Regulatory Attempts Research Articles

The Effects of Regulated Auditor Tenure on Opinion Shopping: Evidence from the Korean Market

We examine the impact of regulated auditor tenure on the shopping for favorable audit reports. We predict that these regulations may affect auditors’ willingness to acquiesce and clients’ incentives to engage in opinion shopping. We draw from the unique Korean setting where both mandatory audit firm retention and mandatory rotation were implemented for all public firms in a staggered manner. Based on hand-collected audit reports, we identify harmful language in explanatory paragraphs. We define favorable audit reports as those with unqualified opinions and without any harmful explanatory language. We find that opinion shopping for favorable audit reports appears to subside after mandatory retention but increases after mandatory rotation, with the positive impact of mandatory retention offset by the negative impact of mandatory rotation. We add to the literature by examining the impact of regulated auditor tenure on opinion shopping and highlighting the potential unintended consequences of these regulatory attempts.

Shared Jobs, Shared Trajectories? Employer Groups and the Regulation of Part-time Work in Germany and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT To explain cross-national variation in the regulation of atypical forms of employment, including measures aimed at protecting the employment conditions of nonstandard workers, existing studies have typically emphasised the importance of labour's relative power resources and insider-outsider dynamics. This article shows that differences in employer stances can also be of key importance in explaining this type of variation. Moreover, it shows that employer support for regulatory efforts to improve quality of atypical employment neither have to result from a perceived need to seek strategic accommodation nor from a positive assessment of the costs and benefits of regulation. It does so by comparing the very different responses of Dutch and German employer groups to regulatory attempts to improve the quality of part-time employment. It illustrates their importance and attributes them to strategic choices that were a logical outcome of the different institutional environments in which Dutch and German employer groups operated.

The emotion paradox in the aging body and brain.

With age, parasympathetic activity decreases, while sympathetic activity increases. Thus, the typical older adult has low heart rate variability (HRV) and high noradrenaline levels. Younger adults with this physiological profile tend to be unhappy and stressed. Yet, with age, emotional experience tends to improve. Why does older adults' emotional well-being not suffer as their HRV decreases? To address this apparent paradox, I present the autonomic compensation model. In this model, failing organs, the initial phases of Alzheimer's pathology, and other age-related diseases trigger noradrenergic hyperactivity. To compensate, older brains increase autonomic regulatory activity in the pregenual prefrontal cortex (PFC). Age-related declines in nerve conduction reduce the ability of the pregenual PFC to reduce hyperactive noradrenergic activity and increase peripheral HRV. But these pregenual PFC autonomic compensation efforts have a significant impact in the brain, where they bias processing in favor of stimuli that tend to increase parasympathetic activity (e.g., stimuli that increase feelings of safety) and against stimuli that tend to increase sympathetic activity (e.g., threatening stimuli). In summary, the autonomic compensation model posits that age-related chronic sympathetic/noradrenergic hyperactivity stimulates regulatory attempts that have the side effect of enhancing emotional well-being.

The effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts in the development of infant emotion regulation.

Caregivers are instrumental in the development of infant emotion regulation; however, few studies have focused on delineating the real-time effectiveness of strategies that caregivers use to reduce infant distress. It is also unclear whether certain caregiver traits facilitate engagement in more successful regulation strategies. This study addressed these gaps by: (1) examining the differential effectiveness of maternal regulatory attempts (MRAs; behavioral strategies initiated by mothers to assist infants with regulating emotional states) in reducing 12- to 24-month-old infants' frustration during a toy removal task; and (2) assessing whether maternal mind-mindedness (mothers' attunement to their infant's mental state) predicted mothers' selection of MRAs. Multilevel modeling revealed that distraction and control were the most effective MRAs in reducing infant negative affect across 5-s intervals (N=82dyads; M infant age=18months; 45 females). Greater use of non-attuned mind-related speech predicted less engagement in effective MRAs, supporting a link between caregivers' socio-cognitive skills and provision of in-the-moment regulation support. These findings highlight the value of considering caregiver regulatory behaviors as a target for elucidating how maternal socialization of emotion regulation occurs in real-time. They also underscore mothers' important role as socializing agents in the development of this foundational developmental ability.

Proxies of Trustworthiness: A Novel Framework to Support the Performance of Trust in Human Health Research.

Without trust there is no credible human health research (HHR). This article accepts this truism and addresses a crucial question that arises: how can trust continually be promoted in an ever-changing and uncertain HHR environment? The article analyses long-standing mechanisms that are designed to elicit trust-such as consent, anonymization, and transparency-and argues that these are best understood as trust represented by proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., regulatory attempts to convey the trustworthiness of the HHR system and/or its actors. Often, such proxies are assumed to operate as markers that trust exists or, at least, has not been lost. But, since trust can neither be "built" nor "secured," this is a precarious assumption. Worryingly, there is no existing theoretical account of how to understand and evaluate these proxies of trustworthiness as part of a trusted HHR ecosystem. To remedy this, the paper argues for a radical reimagining of trust and trustworthiness as performative acts that ought to be understood in relation to each other and by reference to the common values at stake. It is shown that proxies of trustworthiness are the operational tools used to perform trustworthiness. It advocates for a values-based approach to understanding the relationship between trust and trustworthiness. This establishes a strong basis for an evaluative framework for proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., to determine how to perform trustworthiness well. Five common proxies in HHR are scrutinized from a values perspective. The contribution is to provide a far-reaching normative and practical framework by which existing and future proxies of trustworthiness can be identified, assessed, maintained, or replaced in rapidly changing HHR regulatory ecosystems where trust itself is crucial to the success of the entire HHR enterprise.

Complexities of competition regulation in Zimbabwe’s mobile money sector

This study explores the complexities of competition regulation in Zimbabwe’s mobile money sector—through an analysis of EcoCash’s market position and practices, and the regulatory steps taken in response. The study is grounded in the competition complaint made in 2014 by Zimbabwean banks against EcoCash to the Competition and Tariff Commission (CTC), wherein EcoCash was alleged to have initially refused to share its unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) infrastructure with banks; and then later to have granted access only on discriminatory terms. The research assessed the market structure and market power in the Zimbabwe mobile money sector; the regulatory challenges that these market features pose; the market power and conduct of EcoCash; and the effectiveness of the measures taken by regulators to address the competition concerns raised in relation to EcoCash. The findings indicated that, in spite of regulatory attempts to dilute its power in the market, EcoCash was, at the time of the core data collection in 2021–22, still in a dominant position in Zimbabwe’s mobile money market.

The AGM as a site of contestation: evaluating the tactics of environmental shareholder activists

ABSTRACT The politics of climate change in Australia remains highly fraught, this is despite the country experiencing acute impacts of a changing climate including mega-fires, floods, and severe and prolonged drought. Government inaction has led to limited market signals encouraging producers or consumers to move away from carbon intensive energy production to clean energy. In the absence of regulation, Australian shareholder activists are engaging directly with company boards and executives to reform corporate behaviour. This engagement, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) shareholder activism, has proliferated since 2017, much later than in comparable jurisdictions. Activists have targeted the mining, oil and gas, and finance sectors, due to their contribution to the Australian economy and their direct impact on global emissions. This paper explores the reasons for, and the implications of, the growth in ESG shareholder activism in Australia. It argues that the emergence of this activism in Australia was delayed due to complexities in the country's corporations' law. Regulatory attempts at stymying ESG shareholder activism resulted in the emergence of a duopoly of actors, at the cost of broader investor and civil society engagement. It is concluded that the rise of ESG shareholder activism in Australia is linked to growing tension between societal expectations, regulation, and the behaviour of firms. And, that ESG activists have been successful in leveraging this tension. There is evidence that large corporates have responded to activist claims, rendering this form of activism a potentially effective method for addressing some of the most pressing issues facing society.

Alternative Fiber-Based Paperboard Adhesion Evaluation with T- and Y-Peel Testing

Due to increased pressure on the availability of wood biomass in the EU and the regulatory attempts to lower CO2 values, where wood-based biomass plays a crucial role in carbon sequestration, the use of cellulose derived from alternative sources is gaining increased interest in the pulp and paper industry as well as in other industries. The processing properties of alternative fiber-based packaging need to be checked in current processing operations with other types of materials and recycling workflows. For example, in the production of folding boxes, after printing other converting properties such as glueability are also of great importance. The adhesive absorption and bonding strength of materials are important as adhesive joints of packaging can interfere with the protective function. In the presented research, three different paperboards produced on a pilot scale from alternative raw material sources were tested. Two paperboards were produced from the alien invasive plants Japanese knotweed and black locust, and one from residual sawdust. The basic paperboard properties were tested regarding paperboard porosity, roughness, z-directional tensile strength, and dynamical behavior regarding liquid interaction (contact angle and liquid penetration dynamic), as water-based adhesives were used in the research. For adhesive joint strength testing, Y- and T-peel adhesion testing was performed on the joint paperboard samples, as still there is no fully standardized method for the evaluation of such fiber-based material properties. The results indicate differences in the penetration dynamics of liquids. This parameter had the highest influence on the peel adhesion strength, while porosity, roughness, and dynamic contact angle were not so significant. Regarding the two adhesive joint tests, the differences in separate materials regarding peel adhesion curves show similar results. However, the Y-peel maximum force values are higher due to the testing setup (in comparison to the T-peel test). The paperboards made from invasive plants showed adhesive joint failures which are more suitable for tamper-proof packaging due to their low surface strength and crack propagation into the fiber structure.

Making Complexity Measurable in Practice: A Formal Analysis of Gamble-Play media

Over the past decade, videogames have become increasingly gambling-like in their design. Scientific and regulatory attempts to unravel such design seem particularly oriented towards the effects and regulatory treatment of paid-for loot boxes, favoring either measurability or complexity. Departing from gamble-play theory, this paper, therefore, attempts to make complexity measurable in practice. We conduct a formal analysis of 20 videogames that include loot boxes, social casino games, optional gambling-themed activities and token wagering by identifying and mapping interactions between their features. Having uncovered 51 features across 11 categories, we then reinterpret previously established notions of gambling. In doing so, we aim to contribute to a future-proof understanding of gambling in videogames.

License to look? The role of permissive beliefs, desire thinking, and self-control in predicting the use of social networking sites

Permissive beliefs are considered the most proximal predictor of actual behavior. Whereas they have frequently been researched in substance-use disorders, the field of social networking sites (SNS) use is missing the investigation as to how relevant permissive beliefs might be in this context, what might be causal precursors of permissive beliefs (i.e., desire thinking), and which processes might influence the effect that permissive beliefs have on actual behavior (i.e., self-control). To answer these questions, 116 people who use SNS participated in an online survey that contained an experimental manipulation of desire thinking and questionnaires measuring permissive beliefs, self-control, and severity of problematic SNS use. In a one-week follow-up, 85 participants reported their SNS usage times. Results showed that the association between permissive beliefs and tendencies to use SNS problematically was not significant. The experimental manipulation led to a decrease in permissive beliefs in the control condition, but did not increase permissive beliefs in the desire thinking condition. Permissive beliefs predicted SNS use in the follow-up assessment, which was not moderated by self-control. The results suggest that permissive beliefs seem to be unrelated to addictive tendencies of SNS use, but are nevertheless associated with daily use. Desire thinking does not appear to activate permissive beliefs in this study, possibly because the use of social networks is less often experienced as conflicting. Due to its ubiquitous availability, the use of social networks itself might quickly resolve the conflict between desires and possible regulatory attempts, making good reasons for use unnecessary.

Managing risks, passing over harms? A commentary on the proposed EU AI Regulation in the context of criminal justice

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems for both crime prevention and control have been in use for several decades although they have in recent years become the subject of growing criminological attention. Despite its transformative potential for societies, AI in general has long existed in a normative void and has been subject to limited regulation and control. The recent draft of the EU AI Regulation can thus be welcomed as the first comprehensive effort to regulate AI in an attempt to set regional, and potentially global, standards. The approach adopted in the Regulation, however, does not seem to adequately address some of the major concerns surrounding AI when it comes, for instance, to its use in criminal justice arenas. This short intervention discusses how a different approach, focusing on the social harms at stake rather than technological risks, could be useful for overcoming some of the limitations of current regulatory attempts.

Closing the gap between UNGPS and content regulation/moderation practices

Both human-based and automated decisions are shaped by national legislation, international regulations as well as on platforms community guidelines or Terms of Service, a set of private rules that control what is allowed and what is not allowed on digital platforms. Such restrictions of what may or may not be deemed acceptable content are taking place in a context of increasing “digital authoritarianism” in which global internet freedom has declined for eleven consecutive years . Moreover, content moderation practices are currently shaped by corporate interests, within increasingly concentrated markets that are influenced by the network effects of the digital economy . Although it is well recognised that the same rights that people have offline must also be protected online, there are increasing examples of legislation and companies” Terms of Service which are leading to restrictions on freedom of expression and other human rights . On the other hand, most of national regulations constitute fragmented regulatory attempts and do not touch upon several issues that could propel content moderation practices that could better respect human rights, such as design features or proceedings closer to responsive regulation models. In this paper we argue that, despite its limitations and its formal legal status, the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) offer a good starting point to address some of these problems and encourage rules and procedures for moderating user-generated online content that put human rights at the very centre of those decisions. Indeed, UNGPs provide the foundations for the development of a responsive normative framework that is consistent across borders, addressing problems generated by fragmented regulatory attempts and of multinational corporations operating in diverse contexts. In an area where there are no easy or clear-cut solutions, UNGPs provide procedural safeguards to collectively address the problems generated in content moderation. Moreover, the normative framework provided by the UNGPs constitute the backbone against which to judge governments that are adopting deficient public policies or to address different issues in the absence of regulation. Lastly, UNGPs greatest innovation is the creation of an independent duty to respect human rights for powerful private actors such as social media platforms that in some cases accumulate more power and institutional capacities than a significant share of governments around the globe. Although previous literature has already adopted a human rights approach to content moderation, we here attempt to provide a closer look upon the specific role that UNGPs may play in addressing the challenges of what has been called the “hidden industry” of content moderation within “mostly submerged systems of technological governance” . In the first section, we briefly describe and analyse the features of UNGPs that we think make them an adequate normative framework to address the human rights challenges that arise in the context of regulating and moderating user-generated content in the online world. We argue that, despite the limitations of an experimental and polycentric approach, the UNGPs have supported some progress, especially when it comes to the recognition of human rights standards in the tech sector. In the second section, we provide the reader with a brief introduction to ways in which content regulatlion/moderation has negatively affected the human right to freedom of expression. The following section addresses the relationship between UNGPs and the duties or roles that each actor could play in addressing the isse: governments, corporations, civil society organizations and individuals. Finally, we end with some concluding remarks and future research questions.

Protecting Health after Dobbs.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court eliminated the long-standing federal constitutional right to abortion. Discussions of Dobbs tend to emphasize the loss of protection for reproductive choice. But Dobbs also eroded protection for a related yet distinctly important interest that served under Roe v. Wade as a check on government regulation of reproduction: the preservation of health. This erasure has opened the door to increasingly restrictive and punitive abortion bans, which are causing providers to deny or delay care that is necessary to prevent harm to both pregnant and nonpregnant patients. Federal regulatory attempts to prevent these harms will have limited impact, partially due to Congress's own history of exceptionalizing abortion in ways that devalue health. Only federal legislation can ensure adequate and enduring protection for the health of women, trans men, and other patients targeted for reproductive control because of their capacity for pregnancy.

Microplastics in drinking water: a macro issue

AbstractMicroplastics are one of the emerging contaminants that have received attention in recent decades due to their adverse effects on human health and the environment. Though microplastics are primarily found in abundance in oceans, freshwater sources and drinking water are not unaffected. Nevertheless, it is not only the microplastics that are harmful; rather their ability to transport contaminants is another serious issue of concern. The contaminant transport ability is affected by various environmental and physico-chemical parameters of microplastics. Lack of effective and targeted water treatment technologies have led intake of microplastics by humans resulting in a variety of health issues. Even though a few regulatory attempts have been made in the direction of curtailing the production and use of microplastics, there is still a long way to go. This paper focuses on various aspects of microplastics’ presence in drinking water, focusing on their contaminant transport ability, human health risks, removal technologies, and the global scenario of concern.

Decrypting Australia's ‘Anti-Encryption’ legislation: The meaning and effect of the ‘systemic weakness’ limitation

The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 is Australia's latest attempt at solving the ‘going dark’ debate. Yet, like many other regulatory attempts towards ameliorating the ill-effects of encrypted communications and information, it has been criticised for privileging law enforcement and intelligence aims of public safety and security over other interests; particularly privacy and cybersecurity. Some fear that the new powers facilitate the creation of encryption backdoors that could be exploited by bad actors. This paper examines the so-called ‘systemic weakness’ limitation, which was designed to allay these fears. The paper concludes that the limitation is effective at preventing the most blatant, wholesale encryption backdoors, yet is not a panacea against all cybersecurity-related concerns that the instrument brings, and its efficacy in practice is likely to be undermined by its substantive and procedural complexity.

Insider Trading and Sabotage

Insider trading is widely reviled, and yet – as Smith and Block argue – it is consistent with the basic principles of a free market system. This article draws attention to an argument against insider trading that Smith and Block don’t address, namely the potential for sabotage. However, this issue still fails to justify insider-trading legislation, and thus ultimately supports Smith and Block’s view that regulatory attempts to prevent it are misplaced.

Economic security & the regulation of gig work in California: From AB5 to Proposition 22

Employment is the primary legal and political means to address economic inequality in the United States. With the evisceration of the welfare state, employment is also key to democratic outcomes. Despite this, self-employed work deployed by labour platforms like Uber has grown in recent years. What can we learn from worker demands and recent regulatory attempts to clarify and extend who is covered by employment protections? Based on a decade of legal and ethnographic research in the state of California, I situate the legal and regulatory history of labour platform work in the context of platform workers’ experiences and responses to the insecurities and poverty promulgated by their putative status as independent contractors. In highlighting this history, I argue that self-organised labour platform workers were critical to the passage of a state law (AB5) that would have forced companies to treat them as employees—with access to predictable living wages, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and health insurance, among other safety net protections. Finally, I show how, leveraging tremendous structural and instrumental power, the major labour platform companies, in the middle of the global Coronavirus pandemic, sponsored a successful referendum on AB5, and lay out the anti-democratic implications of the referendum's passage.

Three Currents of Platformization in China

This essay explores the three currents of user-generated content (UGC) platform development in China: one is full of improvised endeavors in the cultural production through amateur creativity; one is featured with affective laboring and networking by prosumers, who struggle with the algorithm-conditioned visibility of platforms; and one is featured with regulatory attempts by platforms and authorities to introduce a new “creator economy.” Our investigation into the platformization has focused on the multifaceted role of networking that unfolds among prosumers and platforms, and subsequently the changing networks and hierarchies of the crowd-based economy. We argue for an emerging landscape of multiple networked territories at multiple scales. The logic of visibility-making coordinates the distributed agency of networking by prosumers, platforms, and cultural and political authorities, giving birth to territories at multiple scales, from themed cultural communities to techno-giants with a sense of national pride.

Investors' Perceptions of Activism via Voting: Evidence from Contentious Shareholder Meetings*

ABSTRACTMotivated by the increasing influence of shareholder votes on corporate policies, we examine investors' perceptions of activism via voting. To identify instances of activism via voting, we focus on annual meetings with at least one ballot item where a substantial fraction of shareholders is expected to vote against management's voting recommendation, indicating an increase in their monitoring activity. We define such meetings as “contentious.” Using a sample of almost 28,000 meetings between 2003 and 2012, we examine stock returns over the period between the proxy filing and the annual meeting. This period captures when investors learn about the contentious nature of the upcoming meeting and form expectations about its likely impact on firms' policies. We find that abnormal stock returns prior to contentious meetings are significantly positive and higher than those prior to noncontentious meetings. These higher abnormal returns increase with the contentiousness of the meeting; are more pronounced in firms with poor past performance, which are more likely to respond to shareholder pressure; and persist after controlling for firm‐specific news and proxies for risk factors. Our results are consistent with investors' expecting activism via voting to have a positive impact on firm value, on average, and cast doubts on regulatory attempts to restrict the use of shareholder votes.

Limiting the loot box: overview and difficulties of a common EU response

<section class="abstract"> 2019 has seen loot boxes remain a prime target of concern for regulators, legislators and industry bodies alike, yet despite the work carried out in the Gambling Regulators European Forum in this regard, there have been no substantial efforts to develop a common EU response to date. This article aims to argue that such inaction at a European level is unsatisfactory from both the perspective of the European consumer and games companies alike, while highlighting that any broad regulatory attempts to limit loot boxes to date should be viewed with scepticism. Having examined the three main approaches that could form the basis of a common EU response (gambling law, self-regulation and consumer law) that could deal with some of the issues that national fragmentation in the field have presented to date, it is submitted that a hybrid system, which draws together principles from these three main approaches, can strike the right level of balance between protecting innovative monetization systems for developers, whilst safeguarding consumers from practices deemed to be ‘predatory’. </section>