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Many U.S. companies fear investing in Third World countries because of the political risk associated with such ventures. Recent events in Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Philippines and others have under scored such concerns, making U.S. businesses reluctant to participate in some of the fastest growing markets in the Third World. Such political risks need not be so worrisome ‐ many U.S. business people remain unaware of how the Overseas Private Investment Corporation can substantially reduce risks by insuring companies against such uncertainties. This paper discusses the ways through which OPIC can alleviate political risk and compares OPIC’s insurance with the programs of private political risk insurers.

While many workers have both professional and organizational identities, which can have conflicting expectations, little is known about this specific and common form of identity conflict. The purpose of this research is to develop and test a measure of organizational and professional identity conflict (OPIC), which the authors define as a psychological conflict that individuals experience between who they feel they are supposed to be in their organization and who they feel they are supposed to be in their profession. The authors theorize that this identity conflict will lead to emotional exhaustion and psychological distress, further leading to turnover intentions.

To test the hypothesized model, the authors utilized a two-study constructive replication design (Study 1, n = 225; Study 2, n = 176) and tested the model amongst both academics and health care professionals using structural equation modeling.

The authors find that identity conflict is associated with both increased levels of emotional exhaustion and psychological distress and, consequently, increased turnover intentions.

Practically, organizations must understand and align themselves with the wider professional expectations, as well as communicate this alignment, in order to avoid OPIC and improve employee well-being.

The authors create and validate a measure to assess and show its detrimental effects on workplace outcomes.

The World Bank established the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) in 1985 as the first truly global agency which insures foreign investments against political risks. MIGA is now in its fifth full year of operations and has been more successful than originally forecast. This paper will discuss the formation of MIGA and includes an analysis of its operations to date. When appropriate, comparisons will be made between MIGA operations and those of the U.S. investment insurance agency, OPIC, the Overseas Private Investment Company, as well as private market insurers. Selected cases of MIGA guarantees are discussed in the paper.

A widely used strategy to cope with the dangers of foreign investment by hedging against potential losses is political risk insurance. All multinational corporations are subject to political risk perils. Political risk is defined as the adverse effect on the value of a business arising out of direct or indirect actions by a foreign government. Broadly speaking, there are six different types of political risk: confiscation, expropriation and nationalization; contract repudiation and frustration; unfair regulatory environment; currency inconvertibility; contingency; and war risk. Similarly, policies available can be defined according to these six categories. In summary, political risk insurance addresses losses which occur because of politically motivated decisions.

States that foreign investors have clamoured into Asia in the 1990s hoping to tap into the spectacular economic growth, but have often done so without awareness of existing or likely future political and social conditions which could affect their investments and business operations. Adds that political risk insurance is available from agencies such as the World Bank’s MIGA or the US government’s OPIC, but projecting needs for such insurance has not been a consistent practice. Reveals that business publications, such as The Economist, and firms such as Business Environment Risk Intelligence, Inc. (BERI), provide regular projections of political risk based on a variety of observed political and social variables. Examines choice of these variables in an Asian context and assesses statistically the forecasting capability of The Economist and BERI models. Finds that the existence of underlying theory makes a positive difference in the ability of the models to forecast correctly and to provide useful advice to foreign investors. Indicates that both models include variables representing conditions that clearly indicate future trouble for investors. Shows that, with some revisions, existing models of political risk can be useful in guiding investment and trade.

The aims of this paper are: to explore the nature of political risk insurance (PRI) contracts as a form of regulation in the context of mining projects in developing countries; to examine how PRI providers factor corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and practices of applicants in their initial decisions to provide PRI; to examine how CSR criteria are reflected in the terms of PRI contracts; to understand how failure to exercise good CSR practices by recipients of PRI affects insurance coverage; to shed light on how good CSR practices which minimize risk to companies and communities can be or are rewarded through PRI contracts; to identify opportunities for reform.

This article adopts a conceptual approach through analysis of the practical effects and public policy implications associated with use of PRI contracts as a regulatory mechanism to promote good CSR practices.

PRI contracts represent a form of proactive risk management used by investors. Because of the significant regulatory effect of the CSR provisions of PRI contracts provided by state‐based agencies, there is considerable potential for and value associated with greater transparency in the implementation of such contracts.

This article sheds light on the regulatory dimensions associated with the CSR provisions of PRI contracts. This represents a new contribution to the literature on CSR contracts, which until this point has focused largely on the CSR aspects of supply chain contracts.

The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a new method for blog quality assessment. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality.

The blog data are processed by the novel method for the assessment of blog quality. The results are compared to Google Page Rank with respect to the Gold Standard, the BlogRazzi Bookmark Rank.

The method is similar or better than Google Page Rank with respect to the chosen Gold Standard.

The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a novel method for blog quality assessment. Even though its superiority to other and more established methods cannot be proven in the context of this limited study, it enriches the toolset available for blog quality assessment and may become important for a deeper understanding of organizational learning.

This paper aims to focus on the design of algorithms and techniques for an effective set expansion. A tool that finds and extracts candidate sets of tuples from the World Wide Web was designed and implemented. For instance, when a given user provides <Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesian Rupiah>, <China, Beijing, Yuan Renminbi>, <Canada, Ottawa, Canadian Dollar> as seeds, our system returns tuples composed of countries with their corresponding capital cities and currency names constructed from content extracted from Web pages retrieved.

The seeds are used to query a search engine and to retrieve relevant Web pages. The seeds are also used to infer wrappers from the retrieved pages. The wrappers, in turn, are used to extract candidates. The Web pages, wrappers, seeds and candidates, as well as their relationships, are vertices and edges of a heterogeneous graph. Several options for ranking candidates from PageRank to truth finding algorithms were evaluated and compared. Remarkably, all vertices are ranked, thus providing an integrated approach to not only answer direct set expansion questions but also find the most relevant pages to expand a given set of seeds.

The experimental results show that leveraging the truth finding algorithm can indeed improve the level of confidence in the extracted candidates and the sources.

Current approaches on set expansion mostly support sets of atomic data expansion. This idea can be extended to the sets of tuples and extract relation instances from the Web given a handful set of tuple seeds. A truth finding algorithm is also incorporated into the approach and it is shown that it can improve the confidence level in the ranking of both candidates and sources in set of tuples expansion.

Using the very latest Visiongauge equipment, Excellon UK has launched a 24‐hour turnaround service to provide extremely accurate verification of drilled PCBs for process certification or machine calibration. The service allows customers to ensure optimum drill performance and to keep approval records without the time and cost of OPIC or CMM.

Conventional wisdom suggests that war in the host country makes it unattractive for foreign firms to invest. To see if this is true for US firms on the aggregate, this paper aims to examine the veracity of a “permanent war economy” hypothesis, that foreign direct investment (FDI) may, in fact, increase in the host country not despite, but because of, war, i.e. one that lends credence to the idea that, in the USA, “defense [has] become one of constant preparation for future wars and foreign interventions rather than an exercise in response to one-off threats.”

The authors test the hypotheses using Generalized Method of Moments estimation, with Heckman Selection, on US FDI data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and war data from the Correlates of War2 Project, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program/International Peace Research Institute data set, the International Crisis Behavior Project and the Center for Systemic Peace Major Episodes of Political Violence data set. The final sample consists of 351 country-year observations in 55 host countries from 1982 to 2006.

The findings indicate that overall US FDI in a host country in a given year decreases if the host country is engaged in wars with multiple countries and if the US Government is involved in the war. Most notably, the results show that US involvement in multiple host country wars is actually correlated with increased US FDI into the host country, providing empirical support for the “permanent war economy” hypothesis.

While other studies have focused on war and FDI, the authors have sought to show the impact of the involvement of arguably the most influential country, i.e. the USA, in the sovereign matters of a focal host country. By studying FDI from the USA as a function of US involvement in wars overseas, over the years with the greatest use of private military companies by the USA and the largest portion of global FDI accounted for by the USA, this work motivates a research agenda on home-host-"other” relations in the context of war and FDI, with the “other” being the supranational “elephant in the room.”