Theory and Empirics of Democracy and Crime Revisited: How Much Further Can We Go with Existing Data and Methodologies?

The vast empirical work on the criminogenic nature of democracies has produced strong—albeit suspiciously wide‐ranging—claims. This article reviews existing evidence and methodologies that link crime and democracies. It asks three questions: Do theories generate separable and exclusionary predictions enabling their identification and testing? Could results be more conclusive given existing data limitations and the current methodological state of the art? How far are we from obtaining such results? We conclude that there are far too many arguments with blurry lines predicting just about any result. Data are more likely to constitute the binding constraint rather than methodology issues, despite the fact that the estimation of causality between democracy and crime can still be improved. Finally, the priority should be the harmonization of existing information sources, which will require overcoming externalities associated with the public good nature of global information generation.     

Interpreting Currency Crises: How Much Do We Know?

ABSTRACT

The main objective of this paper is to understand the causes and symptoms of currency crises by reviewing the seminal literature and noting some of its significant features. The paper revises the so-called first- and second-generation models and accounts for six different features. Based on this revision and account, the paper suggests the need to view currency crises beyond the traditional line of thought. In effect, to comprehend the process, which may lead to the inconsistency of the exchange-rate-maintenance policies and result in a currency crash.     

Women Entrepreneurs: Can We Remove the Barriers?

Entrepreneurial activity among women continues to attract attention world wide. However, despite obvious gains, women lag behind men in business ownership and economic independence on every continent. This paper will review the research on entrepreneurship as a career choice for women, the motivations and career paths followed by women entrepreneurs, the attitudes and behaviors associated with successful ventures, the problems that persist and policies that conspire to keep women’s businesses few and small. A discussion of legislation and practices that have helped and hindered women’s entrepreneurship will follow, with suggestions for reframing the issues and reforming policies.     

Interference of Local Government, Industrial Concentrative Rate and Corporate Diversification

This paper studies the effects of internal and external environments on the strategic decision-making of diversification using the cross-sectional data of China＇s 1 033 non-financial listed companies in Shenzhen and Shanghai Exchange. Corporate external-environment is substituted by index of marketization and market concentrative rate, and internal-environment is substituted by governance framework and financial status. The multi-regression analysis shows that the strategic decision-making of diversification is prominently affected by external factors such as index of marketization and market concentrative rate, and is significantly negative related to the proportion of state-owned shares and corporate shares. There is no correlation between diversification and whether directors hold concurrently, or manager compensation, cash flow, and debt ratio.     

Can We Develop Measures of Hypothetical Constructs?

A rational approach to item development and scoring was used to assess six dimensions considered relevant to a law enforcement position. Factor analysis, reliability analysis, and correlations with various other measures indicated reasonable “construct validity” for three of the six original measures. All six final measures were easily interpretable, but three were inconsistent with our original concepts or were much more narrow representations of the intended construct. All measures displayed low correlations with job performance measures.     

Linguistics and Economics: Is Entrepreneurship Innate?

One of the great scientific achievements of the second half of the twentieth century was the advance in linguistics. Noam Chomsky was one of its foremost exponents. Chomsky and his followers claim that human beings have an inbuilt ‘language acquisition device’ which allows children to acquire language with extraordinary ease. Language is as much part of human nature as flying is that of birds. This paper argues that, like language, the propensity to trade is an inbuilt characteristic of human beings. Language permeates all human faculties including the ability to plan for the future. As a result human economic activity shares many important features with language, in particular its recursive and unbounded character. There is also evidence that the concept of property is innate. It follows that attempts to frustrate or limit the exercise of property rights and their use in trade works against the grain of human nature. Limits on the natural expression of entrepreneurship may be as damaging as other constraints on human flourishing.     

Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid: A Recipe for Inclusive Growth or Social Exclusion?

Policy makers often see entrepreneurship as a panacea for inclusive growth in underdeveloped ‘Base of the Pyramid’ (BOP) regions, but it may also lead to unanticipated negative outcomes such as crime and social exclusion. Our objective is to improve the understanding of how entrepreneurship policies can lead to socially inclusive growth at the BOP. Drawing on data collected from Brazilian tourism destinations with varying entrepreneurship, innovation, and social inclusion policies, we argue that weak institutions coupled with alert entrepreneurs encourage destructive outcomes, especially if entrepreneurship policies are based solely on economic indicators. Policies addressing both economic and social perspectives may foster more productive entrepreneurial outcomes, albeit at a more constrained economic pace. The study extends the related BOP, entrepreneurship, global value chain, and sustainable tourism literatures by examining the poor as entrepreneurs, the role of local innovation, and how entrepreneurship policies generate different social impacts within poor communities.     

Defining the ‘Social’ in ‘Social Entrepreneurship’: Altruism and Entrepreneurship

What is social entrepreneurship? In, particular, what’s so social about it? Understanding what social entrepreneurship is enables researchers to study the phenomenon and policy-makers to design measures to encourage it. However, such an understanding is lacking partly because there is no universally accepted definition of entrepreneurship as yet. In this paper, we suggest a definition of social entrepreneurship that intuitively accords with what is generally accepted as entrepreneurship and that captures the way in which entrepreneurship may be altruistic. Based on this we provide a taxonomy of social entrepreneurship and identify a number of real cases from Asia illustrating the different forms it could take.     

Self-Organization and the Role of Government: How and why does self-organization evolve in the shadow of hierarchy?

Self-organization is a concept that is often used to legitimize a government’s retreat from sectors in which it has traditionally played a vital role. In this article, we analyse how the emergence of new welfare services is mutually shaped by factors that stimulate self-organization among citizens and by meta-governing interventions by local governments. Self-organization seems to takes place in the shadow of a government hierarchy: either a fear-based one or a benevolent one. Boundary spanners play an important role in establishing these new arrangements, thereby making use of, and developing, trustworthy relationships between citizen groups and government.     

Rating and capital structure: How do the signs affect the speed of adjustment?

Standard and Poor's ratings can be modified by the addition of a plus (+) or minus (?) sign to show the relative standing within each major rating category. In this paper, we analyze the influence of these signs on the speed of leverage adjustment for listed European companies in the 2004–2014 period. Our results indicate that (a) when a qualification is accompanied by a minus sign, it adjusts more slowly than qualifications either with a plus sign or without a sign; (b) when a rating has a plus sign, the adjustment is slower than when it has no sign; and (c) when a qualification is BBB‐, the speed of its leverage adjustment is close to zero. These results suggest that companies with signs in their ratings decrease their speed of adjustment to the target leverage ratio. In addition, such companies are especially concerned about a credit rating downgrade when it implies a possible loss of the degree of investment (BBB‐).     

Is the Coach Paid too Much?: Coaching Salaries and the NCAA Cartel

Recently, a great deal of controversy has been generated from the salaries earned by head coaches in the NCAA. Although many figures in the world of sports earn high salaries, one important difference in the case of the NCAA is that the players do not get paid. We develop a model that shows that a cartel agreement to not pay the players raises the coach's salary if some players choose where to play based on the identity of the coach. The agreement not to pay the players improves competitive balance in the baseline model, but this result does not generalize.     

Industrial relations and the management of whistleblowing after the Francis report: what can be learned from the evidence?

This article focuses on the results obtained from the quantitative surveys conducted for the independent review into creating an open and honest report culture in the NHS. It examines the management of whistleblowing and discusses the research findings in the light of the recommendations made by Sir Robert Francis QC in his ‘Freedom to Speak Up’ report published in February 2015. The authors believe that the principles and actions set out in this report and the detailed Annexe describing various aspects of good practice are generally applicable in both the public and private sectors. In so far as it provides evidence that those who follow their employer's procedure when raising a concern have better outcomes than others, the authors conclude that the quantitative research for Francis is consistent with other findings that power resources and institutional arrangements can be critical to the whistleblowing process.     

How Can Leaders Cultivate an Organizational Culture of Creativity and Innovation,Particularly in the Academy?

Cultivating creativity and innovation in the academy requires adaptive leadership to develop organizational capacity for collaboration and teamwork. To foster collective capacity for innovation, leaders can be guided by Kouzes and Posner's five practices of exemplary leadership.     

Can University Leaders Manage the Tensions Between the Practice of Innovation and the Traditions of the University?

The practice of innovating within a university causes tension because it is not well understood, is perceived as risky, and is seen as a threat to established power, which makes it difficult to know where to house it for maximum effect. The tension can be reduced by focusing on the similarities of innovating and teaching, inviting faculty and staff to serve as early adopters, and having senior administrators be the budgetary and political champions for innovation initiatives.     

Entrepreneurship in the informal economy: commercial or social entrepreneurs?

Recent research has revealed that a large proportion of entrepreneurs start-up their ventures operating on a wholly or partially off-the-books basis. Until now, it has been commonly assumed that those who operate in the informal economy are exclusively commercial entrepreneurs. They are assumed to be rational economic actors who weigh up the benefits of operating off-the-books against the costs of being caught and decide to operate in this manner. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically this a priori assumption. Reporting evidence from a 2005/6 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 102 informal entrepreneurs in Moscow in Russia, the finding is that such entrepreneurs are not purely commercially driven. Examining their rationales, informal entrepreneurs are found to range from purely rational economic actors pursuing for-profit logics through to purely social entrepreneurs pursuing purely social logics, with the majority somewhere in-between combining both for-profit and social rationales. Neither do their logics remain static over time. What begins as a commercial entrepreneurial venture may become more socially oriented over time or vice versa. So too do their logics vary socio-spatially. Those living in deprived populations are more socially-orientated, whilst those in relatively affluent populations are comparatively more profit-driven. The outcome is a call for a more nuanced explanation of the complex and heterogeneous logics of informal entrepreneurs.