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The past few years have seen the issue of refugees rise in prominence, particularly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. It has been almost seven decades since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was set up and the first international treaty regulating the issue of refugees signed. This article examines the international legal framework governing the issue of refugees and argues that it is ineffectual because refugees are inherently a matter of high politics – refugees are fundamentally a political issue subject to the vicissitudes of politics. The moral and economic justifications for the international refugee regime are also highly contested, and this contestation plays out in the political realm. The international refugee regime and legal regulation of the issue is unlikely to be effective for as long as the nation-state continues to be the primary actor in the international world order. This is because the international refugee regime requires enforcement by states to be effective – however, political, moral and economic vicissitudes across the states involved impede its ability to function in its ideal conception.

The past few years have seen the issue of refugees rise in prominence, particularly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. It has been almost seven decades since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was set up and the first international treaty regulating the issue of refugees signed. This article examines the international legal framework governing the issue of refugees and argues that it is ineffectual because refugees are inherently a matter of high politics – refugees are fundamentally a political issue subject to the vicissitudes of politics. The moral and economic justifications for the international refugee regime are also highly contested, and this contestation plays out in the political realm. The international refugee regime and legal regulation of the issue is unlikely to be effective for as long as the nation-state continues to be the primary actor in the international world order. This is because the international refugee regime requires enforcement by states to be effective – however, political, moral and economic vicissitudes across the states involved impede its ability to function in its ideal conception.

The past few years have seen the issue of refugees rise in prominence, particularly in Europe but also in other parts of the world. It has been almost seven decades since the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was set up and the first international treaty regulating the issue of refugees signed. This article examines the international legal framework governing the issue of refugees and argues that it is ineffectual because refugees are inherently a matter of high politics – refugees are fundamentally a political issue subject to the vicissitudes of politics. The moral and economic justifications for the international refugee regime are also highly contested, and this contestation plays out in the political realm. The international refugee regime and legal regulation of the issue is unlikely to be effective for as long as the nation-state continues to be the primary actor in the international world order. This is because the international refugee regime requires enforcement by states to be effective – however, political, moral and economic vicissitudes across the states involved impede its ability to function in its ideal conception.

Abstract
With reference to the biographical documentary Doh! Oh Dear, A Female Tear (by professional falsettist Stephen Chen) and the author's personal testimony (as an untrained falsetto practitioner), this essay approaches the subject of male falsetto from three perspectives: the historical, the individual, and the geopolitical. It suggests that the male falsetto in question can be understood as a multilayered "trans" figuration that comes into being in and through historical discourses, individual embodiments, and geopolitical articulations. Given the limited scholarship on falsetto, this piece means to draw attention to and solicit further research on the much-neglected phenomenon of falsetto in queer and transgender studies.

We provide a lowerbound on the sample complexity of distribution-free parity learning in the realizable case in the shuffle model of differential privacy. Namely, we show that the sample complexity of learning d-bit parity functions is Ω(2d/2). Our result extends a recent similar lowerbound on the sample complexity of private agnostic learning of parity functions in the shuffle model by Cheu and Ullman . We also sketch a simple shuffle model protocol demon- strating that our results are tight up to poly(d) factors.

This paper examines whether financial statement comparability (hereafter referred to as comparability) is associated with corporate tax avoidance. We document the negative relationship between comparability and tax avoidance. Our findings indicate that comparability reduces information asymmetry, which makes the monitoring of managerial activities more effective. In addition, comparable information may increase the risk of detection of aggressive tax strategies, which leads to reputational, regulatory and political risks. We further examine how analyst coverage and product market competition influence the relationship between comparability and corporate tax avoidance. The results show that analyst coverage substitutes for the effect of comparability on tax avoidance. However, we do not obtain any conclusive evidence that product market competition plays a complementary role to comparability in reducing tax avoidance. Our results are robust to the various measures of comparability and tax avoidance and alternative methodological techniques