Natural disasters do not affect people equally. In fact, a vulnerability approach to disasters would suggest that inequalities in exposure and sensitivity to risk as well as inequalities in access to resources, capabilities, and opportunities systematically disadvantage certain groups of people, rendering them more vulnerable to the impact of natural disasters. In this article we address the specific vulnerability of girls and women with respect to mortality from natural disasters and their aftermath. Biological and physiological differences between the sexes are unlikely to explain large‐scale gender differences in mortality rates. Social norms and role behaviors provide some further explanation, but what is likely to matter most is the everyday socioeconomic status of women. In a sample of up to 141 countries over the period 1981 to 2002 we analyze the effect of disaster strength and its interaction with the socioeconomic status of women on the change in the gender gap in life expectancy. We find, first, that natural disasters lower the life expectancy of women more than that of men. In other words, natural disasters (and their subsequent impact) on average kill more women than men or kill women at an earlier age than men. Since female life expectancy is generally higher than that of males, for most countries natural disasters narrow the gender gap in life expectancy. Second, the stronger the disaster (as approximated by the number of people killed relative to population size), the stronger this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. That is, major calamities lead to more severe impacts on female life expectancy (relative to that of males) than do smaller disasters. Third, the higher women's socioeconomic status, the weaker is this effect on the gender gap in life expectancy. Taken together our results show that it is the socially constructed gender‐specific vulnerability of females built into everyday socioeconomic patterns that lead to the relatively higher female disaster mortality rates compared to men.

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After the non-binding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many global and regional human rights treaties have been concluded. Critics argue that these are unlikely to have made any actual difference in reality. Others contend that international regimes can improve respect for human rights in state parties, particularly in more democratic countries or countries with a strong civil society devoted to human rights and with transnational links. Our findings suggest that rarely does treaty ratification have unconditional effects on human rights. Instead, improvement in human rights is typically more likely the more democratic the country or the more international non-governmental organizations its citizens participate in. Conversely, in very autocratic regimes with weak civil society, ratification can be expected to have no effect and is sometimes even associated with more rights violation.

The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. Two estimation techniques—a fixed-effects panel estimator with contemporaneous effects only and a dynamic generalized method of moments estimator—are used to test the impact of various forms of political violence on tourism. Both models show strong evidence that human rights violations, conflict, and other politically motivated violent events negatively affect tourist arrivals. In a dynamic model, even if autocratic regimes do not resort to violence, they have lower numbers of tourist arrivals than more democratic regimes. Results also show evidence for intraregional, negative spillover, and cross-regional substitution effects.

In his article with the provocative title "Are Recessions Good for Your Health?", Ruhm (2000) has found robust and consistent evidence that the total mortality rate, agespecific mortality rates as well as most specific mortality causes are pro-cyclical. His finding that high unemployment rates are associated with lower mortality and vice versa stands in stark contrast to Brenner's earlier work, who found the opposite effect, possibly after a time lag. Ruhm controls for state-specific effects in a panel of US states over the period 1972 to 1991, whereas Brenner's work is based on time-series analysis.Extending and improving upon Ruhm's original analysis, we analyse the effect of state unemployment and economic growth rates on mortality in the states of Germany over the period 1980 to 2000, both in a static and a dynamic econometric model. Controlling for state-specific effects, we find evidence that aggregate mortality rates for all age groups taken together as well as most specific age groups are lower in recessions. The same is true for mortality from cardiovascular diseases, pneumonia and influenza, motor vehicle accidents and suicides, but not necessarily for other specific mortality causes. In particular, there never is a statistically significant effect on homicides, other external effects and malignant neoplasms. There are also few differences apparent between the effect on male and female mortality. If we do not control for state-specific effects, then we often arrive at the opposite result with higher unemployment being associated with higher mortality. This suggests that a failure to control for time-invariant state-specific effects leads to omitted variable bias, which would erroneously suggest that mortality rates move counter-cyclically. Overall, we can confirm Ruhm's main finding for 2 another country: recessions lower some, but not all, mortality rates in the case of Germany.

This article tests the hypothesis that democracies exhibit stronger international environmental commitment than non-democracies, using multivariate econometric techniques. A number of proxy variables are used in lieu of environmental commitment, a non-observable variable. Strong evidence is found that democracies sign and ratify more multilateral environmental agreements, participate in more environmental intergovernmental organizations, comply better with reporting requirements under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora, put a greater percentage of their land area under protections status, are more likely to have a National Council on Sustainable Development in their country and have more environmentally relevant information available than non-democracies. The findings suggest that a spread of democracy around the world will lead to enhanced environmental commitment worldwide. Results are robust with respect to inclusion or exclusion of developed countries in the sample. The use of four different variables for democracy also ensures robustness with respect to the measure of democracy. The strong evidence in favour of a positive link between democracy and environmental commitment stands in contrast to the somewhat weak evidence on such a link between democracy and environmental outcomes. The explanation presumably is that theory predicts a stronger positive link of democracy with environmental commitment than with environmental outcomes.

Summary -Foreign investors are often skeptical toward the quality of the domestic institutions and the enforceability of the law in developing countries. Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) guarantee certain standards of treatment that can be enforced via binding investor-to-state dispute settlement outside the domestic juridical system. Developing countries accept restrictions on their sovereignty in the hope that the protection from political and other risks leads to an increase in foreign direct investment (FDI), which is also the stated purpose of BITs. We provide the first rigorous quantitative evidence that a higher number of BITs raises the FDI that flows to a developing country. This result is very robust to changes in model specification, estimation technique and sample size. There is also some limited evidence that BITs might function as substitutes for good domestic institutional quality, but this result is not robust to different specifications of institutional quality.

Original citation:Plümper, Thomas and Neumayer, Eric (2010) Model specification in the analysis of spatial dependence. European journal of political research, 49 (3).