Search results

In recent years, socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers have increased their usage of nontraditional lending nearly converging to levels of usage observed for nonsocially disadvantaged groups. The purpose of this research is to explore explanations for this trend in lending utilization by socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers by examining factors that influence credit usage and credit choice.

A multinomial logit is used to estimate the probability of loan choice given characteristics of the producer and farm.

While not a causal analysis, the results suggest that farm characteristics, which differ between socially disadvantaged and nonsocially disadvantaged producers, are associated with a lower likelihood of credit usage by an average socially disadvantaged farmer. For those that have loans, socially disadvantaged producers exhibit higher debt-to-asset ratios and lower current ratios, characteristics that are typically associated with higher than observed probability of usage of loans other than nontraditional. Socially disadvantaged producers also have lower value of assets which is associated with a higher probability of nontraditional loan usage.

This research is among the first to examine loan usage of socially disadvantaged producers using nationally representative data.

This paper explores the relationship between droughts and U.S. agricultural sector profitability in select U.S. regions. We also examine the extent to which the farm safety net, including direct government payments and the federal crop insurance program, may compensate for the impacts of drought on farm sector profitability.

Fixed effect regressions estimate the relationship between drought and profitability for the farm sector. The analysis uses a panel of annual, state-level net farm income and its subcomponents (from the USDA, Economic Research Service) and state-level annual drought measures constructed from county crop damage days (as reported in the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses Database for the United States, or SHELDUS). SHELDUS includes Severe (D2) or more intense drought shocks for the states east of the Rocky Mountains, and these states provide the focus for our analysis.

Market net farm income negatively correlates with the drought measures. This relation is partially driven by the increase in production expenses during drought episodes. Further, sales from inventories tend to increase during drought periods. A significant share of damages to sector performance are offset by federal crop insurance program indemnities. Finally, our results show that drought impacts and the effects of the farm safety net are distributed differently across geographic regions.

To our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to examine drought impacts on the components of agricultural profitability, including the farm safety net and production expenses, at the sector level.

The Children Act 1989 forms a modern and integrated legal framework for children proceedings. A victim of its own success, the Act has brought child care law into the spotlight, with more public law cases heard in judge courts and the proceedings making great demands of public funds in social work and legal spheres. There is a need to simplify the process and make more urgent the resolution of cases to better protect children in a timely way.

This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of the Bribery Act 2010 in curbing corporate bribery.

The paper takes a doctrinal focus in assessing UK bribery law using both primary and secondary sources.

This paper finds that the effectiveness of the Bribery Act 2010 in curbing bribery lies in its approach of changing the basis for corporate criminal liability from focusing on the guilt of personnel within the company to focusing on the quality of the system governing the activities of the company. Companies have to address the risks of bribery or risk facing liability for failure to prevent bribery. With its regulatory approach to corporate liability, coupled with its extraterritorial reach, the Bribery Act is likely to change business cultures that facilitate bribery, thereby proving an effective law to corporate bribes.

This paper highlights the deficiency of earlier laws in tackling corporate bribery, examines the crime of bribery from a company law perspective and argues that the regulatory strategy in the Bribery Act is likely to be an effective tool against bribery.

Procedural justice is important for fostering peoples’ willingness to cooperate with police. Theorizing suggests this relationship results because procedural justice enhances perceptions that the police are legitimate and entitled to be supported. The purpose of this paper is to examine how legitimacy perceptions moderate the effect of procedural justice policing on Muslims’ willingness to cooperate with police.

Survey data from 800 Muslims in Australia are used.

This study shows Muslims’ procedural justice perceptions are positively associated with two types of cooperation: willingness to cooperate with police in general crime control efforts; and willingness to report terror threats to police. Muslims’ perceptions of police legitimacy and law legitimacy also influence willingness to cooperate. Specifically, police legitimacy is more important for predicting general willingness to cooperate with police, while law legitimacy is more important for predicting Muslims’ willingness to report terror threats. Importantly, legitimacy perceptions moderate the relationship between procedural justice and both types of cooperation. Specifically, procedural justice promotes cooperation more strongly for those who question the legitimacy of police or the legitimacy of counter-terrorism laws, but the moderation effects differ across the two cooperation contexts. The findings have implications for procedural justice scholarship and for counter-terrorism policing.

The current paper examines an under-explored aspect of legitimacy; it examines police legitimacy perceptions, but also examines how people view the legitimacy of laws police enforce (i.e. law legitimacy). It is argued that perceptions about law legitimacy can also impact people’s willingness to cooperate with police.

This chapter derives from the movieDr. Strangelovecues for exploring questions about the quest for methodological insularity and purity in socio-legal research. Steven Lukes’ classic three-dimensional model of power provides an intellectual focus for the core exploration of relations between epistemology and data generation, the two key elements that we usually identify with methodology. The discussion culminates in an affirmative argument for the value of approaching methodology as jazz, the creative popular music that grounds reliable, humane sense in Kubrick's movie and provides an apt analogy for much of the leading scholarship in the LSA tradition.