It appears that Sweden and the United States may be a study in contrasts regarding the sanction and use of corporal punishment on children. A 1979 study of American parents noted that 81% of them employed corporal punishment with children. A different study done in Sweden in 1978 noted that only 26% of parents used corporal punishment with children. What points to the differences in these paren...

BACKGROUND Medical professionalism is an essential aspect of medical education and practice worldwide and it must be adopted according to different social and cultural contexts. We examined the current congruence and variance in the perception of professionalism in undergraduate medical students and faculty members in one medical school in Saudi Arabia. METHODS The target population was first...

Recently published studies that investigate the effect of benefit cuts on the employment prospects of unemployed show that sanctions substantially increase the probability of an individual to get employed. This evidence suggests at first sight that benefit sanctions are an effective tool in the activation process of the unemployed and should be used more frequently by welfare agencies to enhanc...

There is an increasing need for norms to be embedded in technology as the widespread deployment of applications such as autonomous driving and warfare and big data analysis for crime fighting and counter-terrorism becomes ever closer. Current approaches to norms in multi-agent systems tend either to simply make prohibited actions unavailable, or to provide a set of rules (principles) which the ...

Monitoring Job Offer Decisions, Punishments, Exit to Work, and Job Quality Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower occupational level. The data c...

This paper studies the evolution of European fiscal policies and the attempts at budgetary consolidation through three periods: the pre-Maastricht phase (to 1991); the run up to monetary union (1992-97), and finally the stability pact phase (1998 onwards). Using three separate indicators – the probability of undertaking a consolidation, the degree to which it is sustained, and the probability o...

In this issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, the Task Force on Community Preventive Services presents a systematic review of the literature o assess the effectiveness of ignition interlocks for reducng alcohol-impaired driving and alcohol-related crashes. The following commentary highlights the progress made with these devices in Sweden. In Sweden, there are 9 million inhabitan...

In this paper, I construct a simple model that illustrates conditions under which increased criminal sanctions can lead to increased levels of crime. This finding is derived from the interaction of binding budgetary constraints and plea bargaining, given that the costs of trial are assumed to be increasing in the size of sanction. In an environment with these institutional features, maximal san...

Unemployment insurance systems include monitoring of unemployed workers and puni­ tive sanctions if job search requirements are violated. We analyze the effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality, notably on wage rates and hours worked, and we examine how often a sanction leads to a lower occupational level. The data cover the Swedish population over 1999–2004. We estimate duration models d...