Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper examines whether fraud allegations affect firms' contracting with the government. Using a data set of whistleblower allegations brought under the False Claims Act against firms accused of defrauding the government, we find that federal agencies do not reduce the total dollar volume of contracts with accused firms; however, they substitute approximately 14% of the harderto-monitor cost-plus contracts for fixed-price contracts. This effect is concentrated in the procurement of services and explained by contract and service substitution. Finally, we find that after the conclusion of the investigation, the government reduces the contract dollar volume by approximately 15% for cases that resulted in a settlement. Our findings indicate that contract-design changes are used to mitigate uncertainty in suppliers' reputation.

When are citizens most likely to hold politicians to account for wrongdoing? In a crowded information environment, political accountability requires that credible information about politician behavior is available and that citizens are able to identify credible information as such. Focusing on this second requirement, we argue that the ability to discern more credible from less credible information is increasing in citizens’ cognitive and political sophistication. Using data from an original survey experiment in Brazil, we show that all citizens react negatively to corruption allegations but that more politically sophisticated respondents are themost likely to discern between sources of information that differ in their credibility. In particular, they are more skeptical of low-credibility sources than their less sophisticated counterparts. Our findings suggest a novel mechanism that may link increasing education with control of political corruption: educated citizens are better able to discern, and therefore act on, credible corruption accusations.

Research on misconduct suggests that accusations against industry peers generate negative consequences for non-accused firms (a “stigma effect”). Yet, building on research on competitive dynamics, we infer that such accusations can benefit non-accused firms that compete with these peers (a “competition effect”). To reconcile these opposing perspectives, we posit that the negative stigma effect will increase with greater product market overlap between the non-accused firm and its accused peer, up to a point, beyond which the positive competition effect will counterbalance it. We further conjecture that the competition effect will be relatively more pronounced when the market classification used by investors for assessing the market overlap is more fine-grained. Accordingly, we suggest that more sophisticated investors, who rely on more fine-grained market classifications, increase their shareholdings in non-accused firms to a greater extent than less sophisticated investors as the market overlap between the non-accused firm and the accused peer increases. Using elaborate data on products and investments, we analyze investors’ shareholdings and stock market returns of non-accused firms in the U.S. software industry following accusations of financial misconduct by their industry peers, and we find support for our predictions. Our study elucidates the interplay between stigma and competition following misconduct by industry peers.

This article shows that the competing discourses on uncorroborated allegations of child sexual abuse (UACSA) each rests on unreliable epistemic assumptions, meaning that in any given case it is uncertain whether the individual making the accusation is a genuine victim or the perpetrator of a false allegation against an innocent individual. It argues that this presents a fatal challenge to the existing fields of knowledge and practise on either side of the discursive divide in terms of how alleged victims in UACSA cases are conceptualized and measured and how they are acted upon. It concludes with a call for an open-minded approach, which prioritizes the pursuit of truth in investigations to try to ensure that criminal justice system interventions in such an inherently problematic area are just and that they do not cause or compound the forms of harm and injustice currently at play.

In this paper, we document basic facts regarding public debates about controversial political issues on Chinese social media. Our documentation is based on a dataset of 13.2 billion blog posts published on Sina Weibo—the most prominent Chinese microblogging platform—during the 2009–2013 period. Our primary finding is that a shockingly large number of posts on highly sensitive topics were published and circulated on social media. For instance, we find millions of posts discussing protests, and these posts are informative in predicting the occurrence of specific events. We find an even larger number of posts with explicit corruption allegations, and that these posts predict future corruption charges of specific individuals. Our findings challenge a popular view that an authoritarian regime would relentlessly censor or even ban social media. Instead, the interaction of an authoritarian government with social media seems more complex.

There is a longstanding dispute between criminal justice professionals on the one hand and researchers and commentators on the other regarding the prevalence of false allegations of rape. Prevalence, however, is contingent upon definition. If the various protagonists' definitions of a 'false allegation' do not coincide, it is virtually inevitable that their estimates will diverge. Drawing on original empirical data from in-depth research interviews conducted with police and Crown Prosecutors, this article explores the following important but much-neglected question: When criminal justice professionals tell us that false allegations of rape are common, what precisely are they talking about? What 'counts' as a false allegation?

False allegation of violence and abuse is an under-recognized problem in custody disputes and divorce cases. However, only a handful of studies have investigated false allegations of domestic violence as a phenomenon in itself. Thus, the aim of the present study was to explore the experiences of individuals (male and female), who were recognized as falsely accused of domestic violence. An interpretive phenomenological analysis approach was utilized to analyze interviews conducted with 19 false allegation victims. Participants' interviews revealed three superordinate themes: (1) \"I was the victim in this relationship:\" False allegation as a form of lifelong intimate partner violence; (2) \"I felt everything crashing down on me:\" False allegation as a traumatic event; (3) \"This battle has brought me to my knees:\" A series of losses following false allegations. The findings may provide some qualitative insights into the experience of false allegation and its possible connection to coercive control in the context of partners' conflictual relationships. It is important for professionals to acknowledge false allegations as abusive tactics used within domestic violence situations as they cause considerable pain to the individuals involved.

U.S. laws provide explicit whistleblower protections and direct regulators to adopt ambitious programs to reward whistleblowing. However, there is limited evidence on whether employee whistleblowing deters financial misreporting and tax aggressiveness. Using a sample of employee whistleblower cases obtained from the U.S. government, I provide evidence that firms subject to whistleblowing allegations exhibit significant decreases in financial misreporting and tax aggressiveness, compared with control firms. I find that this deterrent effect persists for at least two years beyond the year of the allegation.

While the willingness of people to believe unfounded and conspiratorial explanations of events is fascinating and troubling, few have addressed the broader impacts of the dissemination of conspiracy claims. We use survey experiments to assess whether realistic exposure to a conspiracy claim affects conspiracy beliefs and trust in government. These experiments yield interesting and potentially surprising results. We discover that respondents who are asked whether they believe in a conspiracy claim after reading a specific allegation actually report lower beliefs than those not exposed to the specific claim. Turning to trust in government, we find that exposure to a conspiracy claim has a potent negative effect on trust in government services and institutions including those unconnected to the allegations. Moreover, and consistent with our belief experiment, we find that first asking whether people believe in the conspiracy mitigates the negative trust effects. Combining these findings suggests that conspiracy exposure increases conspiracy beliefs and reduces trust, but that asking about beliefs prompts additional thinking about the claims which softens and/or reverses the exposure's effect on beliefs and trust.

How does the content of public allegations impact regulatory communication strategies? Employing a multinomial logistic regression analysis and an original data set, this article analyzes the Israeli banking regulator's nuanced responses to public expressions of opinion between 1996 and 2012. We demonstrate this agency's greater propensity to acknowledge problems, yet mostly shift blame to others when faced with claims that regulation is overly lenient, and to deny allegations that regulation is excessive. These findings, although based on one institution, are important because they demonstrate an agency's differential response to external allegations, given their content and its assessment of the relative threat to its reputation. They also suggest that external audiences may be able to shape agency attention and response by carefully framing their claims in light of their understandings of agencies' distinct reputational vulnerabilities.