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Summary. A review of which Brazilian voters think corruption is the most important issue facing the country and how that has changed over time.

Summary. Of all of my work, these three papers most specifically draw from the the conceptual frames developed in the IC Safra Lab - although their explicit reference to it varies. The risk of IC to public credibility of scientific and scholarly institutions stands at the focus of this work, especially the paradox of the pursuit of value-free science as a value-laden approach to defend this crediblity without accountability.

Summary. To what extent are professional decision-makers in the field of public procurement susceptible to cognitive biases? Recent research found a bias in favor of the lower bidder when ranking competing bids (Dekel and Schurr 2014, “Cognitive Biases in Government Procurement – an Experimental Study with Real Bid Evaluators,” 10(2) Review of Law and Economics 169–200). In the present research we examine this question regarding another stage of the public procurement process – the qualification stage. To this end, we conducted a series of experiments with the participation of procurement officials in situations that closely resemble their daily work. Our main finding is that even though procurement officials are susceptible to a cognitive bias when they have to score competing bids, they overcome that bias when asked to decide whether to qualify faulty or questionable bids. We cautiously ascribe this difference to the different types of decision-making involved, and suggest further explorations of these insights.

Summary. This paper focuses on a doctrine that the Israeli Supreme Court has developed since the early 1990s under which the Court removes officeholders from their position by ordinary judicial review proceedings. Although this doctrine is not founded on any formal constitutional settings, nonetheless it has had a significant influence on the relationships between the judiciary and the political branches, as it was the basis for the removal of several major political figures — including ministers and top bureaucrats — from office. The substantial rise of judicial power in Israel since the early 1980s has been documented by the literature of comparative constitutionalism. Yet this rise took place despite the lack of any meaningful formal constitutional guarantees of judicial autonomy in Israeli constitutional law. I argue that this doctrine of removal can serve to explain this gap. This practice of ‘impeachment’ by judicial review is unique to Israel. Therefore, it has hardly been studied by the comparative literature. It is, however, extremely common and influential in Israeli constitutional and political life. It also enjoys massive support from legal elites and the general public alike. I argue that one cannot understand the relationships between the courts and politics in Israel without taking this component into account. In this Article, I describe the development of this practice by the Israeli Supreme Court and its influence on the relationships between the courts and politics in Israel. I also provide a critical evaluation of the doctrine.

Summary. Provides recommendations to hospitals dealing with surgeons’ requests to double-book operations.

Summary. Lobbying public officials is common practice, but becomes problematic when officials have a financial interest in the sector that lobbies them and for which they are responsible. This article explores such cases, with a particular focus on Eastern Europe.

Summary. We explore affiliations of high-level public officials in East and South-East Europe and Central Asia with higher education institutions, which create a risk of undue influence because of conflict of interest.

Includes discussion of ways in which mainstream reforms do not address institutional/legal/influence-market corruption.

Summary. Two-year research project on Ethics and Integrity in Public Life, conducted by the Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), Portugal and financed by Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos (FFMS).The project focus on ethics self-regulatory measures implemented by representative institutions across the EU democracies.

Summary. Scholars across the social sciences have long hypothesized that individual contributors often make political contributions on the basis of partisanship or ideology and that the most active donors may be the most ideologically motivated. But drawing from a newly constructed “big” data set called the Longitudinal Elite Contributor Database (LECD), the author shows that past studies have failed to detect several striking patterns in the strategies of individual contributors: (1) a persistent positive association between frequency of giving and bipartisan or “split contributing” and (2) significant declines in the likelihood of bipartisan contributing since the late 1980s. The author shows that donors who give to both parties also target more moderate incumbents of each political party, relative to partisan donors. Taken together, the findings suggest that repeat individual donors are less partisan in their strategies, and vis-à-vis the incumbents to whom they send donations, these repeat contributors are also less ideologically extreme.

Summary. Drug shortages and increasing generic drug prices are associated with low levels of competition. Mergers and acquisitions impact the level of competition. Record merger and acquisition activity was reported for the pharmaceutical sector in 2014/15, yet information on mergers and acquisitions in the generic drug sector are absent from the literature. This information is necessary to understand if and how such mergers and acquisitions can be a factor in drug shortages and increasing prices. METHODS: Data on completed merger and acquisition deals that had a generic drug company being taken over (i.e. 'target') were extracted from Bloomberg Finance L.P. The number and announced value of deals are presented globally, for the United States, and globally excluding the United States annually from 1995 to 2016 in United States dollars. RESULTS: Generic drug companies comprised 9.3% of the value of all deals with pharmaceutical targets occurring from 1995 to 2016. Globally, in 1995 there were no deals, in 2014 there were 22 deals worth $1.86 billion, in 2015 there were 34 deals totalling $33.56 billion, and in 2016 there were 42 deals worth in excess of $44 billion. This substantial increase was partially attributed to Teva's 2016 acquisition of Allergan's generic drug business. The surge in mergers and acquisitions for 2015/16 was driven by deals in the United States, where they represented 89.7% of the dollar value of deals in those years. CONCLUSIONS: The recent blitz in mergers and acquisitions signals that the generic drug industry is undergoing a transformation, especially in the United States. This restructuring can negatively affect the level of competition that might impact prices and shortages for some products, emphasizing the importance of updating regulations and procurement policies.

Summary. Discusses developments in the issue of whether to regulate the practice of double-booking surgeons to maximize revenue.

Summary. This article aims to the logical development of a practical and applicable analysis model of argumentative transparency, specifically for the study of public policies. To this end, we draw upon a “political concept of transparency” which redefines pragmatic logic operations in contexts of trust and cooperation between actors. The model combines a principal-agent framework, non-linear assumptions of production of information, and conversational maxims of use of language. This results in an analysis that is focused on the actors’ capacity and their relation. The model also finds a necessary link between active and passive transparency processes, where the building of trust arising from transparency is directly associated with the reduction of control costs. In addition, this article intends to be an applied model, with visual tools related to transparent decision-making processes, protocols for marking up transparency in texts and, finally, an empirical analysis of transparency in the argument of specific public policies. The combination of multiple frameworks and the deduction of a logical model presents an original work for the study of public policies.