Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What is investor-state arbitration? And how does it impact upon people’s lives? Today, we present a Q&A with Gus Van Harten, author of Sovereign Choices and Sovereign Constraints, where he explains the fundamentals of investor-state arbitration and its place in international law.
By Viktoria Baklanova and Joseph Tanega
In the name of financial stability, institutional and product regulations since the 2008 financial crisis have forced banks and non-bank banks (the so-called “shadow banks”) to create insatiable compliance regimes. But the juggernaut does not stop here.
The internet has come a long way since the first “electronic mail” was sent back in 1971… but with its rapid advancement come challenges to cybersecurity and the increasing threat of cyberterrorism, both on an individual level as well as on a larger global scale. In their new book, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, experts P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman warn us that we may not be as secure online as we think we are.
With over 30,000 media reports and academic studies on the dangers of cyberterrorism, surely the threat today could not be greater? But as P.W. Singer, author of the bestselling Wired for War and co-author of Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know, points out — not a single person has died in a cyberterror attack.
By Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo
Economic crises have a traumatic effect on peoples’ psychology and attitudes, as superbly illustrated by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, both written in the middle of the Great Depression. The experience of the dramatic years during the Great Depression had a large impact on people and, ultimately, helped forge the social beliefs and attitudes that sustained a political system for many years.
By Stephen Blyth
Almost exactly twenty years ago, on 19 October 1993, the US House of Representatives voted 264 to 159 to reject further financing for the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), the particle accelerator being built under Texas. $2bn had already been spent on the Collider, and its estimated total cost had grown from $4.4bn to $11bn; a budget saving of $9bn beckoned. Later that month President Clinton signed the bill officially terminating the project.
By Richard S. Grossman
2013 was an eventful year from the perspective of economics. The US government was shut down for 16 days as ideologically-driven Republicans held the budget hostage in an effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Japan’s new nationalistic government embarked on a bold, and so far largely successful attempt to revive the country’s anemic economy.
Is it morbid or therapeutic to analyze the economic catastrophes of the past? What critical strategies can be imported from the realms of medicine and military history to the study of the current state of the economy? Richard Grossman, author of Wrong: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them, skillfully dissects the cadavers of economic policies.
By Robert Pollin
In 2010, the Harvard University economics professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a paper in the American Economic Review, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” that spoke to the world’s biggest policy question: should we cut public spending to control the deficit or use the state to rekindle economic growth?
How has globalization changed in the last ten years? We asked Manfred Steger, author of Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, how he felt it has been affected by world events in the decade since the first edition of his Very Short Introduction was published.
>By Carolyn Napolitano
The 2014 Allied Social Science Associations meeting will be held from 3-5 January at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown. More than 50 associations nationwide will come together for three days of engaging lectures, thought-provoking sessions, and networking with some of the top figures in the field.
By S. Subramanian
In one way or another, the question ‘How is India Doing?’ has been one of great interest down the decades, and not only from the mid-1980s when Amartya Sen wrote an article, with that title, in the New York Review of Books.
By Maurizio Borghi and Stavroula Karapapa
After almost a decade of litigation, on 14 November the Southern District Court of New York has ruled on the class action Authors Guild v Google. Judge Chin, who had rejected in March 2011 the agreement proposing to settle the case, found that the activities carried out in the context of the Google Books project do not infringe copyright.
By Cynthia B. Meyers
AT&T has produced a teen reality program, @summerbreak—seen not on TV but on social media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. General Electric is sponsoring articles in the magazine The Economist. And Pepsico has a blog site, Green- Label, devoted to skateboarding, rap music, and other interests of “millennial males.”
By Johanna Niegel
Private foundations are attracting a lot of attention as far as international asset protection and estate planning are concerned.
By Colin P. Green, John S. Heywood, and Nikolaos Theodoropoulos
The British labour market shares two important trends with that in the US. Wage inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s and there has been increased use of performance pay, earnings that vary with worker job performance.