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This study attempts to account for the vastly different trajectories taken by mass andelite opinion in the wake of the Lewinsky affair. Data from a panel study, collected before andjust after the scandal broke, suggest that Clinton's prior popularity indelibly colored massresponse to the scandal, thereby constraining citizens' reactions. As would be predicted bytheories of "motivated reasoning," the influence of various considerations (like thecredibility and importance of the allegations) on reactions to the scandal was conditional uponprior affect for the president. Such findings are difficult to accommodate within the more rational"Bayesian updating" perspective. These data shed light on mass response to theLewinsky scandal in particular and citizen reaction to presidential behavior more generally, aswell as on the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate motivated reasoning in candidate evaluation.

AbstractLie tellers in intimate relationships often claim their lies were told to protect their partner. However, based on several converging theories (e.g., motivated reasoning, cognitive dissonance), we expected lie receivers to interpret lie tellers' motives less altruistically. We also made predictions regarding other variables on which we expected lie tellers' and lie receivers' perceptions to differ (e.g., justifications for the lie and responses to the lie, lie tellers' guilt, the temporal and situational context of the lies, perceptions of causality and blame). Participants wrote 2 autobiographical narratives, one from the perspective of lie teller and the other from the perspective of lie receiver. Participants also completed questionnaire items that mirrored the coding dimensions used in our content analyses of the narratives. As predicted, results indicated that the same participants, when occupying the role of lie teller as opposed to lie receiver, viewed their lies as more altruistically motivated, guilt inducing, spontaneous, justified by features of the situation, and provoked by the lie receiver. We discuss potential explanations for perspective differences in lying, the value of multiple perspectives when studying and evaluating lies, and the potential for an understanding of perspective differences to aid in conflict resolution.

Shared mental models: ideologies and institutions / Arthur T. Denzau and Douglass C. North -- The institutional foundations of political competence: how citizens learn what they need to know / Arthur Lupia and Mathew D. McCubbins -- Taking sides: a fixed choice theory of political reasoning / Paul M. Sniderman -- How people reason about ethics / Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer -- Who says what? Source credibility as a mediator of campaign advertising / Shanto Iyengar and Nicholas A. Valentino -- Affect as information: the role of public mood in political reasoning / Wendy M. Rahn -- Reconsidering the rational public: cognition, heuristics, and mass opinion / James H. Kuklinski and Paul J. Quirk -- Three steps toward a theory of motivated political reasoning / Milton Lodge and Charles Taber -- Knowledge, trust, and international reasoning / Samuel L. Popkin and Michael A. Dimock -- Coping with trade-offs: psychological constraints and political implications / Philip E. Tetlock -- Backstage cognition in reason and choice / Mark Turner -- Constructing a theory of reasoning: choice, constraints, and context / Arthur Lupia, Mathew D. McCubbins, and Samuel L. Popkin

Prevailing analyses of INGO influence have focused on their advocacy role, claimed that they are motivated by values and assumed state monopoly over legitimate coercive power. As INGOs increasingly implement policy where state power is weak or non-existent, their commitment to their mission frequently causes action that violates their proper role. This article examines one case to probe how the INGOs community responds when the principles to which it is committed conflict and generates two findings. First, when principles conflict, they structure competing responses to a problem and who falls on which side reflects a kind of 'bureaucratic politics' of the transnational community. Second, principled actors have a hard time reasoning through trade-offs when values conflict. The same principled commitments that yield more success in advocacy roles may hinder success in policy implementation.

In 1862 Bismark said, "The great questions of the age are not settled by speeches and majority votes . . . but by iron and blood. (Quoted in Shulze, 1998: 140)" While beautifully evocative, Bismark's reasoning raises more questions than his for-mulation answers. What are the great questions of an age? How do those preoccupations arise? If political argument is meaningless, or nearly so, why do actors engage in it? And if some issue is settled by force, what led individuals and nations to sacrifice their blood and treasure, their sons and daughters? Realists generally say that one of two factors typically explains the preoccupations of an age and the resort to force; humans are motivated by either material interests or the drive for the power necessary to secure their interests. We need look no deeper.

Prevalent thinking about liquidity traps suggests that the perfect substitutability of money and bonds at a zero short-term nominal interest rate renders open-market operations ineffective for achieving macroeconomic stabilization goals. We show that even were this the case, there remains a powerful argument for large-scale open market operations as a fiscal policy tool. As we also demonstrate, however, this same reasoning implies that open-market operations will be beneficial for stabilization as well, even when the economy is expected to remain mired in a liquidity trap for some time. Thus, the microeconomic fiscal benefits of open-market operations in a liquidity trap go hand in hand with standard macroeconomic objectives. Motivated by Japan's recent economic experience, we use a dynamic general-equilibrium model to assess the welfare impact of open-market operations for an economy in Japan's predicament. We argue Japan can achieve a substantial welfare improvement through large open-market purchases of domestic government debt.

The adverse impacts of particulate air pollution and ground‐level ozone on public health and the environment have motivated the development of Canada Wide Standards (CWS) on air quality. In cost‐benefit analysis of air‐quality options, valuation of reduction in mortality is a critical step as it accounts for almost 80% of the total benefits and any bias in its evaluation can significantly skew the outcome of the analysis. The overestimation of benefits is a source of concern since it has the potential of diverting valuable resources from other needs to support broader health care objectives, education, and social services that contribute to enhanced quality of life. We have developed a framework of reasoning for the assessment of risk‐reduction initiatives that would support the public interest and enhance safety and quality of life. This article presents the Life Quality Index (LQI) as a tool to quantify the level of expenditure beyond which it is no longer justifiable to spend resources in the name of safety. It is shown that the LQI is a compound social indicator comprising societal wealth and longevity, and it is also equivalent to a utility function consistent with the basic principles of welfare economics and decision analysis. The LQI approach overcomes several shortcomings of the method used by the CWS Development Committee and provides guidance on the compliance costs that can be justified to meet the Standards.

Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: "Macroeconomic stability and rapid export growth were the two key elements in starting the virtuous circles of high rates of accumulation, efficient allocation, and strong productive growth that formed the basis for East Asia's success." (World Bank, 1993). Public perception of the Asian economies could hardly have shifted more since that time. Currency depreciation, rising corporate bankruptcy, bank failures, and sovereign bonds downgraded to junk bond status ended the euphoria in Asian "emerging markets". Almost overnight, the reputation of the Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) in East and South East Asia deteriorated from a model of efficient development to an example of worst "crony capitalism". Politicians, rating agencies, and investors were caught off guard by the development of the Asian financial crisis. During the meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum (APEC) in November 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton referred to the financial crisis in Asia as merely "a few small glitches in the road". Moody's and Standard and Poor's had upgraded the Philippines' long term debt rating a few months earlier and downgraded the affected economies only when the crisis persisted for more than three months. Com-paring Thailand's situation to Mexico's economy prior to the peso crisis 1994-1995, the Morgan Stanley star analyst Barton Biggs wrote in January 1997:"Thailand's problems are cyclical, not secular. Thailand is not Mexico in late1994. [..]On the numbers, Thailand qualifies for the euro and is healthier than Germany". The optimism seemed warranted by a history of high growth in the Asian countries. Before the outbreak of the crisis, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea, and Thailand had experienced uninterrupted growth of more that 5 percent of GDP per year for almost two decades. The economic profession also experienced its Waterloo in Asia. Economists not only failed to predict the crisis; they also failed to recognize the vulnerability of the region. Paul Krugman (1994) in his now famous article in "Foreign Affairs" was the only well-known economist to doubt the sustainability of rapid growth in East and Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, even he did not predict this kind of collapse, but rather a gradual economic slowdown of growth. Despite the initial confusion among economists, academic discussion about the Asian financial crisis quickly crystallized around two different explanations of the crisis. One explanation of the Asian financial crisis states that the affected countries suffered from constantly deteriorating fundamentals, such as worsening cur-rent account deficits, growing dependence on short-term loans, slowing export growth, and a rising share of non-performing loans. This made a crisis inevitable. Proponents of this explanation believe the Asian countries were ruled by "crony capitalism". Implicit and explicit government guarantees of loans led to over-investment and to investment in non-tradable and risky sectors, such as real estate and the stock market. This created an asset bubble, which eventually burst and dragged the over-leveraged financial intermediaries down with it. The situation was aggravated by the fact that borrowed funds were largely de-nominated in U.S. dollars. The run on the currency and the subsequent abandon of the exchange rate peg gave rise to a skyrocketing debt burden in terms of domestic currency and caused a further spread of bankruptcies.6 Although the proponents of the crony capitalism explanation acknowledge that market might have overreacted, they argue that the exchange rate crisis was fully warranted by fundamentals and not entirely caused by market irrationality. The second explanation blames the outbreak and the spread of the financial crisis in Asia on the intrinsic instability of international lending. According to this explanation, the Asian economies suffered from a state of international illiquidity when the crisis struck. This means that short-term foreign currency obligations exceeded available assets. The countries were therefore vulnerable to runs by their international creditors. Each creditor withdrawing their funds acted ration-ally, as he knew he would incur losses if he failed to withdraw his funds in the case of a financial panic. The change in investors' sentiments succeeded in devastating the Asian economies because they had recently opened the domestic financial markets. Countries with worse banking problems and a higher degree of corruption, like China, Vietnam, and Pakistan, could shield themselves from the crisis because their capital account had not been liberalized prior to the crisis. Jeffrey Sachs and Steven Radelet refer to the Asian financial crisis as a "crisis of success" where international investors' exuberance first led to a lending boom. Once the vulnerability of Asian economies to external shocks was discovered, exuberance turned into panic and investors withdrew their funds leaving the affected economies ravaged. According to this reasoning, the behaviour led to a fundamentally unnecessary crisis. As proponents of the financial panic hypothesis insist, Asian economies showed all signs of following a sustainable path of economic development. This paper analyzes these two competing explanations for the five most affected countries of the Asian crisis: Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. It is motivated by the systemic implications of the Asian crisis for the stability and regulation of the world financial system. The moral hazard hypothesis implies that financial markets were effective, though belated, messengers of economic ills. This would mean that more liberalization and more transparency would help avoid future crises. The financial panic explanation, by contrast, calls for capital controls as long as an international lender of last resort does not exist. Bhagwati is one of the most prominent opponents of capital account liberalization. He argues that the gains of capital account liberalization are small4compared to the additional risk that the countries incur. If the financial panic hypothesis proved to be true, this would force the economics profession to reconsider the cherished virtues of free capital markets. This paper takes a moderate position and argues that economic development across the affected "Asian Tigers" was uneven and pre-existing weaknesses were so different that generalizations on the causes of the meltdown are not warranted. In the words of Barry Eichengreen, we argue that "not all tigers have the same stripes". The paper is organized as follows. Chapter 2 reconstructs the most important developments leading to the Asian financial crisis and briefly describes the un-folding of the crisis in Thailand and the subsequent spread to other countries in the region. Chapter 3 presents two models of the Asian financial crisis according to the two different sets of explanation. The first model explains the Asian melt-down with moral hazard-induced over-investment, while the second model likens the Asian crisis to a financial panic caused by a loss of investors' confidence. In last section of chapter 3, we evaluate the different models. We find that the moral hazard explanation accurately describes the cases of Thailand and Korea, but does not conform to data for Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The missing evidence for the moral hazard model, however, does not prove the existence of an irrational financial panic, but suggests the crisis in Thailand may have precipitated a deterioration of economic fundamentals in neighbouring countries. Chapter 4 focuses specifically on these dynamic effects of the crisis. We consider two channels through which the crisis in Thailand could have induced crises in other developing countries: competitive pressure through third county trade linkages and pure contagion. We find evidence that the devaluation of the baht exerted competitive pressures on the economies of the region. At the same time, there is mixed evidence at best for the existence of herding behaviour of the financial markets. In summary, the paper demonstrates that for Thailand and Korea, the moral hazard model is supported by the evidence. The other countries were on a relatively sustainable path of economic development until the devaluation of the Thai baht raised the cost of maintaining a fixed exchange rate. This result supports calls for an effective international lender of last resort. Einleitung: Die Finanz- und Währungskrise, die 1997 in Asien ausbrach, überraschte die meisten Beobachter. In den 80er und 90er Jahren galten die asiatischen "Tiger" als Vorbilder effizienter wirtschaftlicher Entwicklung. Noch im Frühjahr 1997 nahmen große amerikanische Rating-Agenturen einige der betroffenen Länder in eine bessere Risikoklasse auf und Morgan Stanleys Star-Analyst Barton Biggs schrieb noch im Januar 1997: "Thailand's problem's are cyclical, not secular. [..] On the numbers, Thailand qualifies for the Euro and is healthier than Germany." Diese Sichtweise änderte sich jedoch radikal während der zweiten Hälfte 1997. Die asiatische Länder, die zuvor gelobt worden waren, galten plötzlich als Hort schlimmster Vetternwirtschaft und Ineffizienz. Die Diplomarbeit "The Asian Financial Crisis: Facts and Explanations" nimmt eine Analyse der Finanzkrise in Asien vor und erklärt, wie es zu diesem radikalen Stimmungsumschwung kommen konnte. Mit Hilfe umfangreichen Datenmaterials wird zunächst eine Bestandsaufnahme der Krise vorgenommen. Als nächster Schritt werden zwei konkurrierende Modelle einer Finanzkrise vorgestellt: Ein Modell erklärt die Krise als eine klassische Überinvestitionskrise, die durch "moral hazard" auf Seiten der Unternehmen und der asiatischen Banken hervorgerufen bzw. verstärkt wurde. Das andere Modell sieht die Krise als eine Panikreaktion der Finanzmärkte, die prinzipiell gesunde Unternehmen und Banken in die Insolvenz trieb. Beide Theorien werden anhand von Länderstatistiken und Finanzmarktdaten auf ihre Plausibilität überprüft. Außerdem werden auf Möglichkeiten, durch institutionelle Neuerungen zukünftige Krisen zu vermeiden, hingewiesen. Diese Diplomarbeit ist für alle diejenigen Unternehmen relevant, die trotz der Finanzkrise weiter im asiatischen Wirtschaftsraum aktiv sein wollen. Für sie sind eine fundierte Kenntnis der Ursachen der Krise unerlässlich, um die gegenwärtige Situation und die wirtschaftliche Aussichten in den betroffenen Ländern besser beurteilen zu können.