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This study contributes to the understanding of the health effects of pesticides exposure and of how pesticides have been and should be regulated.

This study presents literature reviews for the period 2000–2013 on (i) the health effects of pesticides and on (ii) preference valuation of health risks related to pesticides, as well as a discussion of the role of benefit-cost analysis applied to pesticide regulatory measures.

This study indicates that the health literature has focused on individuals with direct exposure to pesticides, i.e. farmers, while the literature on preference valuation has focused on those with indirect exposure, i.e. consumers. The discussion highlights the need to clarify the rationale for regulating pesticides, the role of risk perceptions in benefit-cost analysis, and the importance of inter-disciplinary research in this area.

This study relates findings of different disciplines (health, economics, public policy) regarding pesticides, and identifies gaps for future research.

This paper examines the implications of the disability rights critique of prenatal testing on the development of genetic policy and abortion rights. It traces the reappearance of the disabled body in public deliberations over reproductive and genetic politics that use disability to frame arguments about which bodies are worthy of protection, how and why we limit reproductive choices, and what reasons women may use to terminate their pregnancies. The disability critique of prenatal testing and selective abortion finds itself in productive tension with reproductive rights politics, which increasingly features disability in both pro-life and pro-choice messages. The uneasy alliance between disability and pro-life interests has profound implications for both disability legal scholarship and the sociolegal inquiry into the role of rights articulation – and rejection – by social movements.

This chapter examines how women deploy gendered motherhood norms to publicly challenge abortion stigma. Drawing on a sample of 41 abortion stories from women living in Tennessee, I find that women evoke notions of intensive, total, and idealized motherhood in order to manage and challenge the stigma of an abortion. A large proportion of these stories were written by married mothers who emphasized their identities as good mothers and wives. A close qualitative analysis of these trends reveals two dominant forms of recasting abortion. First, abortion is framed as an extension of total mothering to spare an unborn baby from risky health conditions. Part of this includes casting abortion as an often-necessary choice in order for a woman to develop into the perfect mother for the benefit of her children – altruistic self-development. Second, abortion is construed as a form of maternal protection of current children to continue intensively mothering them. Both themes speak to women’s strategies for reframing abortion as a health practice to promote the well-being of children. These findings have implications for the study of medical stigma, reproduction, and the impact of gender ideals on women’s health choices.

Purpose: The United States became a member of the United Nations’ (UN’s) core anti-racism treaty, International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), but has not passed the UN’s core gender equality treaty, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This chapter explores why the United States passed only one of the conventions. It reviews the power, misinterpretation, and compliance theories that explain why only one of the treaties was ratified. In addition, it offers a fourth explanation of the nation’s behavior – that of relative cost.

Findings: This chapter shows that CEDAW’s mandates, which are specific in nature, are costlier with respect to public services, educational resources, and programs to alleviate cultural prejudices, than are the more broadly framed ICERD mandates. This chapter finds this difference as a driving factor for the nation to enter into the race convention and not the women’s rights pact.

Methodologies: Methodologies used in this publication include feminist and legal analyses and the examination of US policies as well as statements made by political figures.

Originality: This chapter makes contributions to legal and feminist scholarship by providing insight into the nation’s adoption of ICERD, and its failure to ratify CEDAW despite its stance that it is a supporter of women’s rights. The implications of this study are that while the power, misinterpretation, and compliance theories are useful to understand the apparent discrepant response to the two treaties, relative cost as defined by the different ways in which the treaties are framed is also useful in explaining the United States’ failure to ratify the gender equality treaty. Though CEDAW is more specific in its identification of equality issues and is costlier than ICERD, the advancement of both gender and racial equality in the United States falls short of international standards.

We study the spatial diffusion of stock backdating, an instance of corporate misconduct about which public information was virtually absent until 2005. Contrary to the findings of Bizjack, Lemmon, and Whitby (2009), our results reveal that this “invisible” practice did not diffuse through board interlocks. Rather, stock backdating spread through geographic proximity: firms were more likely to backdate stock options to the extent that other firms located geographically close to them had done so. Lending support to the importance of localized interactions among members of the local business elite, the effect of geographical proximity was conditional on high levels of local board interlocks. Our findings regarding the differential impact of geographic proximity and board interlocks on the diffusion of this invisible practice are analogous to the diffusion pattern of controversial practices proposed by Davis and Greve (1997).

A discipline is bound by some combination of a shared subject matter, shared theory, and shared technique. Yet modern economics is seemingly without limit to its domain. As a discipline without a shared subject matter, what is the binding force of economics today? The authors combine topic modeling and text analysis to analyze different approaches to inquiry within the discipline of economics. The authors find that the importance of theory has declined as economics has increasingly become defined by its empirical techniques. The authors question whether this trajectory is stable in the long run as the binding force of the discipline.

Considering the recent trends of the increasing globalization of the market economy and the diffusion of democracy, the modern world needs to pay closer attention to pro-women and pro-girls policies if gender discrimination is to be challenged. Such policies could mark an era of building greater gender equality across the world by strengthening domains of women’s well-being that have been shown to decline in the initial years of the democratization and globalization of countries.

Women, who have more complex societal roles than men and whose employment is more tenuous, are more vulnerable to the rapid restructuring in macro-political and economic systems and bear more of the costs of systemic changes. My world-scale analyses show that women and men benefit unequally from the growth of democracy and the global economy – men’s well-being improves with the growth of democracy and globalization but women’s well-being declines. According to my follow-up studies, the decline lasts for over a decade (2014). These findings suggest that prior results of research proposing that democracy and the global economy improve people’s well-being are most likely biased when gender and the level of development in countries are not accounted for. To protect women and girls and to avoid gender discrimination, globalizing and democratizing countries should prioritize gender mainstreaming in their policies.