Endogenous coalition formation in contests

This paper analyzes coalition formation in a model of contests with linear costs. Agents first form groups and then compete by investing resources. Coalitions fight for a prize that is assumed to be subject to rivalry, so its value is non-increasing in the size of the group that obtains it. This formulation encompasses as particular cases some models proposed in the rent-seeking literature. We show that the formation of groups generates positive spillovers and analyze two classes of games of coalition formation. A contest among individual agents is the only stable outcome when individual defections leave the rest of the group intact. More concentrated coalition structures, including the grand coalition, are stable when groups collapse after a defection, provided that rivalry is not too strong. Results in a sequential game of coalition formation suggest that there exists a non-monotonic relationship between the level of underlying rivalry and the level of social conflict.

“If men were supplied with every thing in the same abundance, justice and injustice would be equally unknown among mankind.” David Hume (1740), A Treatise of Human Nature

I thank Luis Corchón, Joan Esteban, Michelle Garfinkel and József Sákovics for their comments and suggestions on the paper.     

The war against drug producers

This paper develops a model of a war against illegal drug producers. This war occurs on two fronts. First, to prevent the cultivation of crops the state engages the drug producers in conflict over the control of land. Second, to impede further the production and exportation of drugs the state attempts to eradicate crops and to interdict drug shipments. The model includes an interested outsider who uses both a stick and a carrot to strengthen the resolve of the state in its war against drug producers. We use numerical calibrations of the model to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of Plan Colombia. The authors wish to thank an anonymous referee, Michelle Garfinkel, Jean Hindriks, Carlos Esteban Posada, and Marc St-Pierre for helpful comments and suggestions, as well as seminar participants at Brown, Yale, the CEPR conference on Crime and Conflicts, Marseilles, October 2004, LACEA, San José, November 2004, the AEA meetings, Philadelphia, January 2005, the ESWC, London, August 2005, and Banco de la República. Herschel Grossman died on October 9, 2004 in Marseilles during a conference where we were presenting this paper.     

All in the family: why non-democratic leaders have more children

Economists have come to learn that politics matters. But survival matters the most to those involved in politics. We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic. This empirical relationship is established controlling for a full array of country specific as well as individual specific variables. Our finding also continues to hold when using alternative measures of family size. This paper has been prepared for a conference honoring Herschel I. Grossman at Brown University in April of 2006. We thank our discussant, Murat Iyigun, an anonymous referee, Michelle Garfinkel and conference participants for excellent suggestions.     

Natural resource rents and internal conflicts: Can decentralization lift the curse?

We study how natural resource rents affect the risk of internal conflict within countries and how the federal structure of countries influences this relationship. Natural resource abundance may induce excessive rent-seeking and thus increase the risk of internal conflict. Fiscal and political decentralization as an institutional arrangement for rent-sharing and political codetermination of regions within a country may limit the destructive effect of natural resource rents on internal stability. Using cross-country and panel data from more than 90 countries covering the period 1984–2004, we find evidence that natural resource rents indeed increase the risk of internal conflict, but this relationship is significantly mitigated by political decentralization.     

On thugs and heroes: Why warlords victimize their own civilians

Violence against civilians is the mainstay of modern warfare, and claims 84% of the war-related casualties. Looting and terror are the two main reasons why the soldiers victimize the civilians from the other side. However, examples have been found (Congo, Sierra Leone,...) where the guerilla and the incumbent army abuse the civilians from their own side. The present paper offers a potential explanation for this phenomenon, based on strategic looting. It argues that this behavior helps drawing a line between thugs and legitimate rebels. Received: July 2004, Accepted: November 2004, Accknowledgement. This paper is part of the PAC Project CIT-2-CT-2004-506084 funded by the European Commission. It has been presented at the ``Rationalist Approaches to War and Conflict' Workshop at WZB in Berlin on July 17, 2004. Helpful comments by the participants, and in particular by the discussant Karl W?rneryd, as well as by Irwin Collier, David Dejong, Michelle Garfinkel, Anke Hoeffler, Karl Moene, James Morrow, Robert Powell and Gerald Schneider, are gratefully acknowledged, without implicating. Helpful comments by two anonymous referees are also acknowledged, with the same caveat.     

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF FISCAL DEFICITS: A SURVEY

Abstract This paper surveys recent literature, both theoretical and empirical, regarding political explanations for fiscal deficits. Political economy suggests conflicts of interest may lie behind the emergence of deficits: (1) Opportunistic politicians generate deficits to win elections, even in conflict with general welfare; (2) Conflicts of interests between politicians’ partisan preferences create incentives for (at least some) incumbents to run deficits and (3) Conflicts of interest between different social groups or regions generate tensions in the allocation of government resources leading to overspending. This paper reviews these different strands of the literature. It also covers contributions that highlight the crucial role of budget institutions in determining the extent to which the political motivations to generate deficits are indeed translated into poor fiscal outcomes. Promising avenues for future research are highlighted.     

Conflict and well-being of civilians: The case of the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war

This paper investigates the contemporaneous effect of conflict on civilians living outside of the conflict zone. Applying a multi-dimensional concept of well-being, it uses two large household surveys over 2012–2016 to analyze how the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war affected the financial well-being and health of people in both countries. We find that the conflict significantly worsened financial well-being in both countries. The impact mostly operates by worsening expectations about financial well-being and is inversely related to the distance from the conflict zone. Our analysis indicates an increase in chronic diseases in Ukraine over a longer period. Mental health is negatively impacted in both countries at the earlier stages of the conflict. However, in Russia this effect is significant only in the region bordering the conflict zone, while in Ukraine it is significant in regions farther away from the conflict zone.     

Formal models of the political resource curse

By surveying formal models, I demonstrate that the political resource curse is the misallocation of revenues from natural resources and other windfall gains by political agents. I show that the curse always exists if political agents are rent-seeking, since mechanisms of government accountability, e.g. electoral competition, the presence of political challengers, and even the threat of violent conflict, are inherently imperfect. However, the scope for rent-seeking becomes more limited as the competition over political power that threatens the incumbent government becomes more intense.     

How Political Actors Co-Construct CSR and its Effect on Firms' Political Access: A Discursive Institutionalist View

This paper explores how corporate social responsibility (CSR) can incentivize political actors to increase firms' political access. Taking a discursive institutional perspective, I argue that the types of access negotiated depend on how political actors co-construct the multiplicity of CSR meanings. To study this process, I focus on the empirical case of the European Union (EU), offering a novel analysis of event observations, policy documents, and interviews with Commission officials, Euro-parliamentarians, and other stakeholders. I find that the value of CSR is highly contested in the EU political arena. I then elucidate four discursive strategies through which political actors interactively refined, reframed, and reinterpreted the meaning of CSR and its relevance for firm access in ways beneficial to their perceived interests. The findings highlight the importance for nonmarket strategy studies to conceptualize CSR as a co-constructed idea and access as negotiated, putting the micro-dynamic relationship between firms and political actors centre stage.     

Mind the gap: the role of HRM in creating,capturing and leveraging rare knowledge in hostile environments

Abstract

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have increasingly entered markets in less developed regions of the world afflicted with weak institutions and political conflict. Some are characterised by ‘extreme’ cases of institutional voids and terrorism, creating a hostile environment for the organisation and its people. This in-depth qualitative study of a service company, a European telecommunications joint venture in Afghanistan, seeks to shed light and build theory on the human resource management (HRM) dimension of managerial learning and knowledge acquisition in hostile environments, as part of the MNE’s organisational learning process. Specifically, we investigate how knowledge gaps can be addressed through supportive HR practices, and how knowledge classified as ‘rare’ can be captured and leveraged through HR interventions such as debriefing. We stipulate that HR practices and interventions adapted to hostile environments, together with expatriate willingness to learn and share new knowledge, play a critical role in the creation, capturing and leveraging of rare knowledge for subsequent use by the MNE in other hostile locations. The study has implications for international HRM and organisational resilience, under the proposition that competitive advantage can be gained through exploitation of rare knowledge acquired in hostile environments.     

Decentralization is Dead,Long Live Decentralization! Capital City Reform and Political Rights in Kampala,Uganda

African cities are currently experiencing some of the highest population growth rates in the world. Accompanying this growth is constant and continuing pressure on national and local governments to develop political and institutional structures that respond to the multiple demands this demographic change provokes in relation to service delivery, economic development and social wellbeing. In response to these challenges, national governments are reviewing the political and administrative structures of their capital cities, sometimes recentralizing authority. This article examines the reforms to Kampala, capital city of Uganda. The article explains how the national government gradually created the legal conditions necessary to take over the capital city directly, and the political rhetoric and conflict that ensued. We argue that while Kampala had deep internal problems and fared poorly in service delivery, matters were exacerbated by the national government's historical indifference to the city. Moreover, past service delivery failures offered an easy rationale for recentralizing authority. We demonstrate that this recentralization was a well‐planned effort by the central government to regain political control of the capital city. This article illustrates how the national government's recentralization of authority in Kampala is a significant departure from its longstanding policy of democratic decentralization.     

The role of affective commitment and political skill in the work interfering with family (WIF) conflict – voluntary turnover relationship

The present study explores how political skill affects an employee’s coping behavior in response to Work Interfering with Family (WIF) conflict. Applying Conservation of Resource theory, we argue that politically skilled individuals are more cognizant of the social embeddedness of WIF, and because of cross-domain resource (e.g. time, attention, energy) depletion, lack the resources to cope with its effects. As such, they leverage their political skill to more effectively turnover from the organization than less politically skilled individuals by detaching their identity and lowering their affective commitment to their organization. We tested the hypotheses using a sample of 181 individuals from a retail firm, and results support the hypothesized model. First, a test of indirect effects confirmed that affective commitment partially mediated the link between WIF and voluntary turnover (measured six months later). Second, a moderated-mediation test revealed, as hypothesized, that affective commitment only functioned as a mediator for individual with high levels of political skill. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.     

Corruption,conflict and the management of natural resources

The documented link between natural resources and civil conflict is not well understood. This paper uses a political economy framework to explore the prevalence of resource-based civil conflict driven by group-level discontent. The theoretical model proposed here offers a policy-based explanation: under conditions related to the quality of governance, discontent about resource management can affect the likelihood of an insurgency. Resource policy arises endogenously as the corrupt government trades-off industry contributions and the cost induced by manifestations of resource-related discontent. The conservation effects of civil unrest are analyzed and government corruption emerges as an important determinant of conflict. The paper also presents some empirical support for the model’s predictions.     

State-owned enterprises' political capital,city administrative rank and economic resources acquisition: Empirical evidence from Chinese capital markets

This paper examines the impact of Chinese State-Owned Enterprises' (SOE) corporate political capital and the administrative rank of the city where the firm is located on their ability to acquire economic resources. The study found that the stronger the political capital owned by SOEs and the higher the administrative rank of the cities in which SOEs were located, the easier it was for them to obtain more loans and subsidies. We also found that as the city administrative rank increased, the positive effect of SOEs' political capital on economic resources acquisition also increased. When SOEs were divided into commercial competitive versus specific functional enterprises, the administrative rank of the city in which the enterprise was located played a significant positive role in obtaining economic resources for commercial competitive enterprises, while the role of their political capital played a limited role. For specific functional enterprises, their own political capital played the more significant positive role. This paper expands the research scope of corporate political connections with a new perspective.     

An assessment of the effect of partisan ideology on shale gas production and the implications for environmental regulations

The production of shale gas depends not only on shale resources and capital investment but also on having a flexible and stable policy environment. This paper examines whether and how partisan ideology affects the extraction of shale gas. We use panel fixed effects as well as the system–generalized method of moments approach with quarterly panel data from 15 US states over the period 2007−2016. We consider not only the political ideology of the state governor but also the state legislature’s influence on the governor, control over the governorship and the legislature by the same party, the reelection of an incumbent government, and turnover in the political party in power. The results indicate that because the right-leaning party is more likely to support shale gas development, when a member of that party heads the state government, shale gas production performance is higher than when the left-leaning party is in power. Therefore, the production of shale gas rises with a turnover in political control from left to right, reelection of a right-leaning incumbent, and more right-leaning power in the state legislature. We believe our results shed light on the role of partisan ideology in shale gas production, which has implications for environmental regulations.     

工作场所中嫉妒与人际破坏行为关系解析

本文对Michelle K.Duffy(2012)关于工作场所中嫉妒与人际破坏行为关系的社会环境模型的最新研究进行了详细解析,该研究验证了道德偏离的中介作用,并研究了两个主要社会环境变量(社会认同和组织破坏行为基准)对此中介模型两阶段调节作用。本文结合Kenneth Tai(2012)最新的关于嫉妒对个人和组织影响的理论分析研究,进行对比分析,综合整理,给出了其他可能的非社会环境类的调节变量,并通过实际案例情境描绘对上述最新研究成果加以对照分析应用,提出实际环境中的实践建议。     

Resources, conflict and development choices: public good provision in resource rich economies

Natural resource wealth can be a curse or a blessing for a country. This paper hypothesises that the provision of productive public goods (or lack of it) is a pathway that helps understand these different outcomes when policy choices are made under the threat of conflict inherent in resource-rich countries. Facing potential conflict over resources, a self-interested ruler may choose to invest in either military repression or in productive public goods—physical and social infrastructure. While both measures aim at preventing conflict, we show theoretically that the optimal policy choice depends on the relative effectiveness of the ruler and the population in contesting the resources. Increased resource wealth provides a disincentive to invest in development if the ruler is more effective than the population in appropriating the resources. Conversely, if the ruler is relatively ineffective, more resource wealth induces higher levels of public goods. We present empirical evidence consistent with the predictions of the model for a sample of 57 countries over three decades. Thus, we provide and test empirically a conditional resource curse theory, postulating that the relative effectiveness of the contenders plays a crucial role in determining whether resources are a curse or a blessing.     

A Confucian perspective on conflict resolution

Chinese business managers, in general, have been portrayed as valuing harmony and peace and having a tendency to avoid confrontation for fear of disturbing relationships involving mutual dependence. This is held to be a reflection of traditional Confucian cultural values.

This paper is an exploratory study which attempts to establish the relationship between the traditional, Confucian cultural values and the modes of conflict resolution preferred by Chinese business managers. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument was employed in this study to describe the preferred conflict resolution modes of Chinese business managers. The results show that compromising tend to be the most preferred conflict resolution mode of Chinese business managers because of the latter's predominantly humanistic, Confucian self-concept.

However, other modes, that is, collaborating, competing, avoiding and accommodating, are also being employed by Chinese business managers as a strategic and political variation of that Confucian self-concept.     

Neoliberal Urban Planning Through Social Government: Notes on the Demographic Re-engineering of Malmö

Neoliberal urban governance is often framed as a break with the social statecraft of the postwar period. If we approach social government as a specific mode of biopolitical population politics, neoliberal reforms can instead be understood as re-articulating the welfarist version of postwar social planning. In this article, I analyze how social urban government can become the basis of neoliberal planning through a study of the Swedish city of Malmö, which has shifted its approach from emblematic Scandinavian social democratic welfare urbanism to a particular kind of neoliberal planning. Malmö is a city where distinctions between desirable and unwanted populations are produced by municipal social planning that concerns itself with accumulating human resources. Postwar social planning technologies are thus re-articulated as the basis for making space competitive for certain residents. This mode of planning is described as a type of ‘social neoliberalism’, which, instead of circumscribing neoliberal economics, extends the reach of neoliberalism into social government. This study suggests that calls for a return to social planning need to be complicated by accounts of how social government itself has been remade by neoliberal reforms. It also points out how the divisions produced by social neoliberalism expose powerful fault lines that reveal a terrain of political struggle.