Michael Albertus, post-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law will present a paper that details the first analysis of a distributive program – a Venezuelan land reform initiative known as Misión Zamora – at the individual level using data on revealed voter preferences and the receipt of particularistic benefits. Using data from a list of millions of voters that signed petitions to recall President Chávez, Albertus will match information on all recent land grant applicants to petition signers to measure the effect of political preferences on the likelihood of applying for land, receiving land, and being effectively rejected. He will present evidence for both strategic core voter targeting and punishment of opposition voters, although both of these effects are modified by local political actors. The lack of a complete property registry and ambiguity in key provisions of the Land Law have enabled considerable administrative discretion in the application of the program.

An extraordinary group of scientists in the last century included the aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, the physicists Leo Szilard, Eugene P. Wigner, and Edward Teller, and the mathematician John von Neumann. These Jewish-Hungarians first left Hungary for Germany, then were forced out of Europe, and in the United States they became instrumental in the defense of the Free World during World War II and the Cold War. The lessons of their lives and oeuvres will be discussed with emphasis on the most controversial one, Edward Teller, known also as “the father of the Hydrogen Bomb.”

Speaker bio:

István Hargittai is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea (London). He is a Ph.D. of Eötvös University (Budapest), D.Sc. of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Dr.h.c. of Moscow State University, the University of North Carolina, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. His recent books include the six-volume Candid Science series (2000-2006), The Road to Stockholm (2002; 2003), Our Lives (2004), Martians of Science (2006; 2007), The DNA Doctor (2007), Judging Edward Teller (2010), and Drive and Curiosity (2011).

Edmund J. Malesky will argue that openness to foreign investment can have differential effects on corruption, even within the same country and under the same domestic institutions over time. Rather than interpreting bribes solely as a coercive “tax” imposed on business activities, he allows for the possibility that firms may themselves be complicit in using bribes to enter protected sectors or gain access to lucrative procurement contracts.  The propensity to bribe across sectors should vary with expected profitability related to investment restrictions. Thus, the linkage of foreign investment to corruption should increase dramatically as firms seek to enter restricted and uncompetitive sectors that offer higher rents. Malesky demonstrates this effect using a nationally representative survey of 10,000 foreign and domestic businesses in Vietnam. He also shows how the impact of domestic reforms and economic openness is affected by policies that restrict competition by limiting entry into a given sector.

Edmund Malesky is an associate professor of political science at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He has published in leading political science and economic journals, including the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Politics, and has been awarded the Harvard Academy Fellowship and Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in comparative politics. Malesky serves as the lead researcher for the Vietnam Provincial Competitiveness Index and Cambodian Business Environment Scorecard.

For more information please see the event web page.

Web tracking is pervasive: the average popular website incorporates over fifty third-party tracking mechanisms. And web tracking is unpopular: a majority of Americans oppose the practice. Do Not Track is a technology and policy response that would provide users with a simple, universal web tracking opt out. Both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have signaled support. This talk explores central questions in the ongoing web privacy debate:

* What information do third parties collect about users?
* What technologies do third parties use to track users?
* What limits does the online advertising industry's self-regulation impose?
* What should Do Not Track prohibit?
* Who should enforce it, and how?
* What would the economic impact be?
* Could it actually happen?

To learn more, visit http://donottrack.us and follow @donottrack.

Speaker Biography:

Jonathan Mayer is a computer science Ph.D. student and 3L at Stanford University. He graduated from Princeton University in 2009 with a concentration in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.  Jonathan's area of study encompasses the intersections of policy, law, and computer science - with particular emphasis on national security and international relations. Jonathan works extensively with the Stanford Security Laboratory within the Computer Science Department and the Center for Internet and Society within the Stanford Law School.

The 11^th Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam was significant in several respects. It placed diplomacy in the forefront of Vietnam’s efforts to maintain peace, stability, and national security, including naming more diplomats as full members of the Central Standing Committee. For the first time, the Party officially identified protecting national interest as the top priority of Vietnam’s foreign policy. The Party continued to push for broader horizons in policymaking to facilitate Vietnam’s integration in the larger world. The Party also agreed that Vietnam should anchor itself to ASEAN and promote its relations with China and the United States. Prof. Tuan will discuss these and other aspects and implications of Vietnam’s foreign policy.

Ta Minh Tuan is a member of Vietnam’s Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific (CSCAP Vietnam), CSCAP’s Study Group on Countering the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Asia Pacific, and Pacific Forum CSIS’s Young Leaders Program. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and the University of South Carolina. His degrees are from the Polish Academy of Sciences’s Institute of Political Studies (PhD), Mahatma Gandhi University’s School of International Relations (MA), and the Hanoi University of Foreign Studies (BA).

**Due to space restrictions, this event has reached capacity and we will no longer be taking RSVPs. Please plan to arrive early as seating is on a first come, first serve basis.**

Since 2008 China's banks have made loans that approach 30% of GDP each year. The central bank has used a broader measure of credit, total societal financing, that suggests credit extended in 2011 may exceed 40% of the country's GDP. It is inevitable that such profligate lending will result in significant amounts of problem loans.  The international market is well aware of this and Chinese bank shares have been hit hard for most of this year. How will these bad loans be managed? More importantly, why has the government once again used China's ostensibly commercial banks as if they were policy banks and what are the implications of this for China's economy going forward?

Carl E. Walter worked in China and its financial sector for the past 20 years and actively participated in many of the country’s financial reform efforts. While at Credit Suisse First Boston he played a major role in China’s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992, as well as the first primary listing of a state-owned enterprise on the New York Stock Exchange in 1994. He was a member of senior management at China International Capital Corporation, China’s first and most successful joint venture investment bank where he supported a number of significant domestic and international stock and bond underwritings for major Chinese corporations. More recently at JPMorgan he was China Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of its banking subsidiary. During this time Carl helped build a pioneering domestic security, risk and currency trading operation.

A long time resident of Beijing before his recent return to the United States, Carl is fluent in Mandarin and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Peking University. He is the co-author of Red Capitalism: the fragile financial foundations of China’s extraordinary rise as well as Privatizing China: inside China’s stock markets. 

This event is part of the China's Looming Challenges series. 

The Nuclear Power Plant Exporters' Principles of Conduct are an industry code of conduct resulting from a three-year initiative to develop norms of corporate self-management in the exportation of nuclear power plants. In developing and adopting the Principles of Conduct, the world's leading nuclear power plant vendors have articulated and consolidated a set of principles that reaffirm and enhance national and international governance and oversight, and incorporate recommended best practices in the areas of safety, security, environmental protection and spent fuel management, nonproliferation, business ethics and internationally recognized systems for compensation in the unlikely event of nuclear related damage.

Speaker Biography:

Ariel (Eli) Levite is a nonresident senior associate in the Nonproliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He is a member of the Israeli Inter-Ministerial Steering Committee on Arms Control and Regional Security and a member of the board of directors of the Fisher Brothers Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Levite was the Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Levite also served as the deputy national security advisor for defense policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control in the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

In September 2000, Levite took a two year sabbatical from the Israeli civil service to work as a visiting fellow and project co-leader of the "Discriminate Force" Project as the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.

Before his government service, Levite worked for five years as a senior research associate and head of the project on Israeli security at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Levite has taught courses on security studies and political science at Tel Aviv University, Cornell University, and the University of California, Davis.

David Lobell to present at AGU's Fall conference.

David Lobell is a guest speaker for SLAC's fall colloquium series. All colloquium events are open to the public. SLAC Colloquium details.

Winner of the 2011 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, “Presumed Guilty” follows the story of two young lawyers and their struggle to free Toño Zúñiga, a young man from Mexico City wrongfully sentenced to 20 years in prison. Filmmakers Roberto Hernández and Layda Negrete expose the injustices of the Mexican legal system.

After the film, join Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar for a discussion about the Mexican justice system with director Roberto Hernández.

“The film puts Mexico’s secretive courts on full display for the first time.” – The New York Times

Light refreshments served.