Does Institutional Theory Need Redirecting?

Greenwood, Hinings and Whetten (2014) present two major criticisms of current institutional scholarship, and see need for a broad redirection: institutional organization theory, they argue, has lost sight of the claim to study organizations and, with its overwhelming focus on isomorphism and similarity, has fallen short on adequately theorizing differences across organizations. In our article, we offer support as well as a riposte. First, while we agree that the organizing of collective efforts needs to be at the core of organization research, we warn that focusing on formal organization – a rationalized cultural product itself – may direct attention away from studying alternative modes of organizing, and underestimates the dynamic developments that have transformed contemporary organizations into increasingly complex objects of inquiry. Second, we are concerned that, by abandoning the analysis of similarities in favour of differences, institutional theory may eventually lose sight of its pivotal quest: to study institutions.     

Institutional convergence: exit or voice?

There is a small but growing literature on the determinants of economic freedom. This paper contributes to this literature in two ways. First, it is empirically shown that β-convergence in economic freedom occurred from 1980 to 2010. Countries with low levels of economic freedom in 1980 “catch up” at a rate of 0.7 percent a year on average, ceteris paribus. Second, the structural characteristics that contribute to this institutional convergence are documented. Conditional convergence estimates suggest democratic institutions do not con- tribute to conditional convergence. Exitability, a variable that captures how easy it is for citizens to “vote with their feet” is related to the change in economic freedom from 1980 to 2010 in a statistically significant manner across all specifications. This provides some preliminary evidence as to the importance of “exit” versus “voice” with respect to the question of institutional change.     

Are Economics Conferences Gender-Neutral? Evidence from Ireland*

We study gender inequality in conference acceptance using data from the Irish Economic Association annual conference from 2016 to 2022, exploiting the introduction of anonymized submission in 2021 to study the effect of blinding. While no gender gap is observed in organizers' acceptance decisions, there is an indication of gender difference favouring the in-group at the reviewer stage. In particular, male reviewers persistently give higher scores to papers with an increasing share of male authors. Evidence suggests that the difference stems from unconscious stereotyping against lesser known female authors. Anonymization eliminates the gender gap of male reviewers, but introduces a gender gap in favour of male authors for female reviewers. We explore differential selection as an alternative explanation, finding that reviewer experience postblinding could potentially account for our results.     

Empowered to do what? Why?

This article reviews an approach to leverage business process reengineering and employee empowerment for not only cycle time and cost reduction opportunities, but also a more exciting and expanded role for the employee. It promotes the reduction of simple, routine tasks, and refocusing the improved skill level of today's employees on higher value adding activities.     

Financial Transfers from Living Parents to Adult Children: Who Is Helped and Why?

Abstract . To what extent can young adult children rely on their parents for financial support? This question will take on added importance if the commitments of the Social Security system put greater strain on the children of retirees. Despite the critical role that parents have in supporting their children, why they help some and not others remains unclear. Findings using two waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study that control for the needs of children and the resources of parents suggest that parents give more inter vivos financial assistance to their disadvantaged children rather than focusing on children most able to give financial help in return. Other measures of child well‐being besides income, including home ownership, education, parental status, and marital status, also suggest that parents help needier children more. Children who live nearby also receive more, a finding consistent with exchange motives or simply the ability of these children to more stridently demand support. Neither altruism nor exchange theories explain why stepchildren receive substantially less support than naturally born or adopted children. The diversity of effects suggests that giving is based on heterogeneous motives—parents may temper their altruism for children by the degree to which they feel responsible and by the stridency of some children in seeking support. Findings are robust upon allowing for unobserved differences across families by estimating fixed effect models.     

Scarce or Abundant? The Economics of Natural Resource Availability

Most natural resources that are used in production are non‐renewable. When they become depleted they are lost for future use. Does it follow that the limited availability of natural resources will at some time in the future constrain economic growth as many environmentalists believe? While classical economists have shared the belief in limits to growth, the distinctive feature of modern neoclassical economics is its optimism about the availability of natural resources. This survey suggests that resource optimism can be summarised in four propositions. First, a rise in the price of a resource leads to a substitution of this resource with another more abundant resource and to a substitution of products that are intensive in this resource. Second, a rise in the price of a resource leads to increased recycling of the resource and to the exploration and extraction of lower quality ores. Third, man‐made capital can substitute for natural resources. Fourth, technical progress increases the efficiency of resource use and makes extraction of lower quality ores economical. In a critical analysis of these four propositions it is shown that while the conjecture that natural resources will never constrain future economic growth is logically conceivable, we do not and indeed cannot know whether it will be possible in practice to overcome any resource constraint. JEL Classification: Q20, Q30, Q40     

Why are Older Pensioners Poorer?

We show that older male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners. There are a number of possible reasons for this including under-indexation of private pensions and the running down of income producing assets. In fact we find that cohort differences more than account for the lower incomes of older pensioners in the sense that the mean income of older pensioners is actually higher than the mean income of the same cohort of pensioners when they were younger. We explore a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it is driven by differential mortality between richer and poorer pensioners. We show how this manifests itself in a long time series of cross-sectional datasets.     

Why do banks acquire non-banks?

This study focuses on the reasons for and the implications of banks?? decisions to acquire non-bank financial service firms (non-banks). The choice to acquire non-banks is driven by both external forces such as deregulation and regulatory capital and by internal forces such as a diversification strategy and efforts to enhance revenue and return to equity holders. We find that whereas the impact of acquiring non-banks increases their non-interest income, it also increases their non-interest expense. The net effect of choosing non-bank acquisitions lowers their subsequent return on assets, market value, and stock returns, as well as increasing their risk. However, the non-bank acquisitions do significantly increase the acquiring banks top executives?? subsequent compensation. We conclude that non-bank acquisitions are driven by both regulatory and strategic forces within the banking industry. However, such acquisitions manifest into agency problems.     

Is it feasible?

The benefits offered by a feasibility study are considerable. Not only does it enable an organization to set a realistic campaign goal, but it can also help with the more inexact science of assessing the fund-raising climate.     

What Is Toxic Followership?

There has been some discussion on the subject of toxic followership, but it is as yet ill‐defined and deserves further evaluation and study. The current paper examines toxic followership using Kelley's typology of followers and provides potential methods of mitigating toxic followership. Just as toxic leaders harm organizations, so too can toxic followers. They both can cause good people to leave an organization, and put the organization's survival at risk.     

Institutional tensions and private sector promotion in Tanzania: whose agenda?

This paper examines the current phase of transition of Tanzania's economy from state-led to market-led development, and considers the impacts of this transition on technological capabilities. The focus is on the different agendas and practices which surround private sector promotion in Tanzania, and examines these from the viewpoint of three sets of actors: the state, aid donors and the private sector itself. It is argued that while there is a consensus that private sector promotion is the way forward for Tanzania to rebuild its industrial and technological base, there are differences of opinions between the main players and there are differences between what is said (the agendas) and what is done (the practice). Historical enmities and distrust between sections of the private sector also contribute to these differences. The conclusion identifies a possible emerging consensus and new alliances between African and Asian Tanzanian business interests that can have a positive impact on technological capabilities and industrial renovation.     

Is the customer always right?

This article begins with a brief review of the early days of production and inventory control (where it started), describes the present state of the art (what it is like today), and ends with a forecast of what the future looks like (where it is going). Recognizing the importance of the customer today, it focuses on the changes in supplier-customer relations in the past as well as those to come.     

Economics Thought on the Accountant-appointed System

As one of the effective measures to reduce distorted accounting information, the accountant-appointed system has played its due role in preventing the state-owned assets from running off and strengthening the financial affairs of state-owned enterprises. But as a kind of new try, the accountant-appointed system still has a lot of defects in the course of its implementation. This paper explains the reason that inherent defects produce with the principal-agent theory in economics. Then it puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions to perfect the accountant-appointed system constantly.     

Regulatory Uncertainty: A Reason to Postpone Investments? Not Necessarily

There is a polarity in the literature as to whether companies do or do not postpone investment decisions in the light of regulatory uncertainty. In the case of flexible regulation characterized by a high degree and discontinuous resolution of uncertainty, we show that companies do not necessarily postpone investment decisions. We trace this observation back to three motivations: securing competitive resources, leveraging complementary resources, and alleviating institutional pressure. We connect these motivations to fundamental principles of the resource-based view and institutional theory and further show the existence of a regime where institutionally motivated and resource-based actions are not necessarily decoupled. We base our research on a case study covering 80 per cent of the German power generation industry which faces regulatory uncertainty from the European CO₂ Emission Trading Scheme.     

Why has China’s vertical specialization declined?

Vertical specialization (VS) is quantified by the VS share, which measures the average import content per dollar of exports. A characteristic of China’s export trade is its strong dependence on assembly and processing activities. To take proper account of this, China’s VS shares should explicitly distinguish processing export production from other production. We estimate China’s annual VS shares from 2000 to 2012—the latest year for which a special input–output table is available that makes such an explicit distinction. We find that VS shares increased from 2000 to 2004 and subsequently started to decrease. To explore why it has declined, we introduce a new structural decomposition approach. We find that the decrease of the VS share appears to have been driven mainly by the substitution of imported intermediates by domestic products. This occurred in particular in the production of exports, which implies an upgrading of China’s position in global value chains.     

Why do statistics journals have low impact factors?

In this paper, we answer the question why statistics journals get lower impact factors than journals in other disciplines. We analyze diffusion patterns of papers in several journals in various academic fields. To obtain insights into the diffusion of the citation counts of the papers, the data are analysed with the Bass model, leading to values for the time-to-peak that can be used to compare the speeds of diffusion paper citations of the different disciplines. Estimation results show that for statistics journals, it takes significantly more years to reach their peak. To further investigate diffusion, we also compute the percentages of the total number of citations a paper has after 2 or 3 years. Again, it appears that statistics journals have slower citation diffusion than journals in other disciplines. We conclude with some suggestions to reduce this disparity.