Minority Myth"

In June 2005, at the end of its October 2004 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court's nine members had served together for almost eleven years, longer than any other group of nine Justices in the nation's history. Although the average tenure of a Supreme Court Justice from 1789 through 1970 was 14.9 years, for those Justices who have retired since 1970, the average tenure has jumped to 26.1 years. Because of the long tenure of recent members of the Court, there were no vacancies on the high Court from 1994 to the middle of 2005. We believe the American constitutional rule granting life tenure to Supreme Court Justices is fundamentally flawed, resulting now in Justices remaining on the Court for longer periods and to a later age than ever before in American history. This trend has led to significantly less frequent vacancies on the Court, which reduces the efficacy of the democratic check that the appointment process provides on the Court's membership. The increase in the longevity of Justices' tenure means that life tenure now guarantees a much longer tenure on the Court than was the case in 1789 or over most of our constitutional history. Moreover, the combination of less frequent vacancies and longer tenures of office means that when vacancies do arise, there is so much at stake that confirmation battles have become much more intense. Finally, as was detailed in a recent article by Professor David Garrow, the advanced age of some Supreme Court Justices has at times led to a problem of "mental decrepitude" on the Court, whereby some Justices have become physically or mentally unable to fulfill their duties during the final stages of their careers. In this Article, we call for a change to the life tenure rule for Supreme Court Justices. To resolve the problems of life tenure, we propose that lawmakers pass a constitutional amendment pursuant to Article V of the Constitution instituting a system of staggered, eighteen-year term limits for Supreme Court Justices. The Court's membership would be constitutionally fixed at nine Justices, whose terms would be staggered such that a vacancy would occur on the Court every two years at the end of the term in every odd-numbered calendar year. Every one-term President would thus get to appoint two Justices and every two-term President would get to appoint four. Our proposal would not apply to any of the nine sitting Justices or to any nominee of the President in office when the constitutional amendment is ratified. Moving to a system of eighteen-year terms for Supreme Court Justices would restore the norms in this country that prevailed on the Court between 1789 and 1970, when vacancies occurred about once every two years, and Justices served an average of 14.9 years on the Court. We recommend that the country recommit itself to the tenure practices that held for Supreme Court Justices for most of our history.

Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered

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The Theory, History, and Practice of the Bribery-Extortion Distinction

Blackmail is considered paradoxical because you can commit a crime while both your ends and means in isolation are legal. For example, if I threaten to expose a prospective employer’s extramarital affair unless the employer hires me, I have committed blackmail. Yet I have a legal right to expose the affair and a legal right to seek a job that I intend to perform. 

After reviewing problems with eight prior theories of blackmail, I offer a new theory. In my view, to get what he wants, the blackmailer uses leverage that is less his than someone else's. Blackmail is thus a way that one person requests something in return for suppressing or settling the actual or potential claims of others. Selling the right to go to the police involves suppressing the state's claim, bargaining with the state's chip. Selling the right to inform the victim of a tort who committed the tort involves suppressing the tort victim's claim. And selling the right to inform others of embarrassing but legal behavior involves suppressing claims belonging to other people, even though those claims may be unredressable in court. 

Similarly, noninformational blackmail involves the same misuse of another's power for the blackmailer's own benefit. For example, when a labor leader threatens to cause a strike unless he personally is paid off, he is suppressing the actual or potential claims of others for his own benefit. And when a public official threatens to deny someone a public contract unless he is paid off, once again he is turning group or representative power to his own benefit. Blackmail differs from ordinary bargaining and threats because the leverage used belongs less to the threatener than to a third party. 

Yet where the leverage used is largely congruent with the threat, blackmail has not occurred. Thus, a tort victim may threaten to expose the circumstances of the tort unless restitution is made. Or a labor leader may threaten to call a strike unless the workers receive higher wages.

James Lindgren

Papers

REGULATING CREATIVITY: RESEARCH AND SURVIVAL IN THE IRB IRON CAGE[dagger]

Testing the "Model Minority Myth"

Term Limits for the Supreme Court: Life Tenure Reconsidered

The Theory, History, and Practice of the Bribery-Extortion Distinction

Unraveling the Paradox of Blackmail