In this study, I examine how firms change their tax avoidance and financial reporting following large tax settlements. I find that firms decrease tax avoidance following large settlements and this effect is concentrated among firms under-reserved for the settlement for financial accounting purposes. Additionally, my results suggest firms learn from tax examination resolutions in a way that affects their financial reporting over the tax account. Finally, I find that the effect of large settlements also spills over to firms within the same auditor network. This study provides context to the tax authority's efficacy in deterring tax avoidance and highlights its role in the financial reporting process.

If the way employees die is a direct cause of their working environment, the employer has a certain responsibility to address or prevent these contributing conditions in the environment. Research reports indicate that police officers have higher suicide rates compared to the rates of the general population. Increasing suicide rates for police officers in recent years have been reported for the United States and Australia. Very limited research data for this phenomenon, especially within the South African Police Service, Limpopo Province was found. Previous research on suicide ideation focused on social and individual factors. A research project was launched to determine the relationship between certain demographic variables, coping strategies and stress factors which can be linked to suicide. Research was conducted by means of a cross-sectional survey design. A random, stratified sample (n=204) of uniformed police members was taken from police stations in the province. The Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, the Police Stress Inventory, the Coping Orientations to the Problems Experienced Questionnaire and a biographical questionnaire were administered. Results of a stepwise discriminant analysis showed that the combination of race, the use of seeking emotional support as coping strategy and size of police stations can predict 75% of high suicide ideation cases and 25% of low ideation cases. It was found that 5,88% of the police officials had significant suicide ideation levels. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Suicidal behaviour is one of the most tragic events in human life causing serious emotional, spiritual, medical, social and psychological distress for individuals, family and fiends. In addition, it imposes a great economic problem for the individual, family, and society. In the South African Police Service an alarming rate of 4 per 10 000 suicides has been indicated in previous years. Due to the escalation of suicide rates it is regarded as a major public health concern. Several studies have been done regarding suicide and law enforcement agencies but few regarding suicide ideation in law enforcement agencies. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship among coping, stress and suicide ideation of police officials in the Gauteng Province within the SAPS. A cross-sectional survey design was used. A random, stratifies sample was taken from police officials in the Gauteng Province (n = 266). The Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, Police Stress Inventory, the COPE Questionnaire and a biographical questionnaire were administered. The results of this study indicated that the factors that predict suicide ideation best are the following: a previous suicide attempt, passive coping styles, to be charged in terms of the disciplinary code, medical conditions and gender. The results also indicated that 9,02% of the sample showed significant levels of suicide ideation. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.

Consent orders are issued by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (GA EPD). Consent orders require facilities to comply with environmental rules and regulations. The effectiveness of the consent order process has recently been questioned. Several facilities were cited with multiple consent orders, suggesting possible implementation weaknesses, i.e., monitoring and enforcement. There is a need to examine trends among facilities issued multiple consent orders and the content of those consent orders. Such an analysis can help determine the efficacy of the process as a tool of compliance and recommendations to improve it. The present assessment covered a span of fourteen years, 1993-2006. The data analysis reflected the strengths and limitations of this enforcement tool as well as the existing resources and powers of the state agencies.

In the 1980s, in support of the Sanctuary Movement for Central American refugees, cities across the United States began to withdraw information and resources from the boundary making processes of the federal state. Inspired in part by a 1971 initiative in Berkeley, California to provide sanctuary to soldiers refusing to fight in Vietnam, “Cities of Refuge” issued statements of non-cooperation with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). They passed policies that prevented police and service providers from asking the immigration status of the people they came into contact with in the course of their daily duties, and limited information sharing with the federal authorities. Drawing on archival research and interviews, this dissertation maps the shifting meaning of Sanctuary as a constellation of practices and logics which has troubled the boundaries of national citizenship. Struggles to establish Cities of Refuge reveal the complex interplay between two different political trajectories in the United States: one deeply implicated with the state’s authority over migration controls and what Agamben has understood as the sovereign exception, and the other with city sanctuary, as a form of urban citizenship. The genealogy of city sanctuary reveals the multiple and sometimes contradictory threads or genealogies that have been woven into American citizenship over time, raising questions about the ostensibly hardened relationship between sovereignty, membership, and the nation state. Exploring the interactions between the daily practices of state institutions and Sanctuary reveals the performative aspects of exception: it is produced and maintained only through the constant repetition of discourses and practices that maintain the boundaries of citizenship and reproduce the state’s authority to control the movement of people across its border. Bringing the study of sovereignty into the city, and exploring alternative assertions of sovereignty reveals the exception not as an underlying logic, but a geographically specific, ongoing struggle.

This thesis consists of three different papers summarized as follows. In The political economy of environmental regulation, I study how enforcement of national environmental legislation differ across municipalities in Sweden depending on the local political situation. While the legislation is national, enforcement is decentralized. I find that municipalities where the Green Party joins the ruling political coalition issue more environmental fines than other municipalities. In pricing on the fish market I use Swedish data to study how size affects the price per kilo of fish for several species. In traditional fishery biomass models, fish stocks are treated as homogenous. New theoretical heterogeneous fishery models, where size is allowed to differ in a fish stock, have important implications for regulation, for example that it is optimal to regulate on numbers of fish instead of weight. However, prices in these models are assumed to be constant. My estimates can be used to shed some light on how prices change when the size composition of the catch changes. In my third and final chapter, Settlement under the threat of conflict - The cost of asymmetric information, I present a theoretical model where two players can divide a good peacefully or engage in a contest in order to obtain the entire good. I assume that one player's valuation of the good is private information and show how this affects the expected cost of the contest and thus the probability of peaceful settlement.

Anthropogenic infrastructure such as roads, ditches and culverts have strong impacts on hydrological processes, particularly surface drainage patterns. Despite this, these structures are often not present in the digital elevation models (DEMs) used to provide surface drainage data to hydrological models, owing to the coarse spatial resolution of many available DEMs. Modelling drainage patterns in human-modified landscapes requires very accurate, high-resolution DEM data to capture these features. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) is a remote sensing technique that is used for producing DEMs with fine resolutions that can represent anthropogenic landscapes features such as human modifications on the landscape such as roadside ditches. In these data, roads act as a barrier to flow and are treated as dams, where on the ground culverts and bridges exist. While possible to locate and manually enforce flow across these roads, there is currently no automated technique to identify these locations and perform flow enforcement. This research improves the modelling of surface drainage pathways in rural anthropogenic altered landscapes by utilizing a novel algorithm that identifies ditches and culverts in LiDAR DEMs and enforces flow through these features by way of breaching. This breaching algorithm was tested on LiDAR datasets for two rural test sites in Southern Ontario. These analyses showed that the technique is an effective tool for efficiently incorporating ditches and culverts into the hydrological analysis of a landscape that has both a gradient associated with it, as well as a lack of densely forested areas. The algorithm produced more accurate representations of both overland flow when compared to outputs that excluded these anthropogenic features all together.

This Master of Laws thesis provides an analysis of Manitoba Court of Queen's Bench civil money judgment cases, sampled quantitatively for 1995 and 2004, to examine the length of time from the filing of a claim to judgment being issued, before and after the implementation of Manitoba Queen s Bench Rule 20A. The historical roots of Manitoba court procedure and certain enforcement processes are examined to explain historically: if you get the judgment, how do you get the money? The procedural law is rooted in the English medieval common law system of judicial writs, most recently made more efficient by Manitoba Queen s Bench Rule 20A. This remains basic to issues of law reform for all common law jurisdictions, including Saskatchewan s Enforcement of Money Judgments Act, and this thesis concludes with a set of qualitative recommendations.

If the way employees die is a direct cause of their working environment, the employer has a certain responsibility to address or prevent these contributing conditions in the environment. Research reports indicate that police officers have higher suicide rates compared to the rates of the general population. Increasing suicide rates for police officers in recent years have been reported for the United States and Australia. Very limited research data for this phenomenon, especially within the South African Police Service, Limpopo Province was found. Previous research on suicide ideation focused on social and individual factors. A research project was launched to determine the relationship between certain demographic variables, coping strategies and stress factors which can be linked to suicide. Research was conducted by means of a cross-sectional survey design. A random, stratified sample (n=204) of uniformed police members was taken from police stations in the province. The Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, the Police Stress Inventory, the Coping Orientations to the Problems Experienced Questionnaire and a biographical questionnaire were administered. Results of a stepwise discriminant analysis showed that the combination of race, the use of seeking emotional support as coping strategy and size of police stations can predict 75% of high suicide ideation cases and 25% of low ideation cases. It was found that 5,88% of the police officials had significant suicide ideation levels. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Suicidal behaviour is one of the most tragic events in human life causing serious emotional, spiritual, medical, social and psychological distress for individuals, family and fiends. In addition, it imposes a great economic problem for the individual, family, and society. In the South African Police Service an alarming rate of 4 per 10 000 suicides has been indicated in previous years. Due to the escalation of suicide rates it is regarded as a major public health concern. Several studies have been done regarding suicide and law enforcement agencies but few regarding suicide ideation in law enforcement agencies. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship among coping, stress and suicide ideation of police officials in the Gauteng Province within the SAPS. A cross-sectional survey design was used. A random, stratifies sample was taken from police officials in the Gauteng Province (n = 266). The Adult Suicide Ideation Questionnaire, Police Stress Inventory, the COPE Questionnaire and a biographical questionnaire were administered. The results of this study indicated that the factors that predict suicide ideation best are the following: a previous suicide attempt, passive coping styles, to be charged in terms of the disciplinary code, medical conditions and gender. The results also indicated that 9,02% of the sample showed significant levels of suicide ideation. Recommendations for future research were made. / Thesis (M.A. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2005.