How does(n't) Urban Shrinkage get onto the Agenda? Experiences from Leipzig,Liverpool, Genoa and Bytom

This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public‐policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda‐setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe population losses but show very different histories with respect to how local governments reacted to them. We use the political‐science concepts of ‘systemic vs. institutional agendas’ and ‘policy windows’ as a conceptual frame to compare these experiences. The article demonstrates that shrinkage is hardly ever responded to in a comprehensive manner but rather that policies are only implemented in a piecemeal way in selected fields. Moreover, it is argued that variations in institutional contexts and political dynamics lead to considerable differences with regard to the chances of making shrinkage a matter of public intervention. Against this background, the article takes issue with the idea that urban shrinkage only needs to be ‘accepted’ by policymakers who would need to overcome their growth‐oriented cultural perceptions, as has been suggested in a number of recent writings, and calls for a more differentiated, context‐sensitive view.     

When Servant Becomes Leader: The Corazon C. Aquino Success Story as a Beacon for Business Leaders

This article makes the case for servant leadership as a model for business in its analysis of the leadership style of former Philippine president, Corazon C. Aquino. Premised on the idea that self-management requires deep spirituality lived integrally (and sustained by an interior or inner life), we identify specific traits and virtues of Aquino and their implications on her leadership and effect on people. The article begins with an introduction to establish the contribution of servant leadership on business. It continues with a summary of key points in servant leadership literature. Then, we analyze Aquino as a person and leader and find that the former spilled over to the latter. We conclude by providing a model based on Aquino’s journey into the role of servant leader; thus, presenting a framework that charts the path toward servant leadership to help businesses address the leadership crisis brought on by an Enron-WorldCom-Tyco dominated business culture.     

Consumption,housing collateral and the Canadian business cycle

How important are collateral constraints for reproducing salient features of the data? To address this question, we estimate two nested versions of a New Keynesian model: one with collateralized household debt and the frictionless version of the same model. Both versions of the model are fit to Canadian data using Bayesian methods. We argue that the presence of collateral constraints improves the performance of the model in terms of overall goodness of fit. Housing collateral helps to generate a positive correlation between consumption and house prices. Moreover, housing collateral induced spillovers boosted consumption growth during the housing market boom‐bust cycles of the late 1980s and early 2000s.