Political Action Committees: Fact,fancy, and morality

The analysis of Political Action Committee activities is dominated by the perspective that PAC contributions are a rational investment in political candidates; they yield valuable short-term payoffs. PACs buy access to officeholders and their votes on important legislation. Despite broad acceptance of this morally suspect theory, the evidence upon which it is based is weak. An alternative perspective — what we call the principled approach — both fits the evidence and rejects the morally repugnant interpretation of the relationship between business and politics that permeates the rational investment perspective. Joanna Banthin and Leigh Stelzer are both Assistant Professors of Management and Industrial Relations at W. Paul Stillman School of Business at Seton Hall University. Together they wrote: Teachers Have Rights, Too(Social Science Education Consortium, Boulder, 1980). Leigh Stelzer also wrote: Mandate for Change: The Impact of Law on Educational Innovation(The American Bar Association, Chicago) and Capitol Goods: The New York State Legislature at Work(Capital Associates, 1975).     

Riding off into the Sunset: Organizational Sensegiving,Shareholder Sensemaking,and Reactions to CEO Retirement

We test hypotheses derived from resource dependence and sensemaking/sensegiving theoretical lenses in the context of CEO succession, focusing on an under‐researched yet prevalent type of executive turnover – CEO retirement. Using event study methodology and a sample of CEO retirements from S&P 1500 firms during the 2003–12 period, we find that, all else equal, shareholders’ perceptions of organizations’ capacity to serve their interests are adversely affected when a retirement related change occurs in the leadership structure. Specifically, in line with resource dependence theory, we find that CEO retirement disclosures typically generate negative abnormal returns. Furthermore, in line with the sensemaking perspective, we find that the magnitude of shareholders’ reactions is contingent on the lexical sensegiving cues contained in the organizational narratives that are released to capital markets via executive retirement announcements. Overall, our theory and results point to CEO retirement events as consequential in the eyes of shareholders, challenging an important assumption of extant succession research. Moreover, they suggest that shareholders’ interpretation of these events is influenced by organizational sensegiving, highlighting the important role of organizational communication around succession events.     

Health insurance and the labor supply decisions of older workers: Evidence from a U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs expansion

This paper exploits a major mid-1990s expansion in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs health care system to provide evidence on the labor market effects of expanding health insurance availability. Using data from the Current Population Survey, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy to compare the labor market behavior of older veterans and non-veterans before and after the VA health benefits expansion to test the impact of public health insurance on labor supply. We find that older workers are significantly more likely to decrease work both on the extensive and intensive margins after receiving access to non-employer based insurance. Workers with some college education or a college degree are more likely to transition into self-employment, a result consistent with “job-lock” effects. However, less-educated workers are more likely to leave self-employment, a result suggesting that the positive income effect from receiving public insurance dominates the “job-lock” effect for these workers. Some relatively disadvantaged sub-populations may also increase their labor supply after gaining greater access to public insurance, consistent with complementary positive health effects of health care access or decreased work disincentives for these groups. We conclude that this reform has affected employment and retirement decisions, and suggest that future moves toward universal coverage or expansions of Medicare are likely to have significant labor market effects.     

School competition and the quality of education: introducing market incentives into public services

Existing research indicates that introducing school choice and competition into the public education system might improve the quality of schooling. Yet, up to date most empirical work on school choice has concentrated on developed countries and it is far from obvious that the experience of these countries can be of any guidance for transition economies. Our work intends to fill this gap. We concentrate on the case of Poland. We argue that in Poland, school choice and competition tends to improve average education quality and efficiency of public education expenditure.     

Institutional Demand-Side Discrimination Against Women and the Human Capital Model

Human capital theorists claim that the gender wage gap is due in large part to supply-side factors. They base this claim on empirical evidence. This paper challenges the interpretation of that empirical evidence. It argues that that interpretation is based on an assumption of a simplified production system that rules out any consideration of institutionally-based demand-side discrimination. It argues that insiders have an incentive to choose production techniques that benefit themselves, and that their choices will bias measures of human capital in their favor. The paper then considers a specific case study - the undergraduate U.S. academic market - where such institutionally-based demand-side discrimination exists, and offers an institutional change which could work to offset it.     

Is the effect really so large? Firm‐level evidence on the role of FDI in a transition economy1

Foreign subsidiaries usually perform better than domestic enterprises, but selection effects have been acknowledged in the literature. This article contributes by quantitatively evaluating the size of the selection effects and direct effects of FDI entry. We use a large panel of firm‐level data from Poland and match foreign‐owned firms to a control group of non‐foreign‐owned companies and analyse various performance indicators. In terms of efficiency measures, between 50 and 70 percent of the foreign affiliates advantage may be attributed to direct ownership effects. However, in the case of export intensity, the majority of the differential between the domestic companies and foreign subsidiaries is attributable to selection effects: MNEs choose export‐oriented companies and sectors.     

Structural change and misallocation: Firm‐level evidence from Poland*

Early transition literature linked a large number of firm failures with the inability to overcome the pre‐transition misallocation of resources, that is, the inadequate capital–labour ratio. We look at the link between misallocation and firm survival using a rich firm‐level dataset of over 1,600 manufacturing plants established in a centrally planned economy after 1945. Our duration models include the standard Olley–Pakes misallocation measures as well as a firm‐level measure of the counterfactual level of capital that takes into account the present‐day market allocation and productivity. We show that while privatization is positively related to firm survival, misallocation (a) was more of a firm‐level than sector‐level phenomenon and, more importantly, (b) it, in general, did not have a sizeable effect on the actual firm survival nor it had an impact on the outcome of privatization.     

物业经理的烦恼与快乐

救人一命胜造七级浮屠 又是一个蓝天白云、阳光明媚的早晨,如往常一样,我先到位于多伦多东北面的公寓大厦巡视,突然发现管理处门口贴着一张字条,歪歪扭扭的英文写着:"有人在#1111室自杀!"     

Food security as resilience: reconciling definition and measurement

In this article, we draw out a set of axioms for food security measurement that follow directly from the internationally agreed 1996 FAO definition. Building on recent work on the theory and measurement of development resilience, we then propose an empirical strategy to measure food security that addresses these measurement axioms better than do prevailing measures. We empirically illustrate this approach using a panel data set from northern Kenya.     

物业签约服务商

位于多伦多东北部的一幢公寓大厦已有十年历史.自大厦落成之日起,都一直聘用同一家园艺铲雪公司.这家公司在多伦多地区算得上规模较大且信誉良好的公司,过去十年的表现中规中矩:夏天,园林花艺几乎十年如一日,没有任何惊喜;冬天,铲雪表现合格,住户的投诉并不多.