The Effects of Australia's Foreign Policy on Indonesia Post-Independence Timor Leste

As initially, Australia supported the integration of Timor Leste into the Republic of Indonesia, many events occurred which caused the relationship between Indonesia and Australia to be slightly disturbed. The changes that have taken place in Australia's relationship with Indonesia illustrate the real effects of Timor-Leste's independence. As a result of Australia's role in the East Timorese independence process, its relationship underwent many changes, especially in the political and military fields. The changes taking place in military relations are evident. The Agreement on Mutual Security (AMS) was released, the joint training was canceled, and the troops that used to work together became enemies. Eventually, Australian arms sales to Indonesia were stopped. Changes in the political and diplomatic sphere, including all political visits, were canceled, and politicians within Australia and Indonesia publicly denounced others. Furthermore, cooperation within the global framework is limited, and the Ambassador's 'high alert' status is. Overall, Australia's relations with Indonesia became hostile. This study aims to determine how the influence of Australian foreign policy on Indonesia after the independence of Timor Leste. This research shows that the independence of Timor Leste and Australia's role in this process directly influenced government relations between Australia and Indonesia. Most Indonesians view the Australian government's actions and policies as separate from its relationship with Australian citizens.

Of Strange Loops and Real Effects: Five Theses on Autofiction/the Autofictional

This chapter explores the advantages of understanding the autofictional as a flexible matrix with scalable parameters. It puts forward five theses: (1) The fact that so many scholars have tried to work with the term “autofiction” indicates an obvious need for the “autofictional” to grasp what is vibrant between life and text. (2) The autofictional is a scalable and latent dimension in all autobiographical writing. Therefore, autofiction is not a separate genre in addition to autobiography and the novel. (3) Imagination and the use of the supernatural may support autobiographical reference. (4) Autofiction produces real-life effects. (5) Autofiction oscillates between fictionality and factuality. Although it brings one or other aspect to the foreground, all of them persist and continue to, more or less, resonate together.

Real Effects of Private Country-by-Country Disclosure

We investigate the effects of mandatory private Country-by-Country Reporting (CbCR) to European tax authorities on multinational firms’ capital and labor investments as well as their organizational structures. We exploit the threshold-based application of this 2016 disclosure rule to conduct difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity tests. We document increases in capital and labor expenditures in Europe, but these effects are more pronounced in countries with preferential tax regimes. Cross-sectional tests and analysis using consolidated financial data provide evidence consistent with multinational firms reallocating capital across Europe to mitigate increased tax enforcement risk, as well as with CbCR hindering capital investment efficiency. We also find evidence consistent with firms responding to CbCR by reducing organizational complexity. Collectively, our results support the conclusion that mandatory private CbCR causes firms to change real investment activities to substantiate their tax avoidance activities in Europe while reducing the appearance of aggressive tax practices.

Do Venture Capital Investors Learn from Public Markets?

We examine whether venture capital (VC) investors learn information contained in public market stock prices. VCs are less likely to stage finance startups and syndicate with other VCs when stock prices are more informative. An instrumental variable approach suggests that the relation is likely causal. The startup’s initial public offering (IPO) prospect is the plausible information contained in stock prices learned by VCs. The effect of VC learning on staging and syndication is more pronounced when collecting information is more costly and the information learned is more reliable. Evidence from a survey of VC investors confirms that they actively learn information from the public market. VCs’ learning from the public market significantly affects their investments across startup firms. Our paper sheds new light on the real effects of financial markets and suggests that the informational role of security prices is much broader than what we have thought. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

How Does Innovation Affect Economic Growth? Evidence from G20 Countries

We study the interactions between innovation and economic growth in G20 countries over 1961–2019. We establish whether there is a temporal causality between these two variables. Employing the autoregressive distributive lag framework, our results expose a grid of short-run and long-run causal relationships between innovation and growth, including long-run unidirectional causality from innovation to economic growth. Overall, our findings shed light on the real effects of innovation on economic growth. JEL Codes: O38, O31, O32

Is preclinical research in cancer biology reproducible enough?

The Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology (RPCB) was established to provide evidence about reproducibility in basic and preclinical cancer research, and to identify the factors that influence reproducibility more generally. In this commentary we address some of the scientific, ethical and policy implications of the project. We liken the basic and preclinical cancer research enterprise to a vast 'diagnostic machine' that is used to determine which clinical hypotheses should be advanced for further development, including clinical trials. The results of the RPCB suggest that this diagnostic machine currently recommends advancing many findings that are not reproducible. While concerning, we believe that more work needs to be done to evaluate the performance of the diagnostic machine. Specifically, we believe three questions remain unanswered: how often does the diagnostic machine correctly recommend against advancing real effects to clinical testing?; what are the relative costs to society of false positive and false negatives?; and how well do scientists and others interpret the outputs of the machine?

An Impossible Prayer: Ethics between Performative and Constative

This article takes up the blurred distinction between performative and constative utterances in an effort to develop a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer as perjurious testimony. Focusing on a passage in the recently published Le parjure et le pardon seminars, I argue that a quotidian and idiomatic conception of prayer is one whose function interminably oscillates between constative and performative, rendering the distinction between these two uses of language indiscernible. This oscillation plays not to prayer's detriment, but instead serves as the animating force behind prayer and the impossible ethical desire prayer expresses. The impossibility of a prayer whose desire is rendered perjurious by the state of affairs from which it emerges opens onto a number of political, ethical, and theological concerns that the second half of the paper addresses. By reading Simone Weil's reflections on the ‘Our Father’ in light of Derrida's considerations above, I argue that prayer's impossibility is a condition of possibility for its ability to produce real effects in the world it betrays.