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This chapter explores the work tasks assigned to women prisoners in Myanmar. The official intention of such tasks is to help rehabilitate women in prison by providing them with skills to enhance their future employability outside the prison. The chapter critically inspects this proposition based on an ethnographic case study involving interviews with previously incarcerated women. The women’s narratives allow us to juxtapose the actual practice of prison work with the aims of rehabilitation and to critically examine the connection between the types of work tasks given, the distribution of tasks to different kinds of prisoners, and the potential of such work to enhance employability post-release. We find that while prison work is provided ostensibly to prepare and equip women with skills as a form of vocational training, in fact, it rather serves the interests of private companies and the Myanmar Prison Department. We argue that the types of work are intentionally and unintentionally exploitative. The challenges faced by women concerning prison work are highlighted, and the authors propose that the Myanmar Prison Department must commit to more genuine livelihood training options that are not exploitative, but meaningful and orientated toward the employability of women prisoners upon their release.

Commentators express concern that when auditors investigate for but fail to detect fraud, jurors might effectively penalize the auditors for having investigated for the fraud (AICPA, 2004; Coffee, 2004; Golden, Skalak, & Clayton, 2006). Consistent with these concerns, Reffett (2010) finds that, in a between-participants setting, evaluators in cases of undetected fraud are more likely to hold auditors liable for damages when the auditors identified the perpetrated fraud as a fraud risk and then investigated for the fraud, relative to when the auditors did neither. What remains unclear, however, is the extent to which identifying versus investigating fraud risks increases evaluators’ between-participants assessments of auditor liability. That is, when auditors investigate for, but fail to detect fraud, is the increase in evaluators’ liability assessments due to the fact that the auditors identified (i.e., were aware of) the fraud risk but did not detect the fraud, or that the auditors unsuccessfully investigated for the fraud (or both)? This study addresses these questions by reporting evidence that both identifying and investigating fraud risks can each, in isolation, increase evaluators’ perceptions of auditor negligence. The processes by which identifying and investigating fraud risks increase evaluators’ negligence verdicts, however, appear to differ.

Lester and Wolff (2013) find little empirical support for the Austrian business cycle theory. According to their analysis, an unexpected monetary shock does not alter the structure of production in a way consistent with the Austrian view. Rather than increasing production in early and late stages relative to middle stages, they find the opposite – a positive monetary shock typically decreases production in early and late stages relative to middle stages. We argue that the measures of production and prices employed by Lester and Wolff (2013) are constructed in such a way that makes them inappropriate for assessing the empirical relevance of the Austrian business cycle theory’s unique features. After describing how these measures are constructed and why using ratios of stages is problematic, we use a structural vector autoregression to consider the effects of a monetary shock on each stage of the production process. We show that, with a clearer understanding of what is actually being measured by the stage of process data, the results are consistent with (but not exclusive to) the Austrian view.

High-speed rail, as a distinct subset of rail systems, has been in operation since 1964, first introduced in Japan and subsequently adopted widely in heavily populated countries across Europe and Asia with plans in place to extend to America and Australia. Development of technologies has been continuous such that maximum speed in service operation has safely increased from 210 to 350 km/h with further advances to come in the next decade. Its economic and social effect through reducing journey time between cities while also offering very high capacity, reliability and safety with a low-carbon footprint means it is no longer considered by sponsoring governments on its merits as a transport system but rather as part of a wider set of strategic policies around housing settlement and employment. Analysis techniques continue to be developed to estimate true benefits alongside construction, environmental impact and operational costs.

This chapter seeks to shed light on the many factors that contribute to people becoming school shooters. These factors are divided into four domains: biological, psychological, social, and cultural. At the biological level, this chapter explores the potential influence of genetics, pre- and post-natal development, and body-related issues that may affect the perpetrators' sense of self. A psychological typology is presented, consisting of psychopathic, psychotic, and traumatized school shooters. Socially, school shooters often have multiple setbacks, failures, and rejections that contribute to their distress. Finally, the cultural domain includes such factors as media violence, role models for killing, and ideologies of hatred and supremacy. Rather than attributing school shootings to a simplistic cause such as bullying, this chapter discusses a wide range of potential influences that combine to cause mass attacks at schools.

This chapter studies the technical efficiencies of Chinese airports by using a meta-frontier production function model which accounts for airports in different regions accessing different technologies. Our empirical results show that the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in the coastal region are higher than their counterparts in the inland region. However, the technical efficiency scores of airports and provincial output in inland region are steadily increasing while the counterparts of airports and provincial output in coastal region are slowly declining. In addition, our analysis of provincial efficiency changes shows that airport productivity has a positive and statistically significant effect on the technical changes of provincial output. Our results partially confirm the success of the government policy of promoting airport construction and development in the western inland region.