Good Neighbors Research Articles

Are Tax Havens Good Neighbors? An LDC Perspective

Tax competition and spillover models offer ambiguous predictions of tax haven impacts on non-tax havens. The implications of tax havens for less developed countries (LDCs), in particular, are not well understood and are little studied. This paper investigates the impact of tax havens on foreign direct investment (FDI) in non-tax haven LDCs. We investigate spillover and agglomeration factors by including measures of proximity to the nearest tax haven and the level of FDI inflows in the nearest tax haven. Employing cross sectional data of 115 LDCs from 1990 to 2006, we find evidence of spillovers from tax havens to nearby LDCs. FDI inflows in LDCs are positively and significantly related to FDI inflows in the nearest tax haven. Geographic diffusion has nuanced effects. LDCs at a medium distance to the nearest tax haven have higher levels of FDI than LDCs that are close to a tax haven. On the other hand, LDCs at a medium distance to a tax haven are less influenced by FDI spillovers compared with LDCs at closer proximity. Taken together, our results suggest that tax havens make good regional neighbors, but not good immediate neighbors for LDCs. These findings are robust to several model specifications, including one with spatially correlated error terms..

Competition, cooperation, and the neighboring farmer effect

In this paper we propose a model that explains how cooperation can emerge spontaneously between firms in a highly competitive market environment. The basic idea is that the more competitive is the market, the less costly it is for firms to help each other like good neighbors. Cooperation takes the form of sharing technical know-how, which speeds up the adoption of new technologies (normally developed elsewhere) that spur industrial development. The model comports with the development history of Japan's first example of successful industrial development – its cotton spinning industry – whose conditions match those of firms in small open economies today.

Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village (review)

Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village (review)

Congruence and Incongruence: Four American Lives

Congruence and Incongruence:Four American Lives Jocelyn Bartkevicius (bio) Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village. Mimi Schwartz. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. Opa Nobody. Sonya Huber. American Lives Series. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. The Enders Hotel: A Memoir. Brandon R. Schrand. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. PAPER, $17.95. Between Panic and Desire. Dinty W. Moore. American Lives Series. University of Nebraska Press, 2008. CLOTH, $24.95. Let me start with a confession: My habit as a reader and reviewer is to lose myself in the universe of a single book. And yet, when four intriguing new books arrived from one press this year, just in time for my last issue as book review editor for Fourth Genre, there was nothing to do but cover them all. Frankly, the thought of this enterprise was captured perfectly by the title of Dinty W. Moore's new book: it left me somewhere [End Page 141] between panic and desire. Panic at finding anything in common among four such different voices and subjects. Panic at doing justice to four writers in one review. Desire to discover what four lives might reveal about the state of contemporary literary nonfiction. What I found was a good deal of longing for lost or inaccessible fathers and father figures. In its own way, each book is a search for meaning in a murky, troubled, and troubling past—a kind of reconceptualization of the self through a reckoning of memory. Sometimes chiefly the individual past, as in The Enders Hotel. Sometimes the cultural and political past as well, as in Between Panic and Desire, Opa Nobody, and Good Neighbors, Bad Times. As Patricia Hampl writes, "Stalking the relationship, seeking congruence between stored image and hidden emotion—that's the real job of memoir." By this definition, these four books all strive to do the real job. Each examines and reexamines memory, and at least in the best passages, interrogates what is to be learned by what is remembered—and forgotten. Mimi Schwartz's Good Neighbors, Bad Times wrestles most directly with the nature of memory, its maddening yet revealing slipperiness. All through her American childhood and adolescence, Schwartz's immigrant father contrasted her behavior with the sterling characters of his family and neighbors in the German village he fled just before the rise of Nazism. "In Benheim, everyone behaved!" he'd say. And, "In Benheim, we all got along!" Or, "In Benheim, people always brought food to those in need." These virtuous behaviors, according to her father, were "self-understood." Naturally, she wasn't the least bit interested. Her desire to understand her father's past is set in motion after his death, when she encounters, in Israel, a Torah that was rescued from her father's village synagogue by Christians during Kristallnacht. Schwartz writes: "I never thought of ordinary Germans rescuing a Torah or anything else Jewish back then. My images were of black boots marching across the Hollywood movies I grew up watching at the Queens Midway Theater, ones full of Nazis I hated and feared." So maybe her father had been right all along. Maybe his memories of Benheim were not idealized, or sanitized to keep unruly children on their toes. Perhaps his village had had some special sense of community and connection that could have transcended even Nazism. Benheim—like the names of the people whose stories she explores—is a [End Page 142] made-up name, a way of protecting the privacy of those Schwartz ultimately had to turn to in searching for memories like her father's. She suddenly craved his stories, but he was dead. She had to turn to others, Jews who fled Benheim and Gentiles who stayed behind. Immediately, Schwartz encounters contradictory memories, often from a single source. Take a woman she calls "Lotte." During their first meeting, she is the epitome of "joie de vivre," full of stories about feeling free and safe in Benheim, welcomed by Jews and Gentiles alike, open to each other's traditions. But the next time they meet, Lotte is dark and brooding...

Rabid or good neighbors?

Rabid or good neighbors?

Good Neighbors, Bad Time: Echoes of My Father's German Village (review)

Good Neighbors, Bad Time: Echoes of My Father's German Village (review)

Defined spatial structure stabilizes a synthetic multispecies bacterial community.

This paper shows that for microbial communities, "fences make good neighbors." Communities of soil microorganisms perform critical functions: controlling climate, enhancing crop production, and remediation of environmental contamination. Microbial communities in the oral cavity and the gut are of high biomedical interest. Understanding and harnessing the function of these communities is difficult: artificial microbial communities in the laboratory become unstable because of "winner-takes-all" competition among species. We constructed a community of three different species of wild-type soil bacteria with syntrophic interactions using a microfluidic device to control spatial structure and chemical communication. We found that defined microscale spatial structure is both necessary and sufficient for the stable coexistence of interacting bacterial species in the synthetic community. A mathematical model describes how spatial structure can balance the competition and positive interactions within the community, even when the rates of production and consumption of nutrients by species are mismatched, by exploiting nonlinearities of these processes. These findings provide experimental and modeling evidence for a class of communities that require microscale spatial structure for stability, and these results predict that controlling spatial structure may enable harnessing the function of natural and synthetic multispecies communities in the laboratory.

The Good Neighbors: Kin (review)

The Good Neighbors: Kin (review)

Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village (review)

Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father's German Village (review)

Fences and Between Fences: Cultural, Historical, and Smithsonian Perspectives

Along with a few Shakespearean gems, the commentary on fences from Robert Frost's Mending Wall may be the best-known poetic icon in contemporary American culture. As Frost and his neighbor mend their common wall in a New England spring ritual, the neighbor twice trumpets: fences make good neighbors. The first declaration sets out a guiding principle of the neighbor's conservative worldview. Despite some gentle and subtle probing by Frost, the neighbor likes having thought of it so well, he says again 'Good fences make good neighbors.' Frost's rejoinder is less well known. It captures the opposing position, profoundly important in understanding the significance of walls and fences in world and American cultural and historical debates, disputes, and physical conflicts. In response to his neighbor, Frost reflects,

Good Neighbors (review)

Reviewed by: Good Neighbors April Spisak Thompson, Colin; Good Neighbors; illus. by Crab Scrambly. HarperCollins, 2008; 214p (The Floods) Library ed. ISBN 978-0-06-113199-8 $16.89 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-113196-7 $15.99 R Gr. 3-5 In this Australian import, the familiar plot of a family with bad neighbors is cleverly upended when it turns out that the rotten folks next door are humans and the beleaguered Floods are a large family of witches and wizards. The Floods have tried being patient, ignoring the bordering trashy yard and annoying sounds, but they've finally reached their limit. Thus begins a series of "accidents" that happen to members of the neighboring Dent family (one is turned into a sophisticated refrigerator, [End Page 402] another is eaten by a long-buried zombie in the yard), the end result being, much to the Floods' delight, no more Dents. Thompson ably balances the several deaths and the macabre household in which the Floods live with humorous asides to the reader, absurd details about wizarding life, and a quick pace that keeps the reader from lingering too long on the individual fates of the Dents. In addition, as with the wretched children who visited Wonka's factory, the Dent family is so horrid, so exaggeratedly unappealing, that little sympathy will be spared for their fates anyway. Readers will be introduced to the Floods as much through the extensive end matter (files on each family member will aid significantly, for example, in sorting out the many children) and the numerous black-and-white illustrations as from the story itself, the first in a series. Even if young horror buffs don't spot the many nods to The Addams Family, they will certainly find this family, which gleefully breaks all the rules and considers bumping off neighbors a reasonable way to bring about peace, an intriguing and appealing group of protagonists. Pair this with Alan MacDonald's trolls vs. bad human neighbors tale Trolls, Go Home! (BCCB 9/07), and readers may never see the folks next door in quite the same way again. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Good neighbors are hard to find: computational complexity of network formation

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in a simple strategic game of network formation. We find that deciding if a player has a strategy that guarantees him a certain payoff against a given strategy profile of the other players is an NP-complete problem. Deciding if there exists a strategy profile that guarantees a certain aggregate payoff is also NP-complete. Deciding if there is a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies which guarantees a certain payoff to each player is NP-hard. The problem of deciding if a given strategy profile is a Nash equilibrium is investigated as well.

4-F, and: Legal Assistants

4-F, and: Legal Assistants Judith Claire Mitchell (bio) 4-f New Haven, 1973, the Year of the Lottery, spring semester the Victorian next door is turned into a funeral home. Look, you say, workers hammering brass letters above the door, they’re putting the fun in Funeral. Such good neighbors those Victorians, so unobtrusive, so hushed yet so tolerant of our own clash and clatter. Never once do they ask us to turn down the music. And, too, we have so much in common. Isn’t our favorite band The Dead? Don’t we spend our afternoons riding that train high on cocaine while they ride that same train [End Page 43] to Jordan? And aren’t we all so cool, so damned cool? Still, we can never bridge the cursed generation gap—you and I such punsters, such pranksters, and the neighbors, let’s face it, a big bunch of stiffs. Today the rabbi says he’s never heard so much laughter this close to a coffin. He likes it, he says, this send off this jewish, this jazz, these stories of the deceased, how he was both breathless and inspiring, and though his prepared sermon is over and done for he gives us an encore, the story of god’s favorite: the fool. Often these days I think of those days— my drug-addled youth, you so gorgeously 4-F— and those jokes, all our jokes, and the journey, of course, the train, the tracks, the trips, all that cartoonish truckin’. It’s us come this far, the gaps full of fresh-shoveled sand, and they’re starting to get us at last, O my draft dodger, my foreign companion, O my alien cornball— It’s us putting the fun into funeral now, us putting the good god y’all back into goddamned. [End Page 44] Legal Assistants Nearly twenty years Sharing an office. Our simple division of labor: Estate planning, me Estate administration, you. Wills and trusts, me Death and taxes, you. We never fought over clients It was easy to tell mine from yours Mine were the living yours were the dead Mine were the dying yours were the dead Mine were the brave yours were the grave I dealt in increase you dealt in surcease I got the here todays you got the gone tomorrows I took the going, goings you took the going, gones I toyed with the looming you toiled with the loaming I dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s you closed the eyes and crossed the bar I shouted here’s your hat you whispered what’s your hurry I did man’s will you did God’s wont In my corner, summertime and the living is easy In your corner, death is easy, comedy’s hard and I could go on and on just as we used to when we were young [End Page 45] and dying was no more than our living. But now here we are both retired, both out to pasture lay-people now each in our own way— and, Daphne, I am not charmed by your taking so to heart your assignments and your name: earth-planted withered laurel, friable bark fierce roots. Judith Claire Mitchell Judith Claire Mitchell is an associate professor in the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Creative Writing Program. She is the author of the novel The Last Day of the War. Copyright © 2008 University of Nebraska Press

Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II

Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors: A Longitudinal Analysis of an Industry Self-Regulatory Institution

We extend theories of self-regulation of physical commons to analyze self-regulation of intangible commons in modern industry. We posit that when the action of one firm can cause harm to others, firms share a type of commons. We theorize that the need to protect this commons can motivate the formation of a self-regulatory institution. Using data from the U.S. chemical industry, we find that spillover harm from industrial accidents increased after a major industry crisis and decreased following the formation of a new institution. Additionally, our findings suggest that the institution lessened spillovers from participants to the broader industry.

Development of the renal glomerulus: good neighbors and good fences

The glomerulus of the mammalian kidney is an intricate structure that contains an unusual filtration barrier that retains higher molecular weight proteins and blood cells in the circulation. Recent studies have changed our conception of the glomerulus from a relatively static structure to a dynamic one, whose integrity depends on signaling between the three major cell lineages: podocytes, endothelial and mesangial cells. Research into the signaling pathways that control glomerular development and then maintain glomerular integrity and function has recently identified several genes, such as the nephrin and Wilms' tumor 1 genes, that are mutated in human kidney disease.

When ‘Good Neighbors’ go Bad: Territorial Geographies of Neighborhood Associations

This paper examines the discourses, practices, and spatialities surrounding neighbors and neighborhoods as mobilized by a particular neighborhood association in Seattle, Washington. By examining how this group enacts and encourages territoriality, I provide an analysis of how exclusionary social relations work on the ground through three distinct case studies: the implementation of Good Neighbor Agreements in conjunction with Seattle's newly expanded Alcohol Impact Areas, the Crime Prevention though Environmental Design program, and a community gathering cosponsored by the Mayor's Office and the Seattle Police Department. The effect of these events was the exclusion of those who are seen as outsiders and the reification of narrowly defined ideas of neighbors and neighborhoods.

Cell interactome: Good neighbors or bad neighbors

We report an interesting finding that cellular distribution and interactions between neighboring cells modulate protein expression and localization. MCF7 breast cancer cells, which express ERb, were cultured in estrogen-free medium. ERb exhibited a unique migration pattern that was dependent on cell density and proximity. This finding attests to a novel interaction mechanism other than receptor–to–ligand. Since cells were grown in conditioned culture media, the only factor influencing protein distribution is cell–cell proximity (cell–cell interactions). Thus, hormonal receptors may function independently from their ligand. In addition, physical intercellular interactions may function as a non-molecular factor inducing gene expression and activation.

Understanding Community Benefits Agreements: Equitable Development, Social Justice and Other Considerations for Developers, Municipalities and Community Organizations

I. INTRODUCTION II. WHAT ARE COMMUNITY BENEFITS AGREEMENTS III. ACCOUNTING FOR THE GROWING INTEREST IN COMMUNITY BENEFIT AGREEMENTS IV. EXAMPLES OF CBAS A. California 1. Hollywood and Highland Center (Los Angeles, 1998) 2. Staples Center (Los Angeles, 2001) 3. LAX Expansion (Los Angeles, 2004) 4. Ballpark Village (San Diego, 2005) 5. Other California CBAs B. New York City 1. Atlantic Yards 2. Columbia University Expansion C. Other Notable CBAs V. PRACTICAL PROBLEMS WITH CBAS A. Community Organizing B. Bargaining Power and Bargaining Tactics C. Money D. Enforcement and Monitoring VI. LEGAL ISSUES RELATED TO CBAS A. Consideration B. Standing to Enforce C. Issues Related to the Planning Process VII. CHECKLIST OF ISSUES TO REVIEW IN CONSIDERING THE USE OF CBAS VIII. CONCLUSION I. INTRODUCTION The opportunity to develop a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) typically arises when a developer announces plans to construct a major project, such as a stadium or a theater complex. Local residents and business owners may often welcome these projects, but they may also have legitimate fears, such as: Will the project displace local residents and local businesses, either physically or through gentrification? Will it cause traffic problems and generate noise, pollution, or other nuisances? Will the economic development benefits espoused by the developer actually create jobs that pay a living wage and offer decent benefits for residents in the neighborhood or in a larger geographic community? Will the developer seek and/or welcome public participation in the project design and review of environmental and community impacts? In short, will the developer and the resulting built project be good neighbors? The CBA movement was born in the late 1990s as a mechanism for community groups to organize and work collaboratively to communicate and negotiate directly with developers. CBAs allow community groups to address a multitude of community impacts and opportunities that the host municipality may not have legal authority and/or the political will to discuss otherwise. Usually framed as private agreements (with or without municipal involvement), CBAs may require a developer to mitigate potential impacts of the development. But often they go even farther, asking the developer to work with the community to improve housing, employment options, and recreational and cultural facilities. As a result, CBAs can empower communities to become active participants in the planning process. Because of their potential to improve communities' quality of life, CBAs are becoming increasingly popular. While CBAs are ardently supported by many stakeholders as a tool for obtaining amenities that might otherwise be unavailable, it should not be assumed that they are always ideal vehicles to promote social justice issues. Practical problems--from organizing coalitions of community groups to negotiating with legally and politically sophisticated developers--sometimes combine to make the process of negotiating a successful CBA an unwieldy exercise. Moreover, CBAs have yet to stand the test of judicial review. When they do reach the courts, they will undoubtedly raise numerous issues of contract validity and interpretation. Additionally, where municipalities may be a party to the CBA and/or may give administrative or legislative validity to a privately negotiated agreement, delegation and enforcement issues are likely to arise. This article offers an analysis of legal and policy issues surrounding the development, implementation and enforcement of CBAs. Part II offers a general explanation of CBAs--what they are, what types of benefits they commonly include, and how they are negotiated and finalized. Part III briefly discusses the reasons behind the popularity of CBAs, and explains how they have been tied to smart growth and other social justice issues. …

Abrahamische Ökumene? Modelle der theologischen Zuordnung von christlich-jüdischem und christlich-islamischem Dialog

This essay reconstructs six paradigms of associating Jewish-Christian dialogue with the encounter between Christians and Muslims: the so-called model of good neighbors, the model of Jewish-Christian relations, the Abraham model, the humanistic model, the monotheistic model and the framework of religious studies. These models are examined according to the following criteria: Do they foster the cooperation between Jews, Christians and Muslims? Do they emphasize theological arguments? Do they sufficiently discern the different grades of proximity and distance between them? The author advocates a model of Abrahamic hospitality, which means continuing the dialogues and inviting the third community to join each particular dialogue.