Salvador Espinosa

Examining the Determinants of Police Department Transparency The View of Police Executives

Scholars know relatively little about why law enforcement agencies choose to share information with the public. Empirical research has shown that departments often do so to satisfy an external demand, whether in the form of a statute requiring information to be collected and disseminated, the presence of a consent decree, or some other similar pressure. There is also evidence that transparency is the product of a unique constellation of factors within agencies that lead certain departments to share more information than others. But this line of inquiry is underdeveloped, and questions remain about both the nature and degree to which these external and internal factors matter. This article focuses on the role of police executives in generating the agency’s response to transparency demands, with a particular focus on such demands generated by civilian oversight agencies and the role that top leadership plays in establishing an organizational culture that values openness and transparency. To address these issues, we draw on the results of a series of Q-sorting exercises and the insights gleaned from several semi-structured interviews with municipal police chiefs and county sheriffs. Preliminary results suggest that the vision and goals of police executives are critical to his or her department’s online transparency.

Building Bond Repayment Capacity in Developing Countries: A Study on Property Tax Collections and Debt Affordability in Mexico

This article uses a multinomial regression model to analyze the bond repayment capacity of issuers of municipal bonds in Mexico. The study emphasizes the role that property and land-based taxes have in the enhancement of repayment capacity, as these are highly underutilized levies with important revenue raising potential. The findings show that there is no statistically significant link between these taxes and the chosen proxy for repayment capacity. This follows from an institutional and legal framework that creates an artificial environment of fiscal solvency. The Mexican case is instructive on how not to create a subnational bond market.

The Design and Estimation of a Bi-National Bond to Finance Strategic Infrastructure along the U.S.-Mexico Border

The magnitude of funds needed to improve infrastructure along the U.S.–Mexico border has substantially outstripped the sources, resulting in a deteriorating environment and border security and placing the inhabitants at risk. Traditionally, the federal government in each country allocates a small budget to the North American Development Bank (NADB), a bi-national institution that manages infrastructure development. This article defines a bi-national bond that can be issued by the NADB in U.S. dollars and/or Mexican pesos and estimates the spread for default risk and premiums for the built-in hedge against adverse movements in interest rates and exchange rates. As of May 2012, the authors estimate a B rated, two-year zero, bi-national bond denominated in pesos will yield 9.645% without the hedge and 2.86% with the interest rate and exchange rate hedges. The structured feature of the bond helps in lowering the cost of financing.

Fiscal Governance, Information Capacity, and Subnational Capital Finance:

This study posits a theory that a country’s capacity to resolve information problems directly relates to the development of subnational government (SNG) capital markets. Based on a sample of fifty-two countries with various degrees of market-based approaches to public debt finance, we evaluate how the capacity to resolve information problems covaries with alternative measures of SNG debt in 2007 to 2014. Empirical findings show that transparency and depth of credit information resolution and extent of disclosure in the private sector positively relate to SNG debt levels, other institutional capacities held constant.

Unveiling the Features of a Regulatory System: The Institutional Grammar of Tobacco Legislation in Mexico

The United Nations will host a drug policy summit in 2016. This will be a good forum to evaluate the effectiveness of existing legal frameworks. The institutional grammar tool can help with such evaluation. This article uses the tool to analyze the inherent features of tobacco regulations in Mexico. The analysis shows that the legal framework seeks to curb consumption with a combination of information and choice rules, and administrative penalties. As the analysis reveals, the usefulness of the method depends upon the availability of a solid theory that allows one to link rule features and the behavior they expect to induce.

Regional Development and Cross-BorderInfrastructure Finance: Comparing theYield-Spread Determinants of Mexican and U.S. Sub-Sovereign Government Bonds

The crafting of innovative mechanisms to fund strategic projects in cross-border regions is acquiring special significance in countries that, like Mexico and the United States, face growing infrastructure needs and tightening public budgets. There is an emerging literature arguing that cross-border mechanisms of bond financing can help attract private capital for strategic infrastructure projects. In this article, the authors consider that while overall financial integration is not a necessary condition for the design of cross-border bonds, higher yield convergence among these instruments can enhance their feasibility. The authors analyze the risk determinants of local government bonds in Mexico and the United States. They find that, although these economies are increasingly interdependent, their sub-national bond markets are structurally different. Although yield spreads in the U.S. reflect the features of the bond and the financial condition of issuers, the observed yield spread in Mexican bonds will largely depend on the gross state product and geographical location of the issuing entity, the face value of the bonds, and their coupon.