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This article examines the institutional pathology of corruption within the Nigerian Navy, and its broader manifestation and implications within Nigeria’s maritime industry. Beginning with an examination of the disappearance of the vessel, MT African Pride, in October 2003, the article reflects on the African Pride case to show that far from being a one-off incident, it was indicative of the opportunism and criminality that naval operations within the oil-rich Niger Delta have generated. Other primary case studies relevant to corruption within Nigeria’s maritime industry, and interrogated by the article, include the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA). The article shall also examine a range of secondary case studies. These are relatively brief meditations on incidents, individuals and maritime industry private contractors and government parastatals, which are relevant to the debate to naval and maritime corruption in Nigeria.

Some harm reduction strategies encourage individuals to switch from a harmful addictive good to a less harmful addictive good. This approach is controversial, with advocates claiming it helps switching to a less harmful substance, and opponents claiming it may lead to new substance abuse. This paper builds on theories of addiction to model the introduction of a harm reduction method, and it demonstrates when each side is correct, depending on the enjoyableness of the harm reduction method, the addictiveness of the harm reduction method, and the substitutability with the original addictive good.

AbstractIn this paper, we examine how a research institution’s social structure and the presence of academic opinion leaders shaped the early adoption of a scientific innovation. Our case considers the early engagement of mathematical economists at the Cowles Commission with John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’sTheory of Games and Economic Behavior.We argue that scholars with administrative leadership functions who were not only scientifically but also organizationally central—in our case Jacob Marschak, the director of research at Cowles—played a crucial role in promoting the early adoption of theTheory of Games. We support our argument with a scientometric analysis of all acknowledgments made in 488 papers published from 1944 to 1955 in the two main research paper series at the Cowles Commission. We apply blockmodeling techniques to the acknowledgments network to reconstruct the formal and informal social structure at Cowles at the time. Our case study emphasizes the importance of formal and informal social structures and the research agendas of academic opinion leaders to explain the early engagement with and adoption of innovative scientific ideas. Studies of the early adoption of scientific theories can benefit from complementary perspectives on the role of academic opinion leaders and scientists in explaining theory adoption.

AbstractWe have a limited understanding of the role emotions play in academia, as exploring emotions consistently and comparably is challenging due to the powerful influence of contextual factors. However, we have identified an interesting setting to empirically investigate the emotional response in academia by examining Nobel Prize winners. Scientists who aspire to earn a Nobel Prize are under pressure from their environment if they have not yet received the Prize. While there are various indicators that suggest the Nobel Prize is forthcoming, the question of “when” weighs heavily on the minds of leading candidates. Consequently, waiting for the Nobel Prize is emotionally taxing. We therefore hypothesize that Nobel laureates who have experienced a prolonged wait for the award would feel a stronger sense of relief upon receiving it. We are interested in measuring their level of emotionality after receiving the Nobel Prize by analyzing their banquet speeches using linguistic content analysis. Banquet speeches provide a consistent and controlled setting to compare emotionality across scientists and over time, as we can measure the same responses to the same recognition under the same circumstances. We expect that waiting longer for the Nobel Prize will increase the positive emotionality of Nobelists’ speeches. The waiting time is determined by calculating the years since the Nobel Prize-winning work was performed. By conducting this time-lapse study, we find a robust positive correlation between waiting time and positive emotions in Nobel Prize banquet speeches. We conclude that scientists who waited longer for the Nobel Prize reported higher levels of positive emotions during their speeches.

This paper provides an overview of RePEc a digital platform for the dissemination of research in economics. Specifically, the focus is on RePEc's main author ranking, which aggregates 36 different rankings based on a range of criteria. The paper first describes the logic behind the ranking and then presents some key descriptive statistics on the top 5% of authors. Notably, the ranking is dominated by English-speaking authors, particularly those affiliated with institutions in the USA. Moreover, less than 9% of authors are female, while around 6% are deceased. Among the living authors, the estimated average age is 60, with over 21% of them aged 70 or above. The paper next discusses the aggregation of the 36 rankings using the harmonic mean, which is RePEc's preferred method. Some counterintuitive properties of this approach are highlighted. Finally, I propose a simpler ranking system based on two criteria-number of journal pages and number of citations-that weight journals and citations according to their qualities and also correct for the number of authors.

This article brings to bear findings from the debate on the boundary problem in democratic theory on discussions of workplace democracy to argue that workplace democrats’ focus on workers is unjustified and that more constituencies will have to be included in any prospective scheme of workplace democracy. It thereby provides a valuable and underdiscussed perspective on workplace democracy that goes beyond the debate’s usual focus on the clarification and justification of workplace democrats’ core claim. It also goes beyond approaches like stakeholder theory in law and economics that determine decision-making rights without taking into account genuinely democratic considerations. My discussion proceeds by considering three principles for inclusion from democratic theory for the specific case of the corporation. I submit that two of them, the all-coerced and the all-subjected principle, are not appropriate for this specific case, because they cannot capture the distinguishing features of the corporation. The all-affected principle however is appropriate but has a very wide range. I further argue that this is not as big of a problem as it first might seem and that this principle is still the most appropriate for defining the demos of the democratic corporation. The article closes by pointing out the consequences of this result for the workplace democracy debate and for the legitimacy of the market as a coordination mechanism.

Commentators claim that drug repositioning (ie developing new uses for authorised drugs) significantly slows when generics are authorised and, therefore, law reform is necessary to encourage more R&D. This study empirically examines this claim by analysing records of clinical trials. It finds that once generics are authorised: i) commercial trials continue at ‘active’ rates for approximately half of the drugs studied, and ii) the number of hospital and university trials actually increases. These findings cast doubt on whether additional incentives are needed. They also indicate that a more effective way to reposition drugs is for recently established government programmes to embrace IP strategies and leverage the hospital and university trials as an R&D pipeline.Keywords: drug repositioning, patent law, regulatory protection, clinical trials, empirical study, generic drugs.