The prospects for cooperation on climate protection beyond 2012 are currently uncertain. Thus policy instruments which foster participation in International Environmental Agreements (IEA) are in demand. Among the instruments under discussion are trade sanctions. Multi-region optimal growth models are a state of the art tool for integrated assessment, but introducing trade sanctions distorts the...

Acommon thread in the economic sanctions literature is the assumption that multilateral cooperation among the potential sanctioning states is a necessary and/or sufficient condition for generating a successful outcome.1 Indeed, obtaining multilateral cooperation is so important that some scholars make this their dependent variable. Some of the more sophisticated work on economic coercion has fo...

This article draws on data from qualitative interviews with ethnic enclave and ethnic economy business entrepreneurs from Chinese, Bangladeshi and Turkish-speaking communities in London. Routes into business and worker recruitment practices are explored, demonstrating the centrality of social capital in the form of family and other social networks within these processes. The article investigate...

Recent waves of immigration to Western nations have fueled a debate over the consequences of ethnic diversity for social cohesion. One prominent argument in this debate holds that diversity is detrimental to trust and cooperation because individuals in heterogeneous communities face difficulties in enforcing social norms across ethnic lines. We examine this proposition in a field experiment inv...

Some researchers have claimed that chimpanzee and human culture rest on homologous cognitive and learning mechanisms. While clearly there are some homologous mechanisms, we argue here that there are some different mechanisms at work as well. Chimpanzee cultural traditions represent behavioural biases of different populations, all within the species' existing cognitive repertoire (what we call t...

This article examines the basic social science concepts of "power" and "social exchange" in order to determine the possibility and desirability of integrating them. It is argued that: (1) all exchange relationships can be described in terms of conventional power concepts without twisting the common-sense notions that underlie such concepts; (2) most-but not necessarily all-power relationships c...

This study seeks to replicate and extend research on the stress process by examining the relationships among stress, social support, physical exercise, and depressive symptoms with data provided by a recent nationwide survey of older adults in Japan. The findings reveal that more frequent physical exercise is associated with less psychological distress. Moreover, the data suggest that some (but...

User sanctions influence the legal risk for consumers who engage in illegal drug markets. If a reduction in user sanctions leads to an increase in consumption, drug prices will rise unless supply is perfectly elastic. In equilibrium, a change in consumption associated with decreasing user sanctions could be relatively small if supply is upward sloping. Using a novel dataset with rich transactio...

Why do mutualists perform costly behaviours that benefit individuals of a different species? One of the factors that may stabilize mutualistic interactions is when individuals preferentially reward more mutualistic (beneficial) behaviour and ⁄ or punish less mutualistic (more parasitic) behaviour. We develop a model that shows how such sanctions provide a fitness benefit to the individuals that...

Iran’s energy and petrochemical exports have recently been restricted by a series of international sanctions. This paper focuses on one of the country’s exports, namely methanol – a petrochemical increasingly used for fuel blending and traded at various locations worldwide – and empirically explores the relationships among the North American, European, and Asian markets to investigate the incid...