Accounting for Income-Contingent Loans as a Policy Hybrid: Politics of Discretion and Discipline in Financialising Welfare States

Income-contingent loans (ICLs) are becoming widely adopted across higher education sectors internationally, and increasingly proposed for other policy domains. This article explores why this policy form has gained such wide popularity in the context of fiscal austerity and greater financialisation of social policy. It argues ICLs act as a policy hybrid, combining elements of a tax and a loan. The article traces the development of ICLs in their original and most developed context, Australia’s university sector. We connect the development of ICLs to changes in modes of state accounting associated with the application of private sector accounting techniques. These changes reflect financialisation inside the state, producing contradictory political dynamics. Drawing on Streeck’s conception of a shift from the ‘tax state’ to the ‘debt state’, we argue the hybrid construction of ICLs creates political tendencies in both directions, facilitating greater state discretion while also implementing market discipline. Alongside these contradictory state imperatives we highlight continued partisanship, pointing to new and ongoing forms of distributive politics. To the extent that accounting technologies allow the state to act as a special kind of creditor, we ask whether financialisation may also involve the emergence of an ‘asset state’.     

Mitigating climate change: A role for regulations and risk‐taking

Why do some firms engage in actions to reduce climate change? We propose two counterintuitive mechanisms: high levels of regulation and a firm's increased tolerance for risk. Drawing from insights on how institutional contexts constrain, and enable, prosocial firm behavior, we argue that external pressures, amplified internally by a firm's higher tolerance for risk, increase the likelihood that a greenhouse gas (GHG)‐intensive firm will engage in climate change actions that exceed regulatory requirements. An analysis based on 7,101 observations of U.S. publicly traded firms during the 2013 to 2015 period supports our hypotheses. Our models show high overall prediction accuracy (88.6%) using an out‐of‐time holdout sample from 2016. Moreover, we find that firms that have exhibited environmental wrongdoing are also more likely to engage in beyond‐compliance activities, which may be a form of greenwashing. Thus, more formal and informal regulatory oversight has the potential to spur positive environmental actions. This has implications for a firm's corporate social responsibility actions as well as for climate change regulatory policy.     

International Accreditations as Drivers of Business School Quality Improvement

Business schools are under pressure to implement continuous improvement and quality assurance processes to remain competitive in a globalized higher education market. Drivers for quality improvement include external, environmental pressures, regulatory bodies such as governments, and, increasingly, voluntary accreditation agencies such as AACSB and EFMD. A case study based on French management schools is presented to demonstrate this impact, and globally, management education is shown to have benefited from specific accreditation standards. Future challenges include the risk of standardization and institutional isomorphism, research relevance and quality, and the consequences of globalization on accreditation criteria.     

Is the Relationship of Wealth Inequality with the Real,Financial and Housing Cycle Country-Specific?

Atlantic Economic Journal - Relying on the methodology of deviation cycle dynamics, we analyze whether the association of wealth inequality measures and the real, financial and housing cycle are...     

Non-nested tests of new classical versus Keynesian models: further evidence

This paper re-runs the experiment conducted by Dadkhah and Valbuena (1985), using data generated by the Australian, Canadian, Japanese, Swiss and Swedish economies. The aim of this exercise is to discriminate between new classical and Keynesian accounts of the business cycle. The results obtained in the present study are broadly supportive of Dadkhah and Valbuena's earlier findings in that the Keynesian model generally outperforms the new classical alternative.     

A sign of the times.

Pressure placed on employers to enhance the bottom line comes from a multitude of changes in the marketplace and has resulted in employers seeking to limit their liabilities and expenses for retiree medical care. To address retiree medical issues, employers have adapted a number of strategies that are presented in this article. These include eliminating or modifying benefits, using a defined contribution approach, capping subsidies and enrolling retirees in Medicare HMOs.     

Alcohol use and wages of young men: whites vs nonwhites

According to the medical community a host of ills accompanies prolonged alcohol use including memory loss, motor dysfunction, and impaired judgement. While deduction suggests alcohol use would reduce wages, past empirical studies find differently. For example, Berger and Leigh (1988) find a 32% wage premium for drinkers. Our study differs in two ways. First, self-selection is corrected using observed variables and secondly, an adjustment for the income effect is incorporated. Our results suggest drinkers receive a wage penalty the size of which differs across races. Nonwhite drinkers (blacks and hispanics) face a 7.3% penalty while white drinkers receive a 3.2% penalty.     

At home on the electronic frontier: work,gender and the information highway

This article presents the findings of field research investigating the experiences of a wide spectrum of home‐based information workers within the context of discourses on technological change and labour market restructuring. The social relations being (re)produced in such settings, particularly as they relate to both common‐sense and theoretical notions of flexibility, are analysed.     

The effects of reward structure,media richness and gender on virtual teams

This study explores the dynamics of virtual teams. We hypothesize that the use of a mixed-incentive reward structure will increase team member satisfaction, affect group cohesion and decrease perceived social loafing in a virtual team environment. We also hypothesize that team member satisfaction and team cohesion will increase and perceived social loafing will decrease with the use of a richer technology medium in a virtual team environment. In addition, we hypothesize that in a virtual team environment, team member satisfaction, group cohesion and perceived social loafing will differ between males and females. Using eighty-nine MBA students at a large southeastern university as participant's for our study, we find that perceived social loafing decreases with the use of a mixed-incentive reward structure in a virtual team environment. We also find that perceived social loafing decreases with the use of a richer technology medium in a virtual team environment. Finally, we find that perceived social loafing differs between males and females and that females perceive more social loafing when there is not a mixed-incentive scheme. The results shed light on the role of gender in virtual teams.     

When Rule Makers Become Rule Breakers: Employee Level Outcomes of Managerial Pro-Social Rule Breaking

We extend Morrison’s (2006) construct of pro-social rule breaking (PSRB) in two important ways. First, we explicate the processes through which PSRB may have unintended negative consequences. Second, we provide a conceptual model intended to guide future research into PSRB. The model discusses the mechanisms through which managerial PSRB may lead to negative employee outcomes. Specifically, we propose that when managers engage in PSRB, more complex processes (perceptions of organizational justice, attributions of management by employees, and psychological contract violations) mediate the unintended employee level outcomes of managerial PSRB.