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Pennsylvania's new attorney general is set to name a special prosecutor in the coming days to investigate Gov. Tom Corbett's handling of the case, specifically why nearly three years elapsed before criminal charges were brought.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane, a Democrat elected in November, confirmed her plans in an interview here. She suggested that when he was attorney general Mr. Corbett, a Republican, slow-walked the investigation of a longtime football coach at the center of the scandal while campaigning for governor.

Mr. Corbett, who was elected in 2010, has flatly rejected the suggestion that he delayed the case.

But polls show that a majority of Pennsylvania voters are critical of his handling of the investigation, and Ms. Kane's inquiry is likely to cast a shadow over his bid for a second term in 2014.

Ms. Kane was elected by the largest margin of any candidate on the state ballot last November — even President Obama — and said she had no interest in challenging Mr. Corbett for governor in two years. But other members of her party acknowledged that there is a risk if her investigation becomes seen as a vendetta.

"Clearly, this is a very delicate issue on the political side," said Jay Costa, the Democratic minority leader in the State Senate. "If she creates an atmosphere that this is a witch hunt or whatever and she has already reached a conclusion, that's not good."

Mr. Corbett, 63, recently returned to the Penn State matter, an unhealed wound for many Pennsylvanians even after the conviction last year of the former coach, Jerry Sandusky, for molesting eight boys. In early January, the governor brought a lawsuit to lift the stiff penalties imposed on Penn State by the National Collegiate Athletic Association as a result of the episode.

The suit seeks to rescind a $60 million fine, a four-year ban on postseason football games and the forfeit of 112 Penn State football victories over a dozen years. It was filed six months after Mr. Corbett called on Pennsylvanians to accept the punishment, and it was widely viewed as calculated to win support from the legions of alumni who bleed Penn State blue and white.

Many Pennsylvania newspaper editorial boards concluded that the action was transparently political.

Mr. Corbett's approval ratings are historically low for a first-term governor of his state. "I don't think there's any doubt" that Mr. Corbett's handling of the case is "a contributing factor in his poor job performance" in polls, said G. Terry Madonna, who directs the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. "Do I think it's an issue that will play out? The answer is yes."

Beyond tarnishing its legendary football program, the Penn State scandal pointed at a cover-up by university leaders, including a former president who is awaiting trial.

Mr. Corbett declined to be interviewed for this article. He has denied delaying or mishandling any aspect of the investigation.

"The governor is happy to talk to anybody about it, including Kathleen Kane," said his spokesman, Kevin Harley. "The proof is the conviction of Jerry Sandusky on 45 of 48 counts, and he will spend the rest of his life in jail because of the work of the men and women in the attorney general's office and the State Police."

Ms. Kane, 46, is a former county prosecutor who specialized in child sex abuse cases. She questioned why it took 33 months to arrest Mr. Sandusky in late 2011 after Mr. Corbett, as attorney general, received a complaint against Mr. Sandusky in the spring of 2009.

"It's never taken me that long" to build a case against a molester, Ms. Kane said in the Harrisburg office she had just moved into, a Carpe Diem paperweight on her desk, adding that speed matters because child abusers seek new victims. "I was on the campaign trail almost two years; I didn't go a single place without somebody asking me why it took so long."

She also questioned the influence of campaign donations Mr. Corbett received from a charity Mr. Sandusky founded, the Second Mile, whose board members contributed to Mr. Corbett's run for governor. Investigators at the time suspected Mr. Sandusky of using the foundation, which helped troubled youth, to find victims.

Mr. Corbett's spokesman said he could not have returned the Second Mile contributions because at the time the case was before the grand jury and he was sworn to secrecy.

Ms. Kane also questioned whether Mr. Corbett devoted enough staff to the investigation and whether agents were trained to pursue child abusers.

Mr. Corbett has said his investigation moved slowly because for a long time there was only a single accuser against Mr. Sandusky. Investigators feared that the evidence was too weak to win a conviction.

"The criticism that Ms. Kane has is that she would never have put this in a grand jury," Mr. Corbett told The Philadelphia Inquirer last week. "My observation is, I don't think she's ever been involved in a grand jury or understands how it operates."

Ms. Kane replied that in her 12 years as an assistant district attorney in Lackawanna County, she brought at least a half-dozen cases to grand juries — though never for child abuse, because young victims are distraught having to speak to 30 or more jurors.

Randy Feathers, who supervised the investigating agents when Mr. Corbett was attorney general, said that from the time he got the assignment several months after the initial accusation there were at least two to four agents pursuing the case.

It took as long as it did, he said, because "we felt like we had no shot" winning in court with just a single victim testifying against Mr. Sandusky, who "walked on water" as an assistant for 31 years to the famous Penn State head coach, Joe Paterno.

So they looked for other victims. "You very rarely find a predator in those circumstances who only molested one kid," said Mr. Feathers, now retired. "Our job was to find those kids."

He added, "Tom Corbett had nothing to do with slowing anything down."

Ms. Kane said she would accept whatever conclusion the special prosecutor reached.

"I am not afraid at the very end, after every stone has been turned, to tell everyone, 'Nothing went wrong here,' " she said.

The documents, part of a record $660 million settlement in 2007 with the victims of abuse, are the strongest evidence so far that top officials for years purposely tried to conceal abuse from law enforcement officials. The files, which go from the 1940s to the present, are the latest in a series of revelations that suggest that the church continued to maneuver against law enforcement even after the extent of the abuse crisis emerged.

Bishop Thomas Curry, who was the vicar for clergy and one of the cardinal's top deputies and his adviser on sexual abuse, also stepped down as the regional bishop for Santa Barbara, Calif.

The church had fought for years to keep the documents secret, and until this week it argued that the names of top church officials should be kept private. In letters written in the 1980s, then-Father Curry gave suggestions for how to stop the police from investigating priests who admitted that they had abused children, like stopping the priests from seeing therapists who would be required to alert law enforcement about the abuse.

Both Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Curry have publicly apologized in the past, but have said that they were naïve at the time about the effectiveness of treatment for abusers and the impact on victims.

In a letter on Thursday, Archbishop Gomez wrote that the files are "brutal and painful reading."

"The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil," he said. "There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed. We need to acknowledge that terrible failure today."

Cardinal Mahony and Bishop Curry are still able to celebrate Mass and other religious duties. But Cardinal Mahony, a vocal advocate of immigrant rights, will no longer speak publicly, as he has done frequently since his retirement in 2011, a spokesman for the archdiocese said.

Archbishop Gomez's move to discipline his predecessor and to accept the resignation of Bishop Curry, was unexpected and unusual. It has not been the custom of bishops to use disciplinary measures of any kind against one another — or even to issue any public criticism.

Instead, as part of the sweeping package of policies for dealing with sexual abuse that American bishops passed at the height of the abuse scandal in 2002, the bishops agreed that they would employ what they call "fraternal correction" with one another when the situation requires. Only the pope can decide to remove a bishop from the leadership of his diocese. And only the pope can defrock a priest or a bishop.

Advocates for abuse victims had called for Bishop Curry's removal last week, and had mixed reactions on Thursday to the actions taken by Archbishop Gomez. David Clohessy, national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, called Bishop Curry's resignation "a small step in the right direction."

But Mr. Clohessy said that the sanctions against Cardinal Mahony amounted to little more than "hand-slapping," and are "a nearly meaningless gesture."

The cause of the explosion was not immediately known. It occurred just before 4 p.m. in the basement of an administrative building next to the 52-story tower of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. Company officials said there was significant damage to the first floor and mezzanine of the building, and witnesses said they saw rescue workers helping trapped employees who had been pinned under falling debris, while others dragged out the injured and the dead.

"I saw them take out three people covered in blood," said Trinidad Díaz, 31, the owner of a restaurant a block away from the explosion. "And after that, ambulances started arriving, one after the other."

The blast — in a highly protected but decaying office complex — comes in the middle of a heated debate over the future of Pemex, a national institution and a corporate behemoth that has been plagued by declining production, theft and an abysmal safety record that includes a major pipeline explosion almost every year, like the one in September that killed 30 workers.

Experts, while cautioning that it was too early to tell what had gone wrong, said the company would inevitably face more severe scrutiny as Mexico's Congress returned to work in the coming weeks. The country's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has pledged to submit a plan for reforming Pemex, opening it to more private investment and perhaps greater consolidation. But with the blast, deliberations about the company could become more elemental.

"You pull all of this together and you say, well, if they can't even guarantee safety in their own building, their own headquarters, what does that tell us about the company?" said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "It tells us there are things seriously wrong there. It tells you things need to be seriously shaken up."

George Baker, director of Energia.com, an energy research institute in Houston, said that previous safety scandals at Pemex had been used by Mexican leaders as an argument for making controversial changes. In 1992, he said, a major explosion in a residential Guadalajara neighborhood — caused by gas leaking into the sewers — was followed by calls for change, and a plan to break Pemex into smaller pieces.

"The provocation, the pretext was that we had this terrible thing happen and now we are going to have a response from Pemex," Mr. Baker said, adding that the explosion on Thursday would also now become part of the political calculations over what to do about the company.

"This may be used, may be manipulated, used as a pretext to do something," he said. "Who knows what that something is, but they may exploit it to do something they were going to do anyway."

At the scene, employees who were visibly shaken said the explosion felt like a bomb or an earthquake. After a deep rumble, a plume of smoke rose skyward and people rushed into the streets. Four rescue helicopters landed in the area to remove the dead or injured, while a half-dozen more helicopters hovered overhead. Soldiers, police officers and ambulances filled the area, and streets were quickly cordoned off.

A team of three emergency responders who had entered the building soon after the blast said that it looked as if two basement floors and parts of three upper floors had collapsed. Papers were strewed everywhere, and the scent of dust lingered in the air. The those in the rescue team said another rescue worker who had gone inside told them he saw eight lifeless bodies.

Just before dark, local news outlets reported that President Peña Nieto had arrived. He had already demanded an investigation and expressed remorse, using his Twitter account. "I profoundly lament the death of our fellow workers at Pemex," he said on Twitter just before arriving. "My condolences to their families."

Pemex officials, using the company's official Twitter account to confirm that at least 14 people had died, said around the time of the explosion that its offices were being evacuated because of an electrical problem. Later, the company said forensic teams were investigating the cause, which had not been determined. "Any other explanation with respect to this is speculation."

Legislation to revise existing mental health laws is under consideration in at least a half-dozen states, including Colorado, Oregon and Ohio. A New York bill requiring mental health practitioners to warn the authorities about potentially dangerous patients was signed into law on Jan. 15. In Washington, President Obama has ordered "a national dialogue" on mental health, and a variety of bills addressing mental health issues are percolating on Capitol Hill.

But critics say that this focus unfairly singles out people with serious mental illness, who studies indicate are involved in only about 4 percent of violent crimes and are 11 or more times as likely than the general population to be the victims of violent crime.

And many proposals — they include strengthening mental health services, lowering the threshold for involuntary commitment and increasing requirements for reporting worrisome patients to the authorities — are rushed in execution and unlikely to repair a broken mental health system, some experts say.

"Good intentions without thought make for bad laws, and I think we have a risk of that," said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied rampage killers.

Moreover, the push for additional mental health laws is often driven by political expediency, some critics say. Mental health proposals draw support from both Democrats and Republicans, in part because, unlike bans on semiautomatic weapons or high-capacity magazines — like the one proposed in the Senate last week — they do not involve confrontation with gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association.

"The N.R.A. is far more formidable as a political foe than the advocacy groups for the mentally ill," said Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, chairman of psychiatry at Columbia University and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association.

Indeed, the N.R.A. itself, in response to the massacre in Newtown, argued that mental illness, and not the guns themselves, was at the root of recent shooting sprees. The group called for a national registry of people with mental illness — an alternative that legal experts agree would raise at least as many constitutional alarms as the banning of gun ownership.

For mental health groups, the proposals under consideration are tantalizing: By increasing services for those with mental illness, they raise the possibility of restoring some of the billions of dollars cut from mental health programs in recent years as budgets tightened in the financial downturn. The measures also hold out hope for improvement of a mental health system that many experts say is fragmented and drastically inadequate. And some proposals — those to revise commitment laws, for example — have the support of some mental health organizations.

But some mental health and legal experts say that politicians' efforts might be better spent making the process of involuntary psychiatric commitment — and the criteria for restricting firearms access once someone has been forcibly committed — consistent from state to state. And some proposals have caused concern, raising questions about doctor-patient confidentiality, the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and the integrity of clinical judgment.

Especially troublesome to some mental health advocates are provisions like New York's, which expand the duty of practitioners to report worrisome patients — a model likely to be emulated by other states. New York's law, part of a comprehensive package to address gun violence, requires reporting to the local authorities any patient "likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others." Law enforcement officials would then be authorized to confiscate any firearm owned by such a patient.

John Monahan, a psychologist and professor of law at the University of Virginia, said that such laws are often superfluous.

Although many mental health practitioners mistakenly believe that federal laws like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act forbid them to disclose information about patients, such statutes already include exceptions that permit clinicians to give information to the authorities when a patient presents a threat to others, Dr. Monahan said.

Most states also have laws requiring mental health professionals to notify the authorities and any intended victim when a patient makes a direct threat.

New York's provision, Dr. Monahan said, differs from virtually every other state's laws in allowing guns to be taken not only from those committed against their will but also from patients who enter treatment voluntarily.

"The devil is in the details," he said of New York's new law. "The two fears are that people will be deterred from seeking treatment that they need or that, once they are in treatment, they will clam up and not talk about violence."

Most mental health experts agree that the link between mental illness and violence is not imaginary. Studies suggest that people with an untreated severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, especially when drug or alcohol abuse is involved. And many rampage killers have some type of serious mental disorder: James E. Holmes, accused of opening fire in a movie theater in Colorado in July, was seeing a psychiatrist who became alarmed about his behavior; Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people and injured 13 others in Arizona, including former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, was severely mentally ill.

But such killings account for only a tiny fraction of gun homicides in the United States, mental health experts point out. Besides the research indicating that little violent crime can be linked to perpetrators who are mentally ill, studies show that those crimes are far more likely to involve battery — punching another person, for example — than weapons, which account for only 2 percent of violent crimes committed by the mentally ill.

Because of this, some criminal justice experts say it makes more sense to pass laws addressing behavior, rather than a diagnosis of mental illness. In Indiana, for example, firearms can be confiscated from people deemed a potential threat, whether or not they have a mental illness.

Proposals in a number of states seek to redefine the threshold for involuntary commitment to psychiatric treatment. But in doing so, they have reignited a longstanding debate about the role of forced treatment.

In Ohio, lawmakers are expected to consider a proposal to increase access to outpatient commitment instead of hospitalization, while also doing away with language requiring people with mental illness to show a "grave and imminent risk to substantial rights" of themselves or others before they can be committed.

In Colorado, where legislators are undertaking a broad overhaul of the state's mental health system proposed by Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a Democrat, the proposal also includes changing the criteria for involuntary commitment.

Under the state's current laws, caregivers can place patients on 72-hour mental health holds only if they are believed to pose an "imminent danger" to themselves or others. The governor's plan would allow caregivers to commit people if they believe there is a "substantial probability" of harm. Virginia and some other states already have standards based on "substantial probability."

But some mental health advocates are wary about lowering the threshold. "The evidence that we have tells us that that's not an appropriate solution, it's not an effective solution to this problem," said Jennifer Mathis, deputy legal director at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, an advocacy group for people with psychiatric disabilities.

But Cheryl Miller — whose 21-year-old son, Kyle, was shot by the police last June after he pointed a toy gun at them — believes that a revised law might have saved her child.

Two weeks before Kyle was killed she took him to an emergency mental health clinic to get him hospitalized. But the staff refused to commit him.

"I said, 'I don't want to take him home; he needs to go to the hospital,' " Ms. Miller said. "They didn't think so. It goes back to, was he an imminent danger to himself? And it was 'No.' "

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles released thousands of pages of files on Thursday relating to child molestation by priests, part of a 2007 civil court settlement, and apologized again for the abuse.

"The 2013 public release of the files of clergy who were subject of the 2007 global settlement concludes a sad and shameful chapter in the history of our local church," the archdiocese said in a statement.

The files were made public more than a week after church records relating to 14 priests were unsealed as part of a separate civil suit, showing that church officials plotted to conceal the molestations from law enforcement as late as 1987.

(Reporting by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Cynthia Johnston)

Binge-viewing, empowered by DVD box sets and Netflix subscriptions, has become such a popular way for Americans to watch TV that it is beginning to influence the ways the stories are told — particularly one-hour dramas — and how they are distributed.

Some people, pressured by their peers to watch "Mad Men" or "Game of Thrones," catch up on previous seasons to see what all the fuss is about before a new season begins. Others plan weekend marathons of classics like "The West Wing" and "The Wire." Like other American pastimes, it can get competitive: people have been known to brag about finishing a whole 12-episode season of "Homeland" in one sitting.

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: "House of Cards," a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. "Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day," the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

"House of Cards," which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don't remember, Google is just a click away. The show "assumes you know what's happening all the time, whereas television has to assume that a big chunk of the audience is always just tuning in," said Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer.

Glen Mazzara, the executive producer, took a similar approach to AMC's "The Walking Dead" this year. In the second half of the season, which will start in mid-February after a two-month break, "we decided to pick up the action right away — to just jump right in," Mr. Mazzara said. Fans of the show, he said, have little tolerance for recaps, since many of them will have just watched a marathon of the first half to prepare for the second.

That the fans even have a choice in the matter is a testament to the fundamental changes under way in the television business. Digital video recorders, video-on-demand capabilities and streaming Web sites have given viewers command of what they watch and when, not unlike the way the invention of supermarkets gave food shoppers a panoply of new choices. In both cases, some consumers love to binge.

While a large majority of TV is still watched live, not recorded, the ratings for some series — like FX's "Sons of Anarchy" — double after a week of recorded viewing is counted. A first-of-its-kind Nielsen study last fall found that a handful of shows gain an extra 5 percent after another three weeks.

Nielsen does not routinely count viewers who wait more than a week to watch an episode, nor does it count most of the viewers who watch online, so it's hard to estimate the true amount of bingeing. Some hoarders wait years: Mr. Mazzara, for instance, said he's waiting to watch HBO's "Girls" until the whole series is over, several years from now. This stockpiling phenomenon has become so common that some network executives worry that it is hurting new shows because they cancel the shows before would-be viewers get around to watching them.

Kevin Reilly, the Fox Entertainment chairman, whose network has already canceled two of the three shows it introduced last fall, alluded to this problem at a news conference earlier this month. "If I bumped into one more person that was doing a 'Breaking Bad' marathon in the middle of our fall launch...," he said, trailing off as reporters laughed.

But the networks are adapting to the generational shift from on-a-schedule to on-demand viewing. When Fox introduced its biggest bet of the season, "The Following," last week, it bought ads saying "Set your DVR now!" And sure enough, episode No. 2 this week out-rated the premiere, suggesting that the ad campaign had worked.

In recognition of the change, some networks are pushing to expand the metrics that determine advertising rates — from the current three-day ratings to a seven-day rating that would better account for on-demand habits.

Binge-viewing has been around at least since the advent of videotapes, when companies started to sell box sets of shows. But it has come of age because of the catalogs on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and other Web sites.

Some media executives like to call the behavior "marathoning," since bingeing can have negative connotations. Either way, the behavior "extends the life of a show," said Anthony Bay, the vice president for digital video at Amazon.

That's been true for "Lost," which ended its run on ABC three years ago, but is still a hit on Netflix and Hulu. Damon Lindelof, a co-creator of the mystery, said he has found that some people enjoyed it more by watching from start to finish, without the weeklong and monthlong waits for answers. Bingers, he said, "were spared the anxiety and the stress of the weekly episodes."

For a creator, he added, speaking to a roomful of producers and distributors in Miami this week, it's comforting to know that "ultimately the way your work is going to be viewed is more like reading a novel."

That said, the traditional TV cliffhanger is far from dead. The producers of shows — even the five beginning on Netflix this year — know they have to satisfy multiple types of audiences. Said David Fincher, the acclaimed film director who is working with Mr. Willimon on "House of Cards" for Netflix, "I want to make sure that people who set the book down on the night stand are able to connect the dots, but I also want the people who are rabidly turning pages to go, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got all that.' "

In some corners of Hollywood there is deep skepticism about Netflix's all-at-once release of "House of Cards." Mr. Willimon acknowledged the advantages to stretching out a season — it's a format viewers are used to, there's more time for marketing — but said that as a storyteller (he's best known for the play "Farragut North," which inspired the film "The Ides of March") he prefers the "House of Cards" approach.

As television becomes less beholden to the schedule and more acclimated to the Web, he said, "it might even dispense with episodes altogether. You might just get eight straight hours or 10 straight hours, and you decide where to pause."

Like all modern presidents before him, President Obama has appointed friends and donors to about 30 percent of diplomatic posts, often in glamorous and safe locales in Europe and Asia. Donors and advisers involved in the diplomatic selection process say that competition for these posts is so tight this year, and Mr. Obama's network of big donors and bundlers so vast, that those who have raised less than a million dollars are for the most part unlikely to be considered.

Officially, of course, there are no such requirements for would-be ambassadors. But in a recent study, two researchers — Johannes W. Fedderke and Dennis C. Jett, both professors of international relations at Pennsylvania State University — computed theoretical prices for different postings.

Titled "What Price the Court of St. James's? Political Influences on Ambassadorial Postings of the United States of America," the paper looks at diplomatic appointments in the Obama administration through January 2011. Dr. Fedderke and Dr. Jett theorize that the most desirable postings are those to countries "that are not obscure, dangerous, poor or of low interest to tourists." Where "political campaign contributions (financial or otherwise) exercise an influence on the nature of posting received," the desirability of a posting should correspond to the size of the campaign contribution.

The researchers compared available information on donors' direct political contributions and "bundling" — money raised on behalf of Mr. Obama by supporters — with data on the national income of host countries, their relative level of safety, and the robustness of their tourist industries.

Not surprisingly, the authors found that politically connected ambassadors, including former aides as well as donors, were statistically more likely to be posted to countries in the Caribbean, North America and Central America. But those whose political connections to Mr. Obama were measured in dollars, rather than administration service, had an increased chance of representing the United States in Western Europe, and a markedly smaller chance of serving in, say, Central Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. The study found that political ambassadors who had made campaign donations of $550,000, or bundled contributions of $750,000, had a 90 percent chance of being posted to a country in Western Europe.

And what do these postings "cost?" Ambassadorial appointments do not, of course, come with price tags. But by combining information on what current ambassadors contributed along with data on the desirability of the ambassadors' host countries, Dr. Fedderke and Dr. Jett arrived at "implied prices" for a selection of highly sought positions. The figures did not represent how much donors actually gave or raised to get the jobs, the researchers said, but rather their theoretical value in fund-raising terms. Those numbers in turn give a sense, Dr. Fedderke said, of how attractive each posting is in relation to the others.

"What we can observe is data on contributions and postings," Dr. Fedderke said in an interview. "And on the basis of that, we can infer an implicit valuation on postings in monetary terms — even if they haven't contributed that much."

When isolating a country's wealth over other factors, Luxembourg came in at the top of the chart, with a posting there valued at $3.1 million in direct contributions, while an appointment to Portugal was predicted to have a value of $602,686 in personal contributions. The model suggests that bundlers can get the same posts for less: Portugal was valued at about $341,160 in bundled contributions, Luxembourg at $1.8 million.

When factoring in a country's tourist trade, however, France and Monaco top the list, with the level of personal contributions at $6.2 million and bundled contributions at $4.4 million.

The prices, authors note, vary considerably depending on which factors to emphasize. And in some cases, the actual nominees appeared to "overpay" for their positions — raising or giving more than the model would suggest was necessary — and in some cases "underpay." That is because some donors bargain poorly for their positions, the authors suggest, while others may possess attributes (business experience, a personal connection to the president) that aid their case. But regardless of the model, Dr. Fedderke and Dr. Jett found, political ambassadors are more likely to be appointed to those countries that are wealthy, popular tourist destinations and safe.

And what price is the Court of St. James's — diplomatic-speak for Britain, the nation's most prestigious post? "The price for the Court of St. James's," the authors find, "appears to lie between $650,000 and $2.3 million."