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In October 2010, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. The Chinese Government responded by freezing political and economic relations with Norway, introducing sanctions on imports of fish and other products, and limiting diplomatic interaction. Using a synthetic control approach, we estimate the effect of Chinese sanctions on Norwegian exports to China and on Norwegian foreign policy. We find that the sanctions reduced direct exports of fish to China by between 125 and 176 million US$ in the period 2011–2013, and direct total exports from Norway to China by between 780 and 1300 million US$. Moreover, immediately following the peace prize, Norwegian agreement with Chinese voting on UN human rights resolutions increased. The results suggest that the Chinese Government can effectively use economic sanctions to affect the foreign policy positions of democratic governments, with potentially chilling effects for international progress on human rights.

Does diversification of an economy improve the chances of democracy? In theory, diversification may reduce elite cohesion and improve citizens’ outside options, making democracy more likely. This paper estimates the effect of export diversification on democracy, using data from 143 countries. We use variability within countries in fertile soil as an instrument for diversification, controlling for country size. To address the possibility that current fertile soil variability may have been influenced by historical country characteristics that could also have affected democracy today, we control for historical changes in land cover. We identify a statistically significant, positive effect of diversification on democracy.

This paper estimates the effect of education on the success of entrepreneurial activity, using survey data from Malawi. An instrument variable approach is used to address the endogeneity of education. We find a significant and substantial effect of an added year of primary education on entrepreneurial profitability. This is consistent with theoretical arguments that primary schooling provides a generalised form of competence that underpins the variety of skills an entrepreneur needs to succeed in business. Results are robust to non-random selection into entrepreneurship.

Though corporate social responsibility (CSR) is on the agenda of most major corporations, corporate executives still largely support the view that corporations should maximize the returns to their owners. There are two lines of defence for this position. One is the Friedmanian view that maximizing owner returns is the social responsibility of corporations. The other is a position voiced by many executives, that CSR and profits go together. This article argues that the first position is ethically untenable, while the latter is not supported by empirical evidence. The implication is that there may be good reason for firms to deviate from a maxim of profit maximization.

In settings where complex social decisions are made, information is often aggregated into indices to facilitate decision making. The value added of such composite indices depends, inter alia, on the extent to which decision makers trust and make use of them. This paper presents a randomized experiment on the use of an index designed to inform migrant resettlement decisions, using 410 graduate students in Bangladesh as respondents. Respondents were randomly assigned to control and treatment conditions. In the control group, respondents faced a discrete choice experiment where they were asked to allocate 1000 migrants between two locations described by five attributes (availability of cropland, distance to hospital, distance to school, poverty incidence, frequency of floods, droughts and cyclones). In the treatment group, respondents also had access to the migrant resettlement index for the two locations. Results show that the resettlement index is used by the respondents, and mechanism analyses suggest this is due to perceptions of improved benefits to costs from using the index to make decisions. Results from the control group also suggest that past adverse environmental events are particularly important for resettlement decisions, but less so for respondents who grew up in areas where such events were frequent.

Does corruption attract or deter foreign investment in the extractive sectors? This article presents an econometric analysis of extractive industry foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows to 81 countries in the period 1996–2009. The results suggest that increased corruption within a country is associated with increased extractive industry FDI, but at a diminishing rate as corruption increases grow larger. For realistic changes in corruption, however, more corruption is associated with more extractive industry investment.

We analyse unique survey data on the migration intentions of 400 households in two extremely climate exposed communities in coastal Bangladesh. The results show that few households in these areas expect to relocate elsewhere over the coming 5-year period. Surprisingly, households that have experienced environmental shocks do not express higher migration intentions or expectations of future shocks. These results hold controlling for variables reflecting household constraints, vulnerability, and coping capacity, and likely reflects the population remaining in the region being a highly selected sample whose preferences for mobility are low and remain limited in the face of environmental shocks. Moreover, an embedded discrete choice experiment shows that shock-exposed households are less likely to move in scenarios of worse future environmental conditions. We argue that this is hard to explain through selection or increased resilience alone, and may instead reflect preference change among shock-exposed households that have chosen to remain. Our results suggest that in contexts of ongoing exposure to climate shocks, migration may over time become an increasingly unimportant adaptation strategy in affected areas.

Human rights imply duties. The question is, duties for whom? Without a well-defined scheme for assigning duties correlative to human rights, these rights remain illusory. This paper develops core elements of a general scheme of duty assignment and studies the implications for corporations. A key distinction in such an assignment is between unconditional and conditional duties. Unconditional duties apply to every agent regardless of the conduct of others. Conditional duties reflect a division of moral labour where different tasks are assigned to specific agents, whose default activates back-up duties of other agents. Corporations face unconditional duties to not directly violate the rights of others, and not undermine the division of moral labour through practices such as tax evasion or corruption. Being unconditional, these duties cannot be deviated from by reference to the misconduct of competitors. In addition, corporate conditional duties to protect, promote or fulfil rights can be activated if the state and other designated duty-bearers fail to discharge their duties.

A model of repeated play of a coordination game, in which stage games have a location in social space and players receive noisy signals of the true location of their games, is reviewed. Sugden (1995) (The coexistence of conventions. J Econ Behav Organ 28:241-256) suggests that, in such a model, there can be a stationary state of convention coexistence only if interaction is non-uniform across social space. This paper shows that an alternative definition of conventions, which links conventions to actions rather than expectations, permits convention coexistence when interaction is uniform. To assess robustness, the concept of a global mutant is introduced, to which certain states of coexistence are robust. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]