“Managing” Corporate Community Involvement

In academic research, many attempts have been undertaken to legitimize corporate community involvement by showing a business case for it. However, much less attention has been devoted to building understanding about the actual dynamics and challenges of managing CCI in the business context. As an alternative to existing predominantly static and top-down approaches, this paper introduces a social movement framework for analyzing CCI management. Based on the analysis of qualitative case study data, we argue that the active role of employees pressuring for CCI policies and practices, as well as the organization audience responses to their efforts, are at the core of the challenges involved in managing CCI. These challenges also pose limits to how far CCI can be extended to a “business as usual” activity.     

Evolution in games with a continuous action space

Allowing for games with a continuous action space, we investigate how evolutionary stability, the existence of a uniform invasion barrier, local superiority and asymptotic stability relate to each other. This is done without restricting the populations of which we want to investigate the stability to monomorphic population states or to strategies with finite support. The authors have benefitted from careful and precise comments by Gerard van der Laan, Jan van Mill, the editor and an anonymous referee. Matthijs van Veelen gratefully acknowledges financial support by the Netherlands’ Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).     

Renewable resource management, user heterogeneity, and the scope for cooperation

Cooperation can increase the efficiency of commonly-owned renewable resource use. However, received knowledge is that, absent side payments, cooperative solutions are more difficult to achieve the less homogenous the agents involved. We revisit this claim by analyzing how differences in the opportunity costs of resource harvesting affect the scope for Pareto-improving contracts, where contracting is with respect to the type of technology used. We find that the scope for cooperation is largest for intermediate levels of heterogeneity.     

Measuring the Economic Effects of Competition Law Enforcement

Summary  Together with a move from a rules-based legal approach to a more economic approach in competition cases, the economic effects of competition law enforcement have received increasing attention. Measuring these effects is important for external accountability of the Competition Authority, for quality control of its decisions and for evaluating the effectiveness of the competition law. This raises many issues in measurement, including the choice of counterfactual, the choice of effects to be measured, and the proper use of available data. The papers in this Special Issue of De Economist discuss these and related issues, based on a broad range of experience in competition law enforcement.      

WHAT'S IN A NAME? RACIAL IDENTITY AND ALTRUISM IN POST‐APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

This paper reports the results of an economic experiment which was designed to test the effect of racial identity on generosity in a non-strategic setting. A sample of undergraduate university students was recruited to participate in a dictator game, where surnames of individuals were revealed to convey information about racial identity. Results indicate that compared to a set of control experiments where participant identity was kept anonymous, revealing racial identity has a significant and positive impact on the size of the offers made. However, while Black participants did not vary their offers based on the racial identity of their partners, White participants were more generous towards White partners than Black partners, exhibiting insider favouritism in their offers.     

Do Borders Matter? Evidence from Japanese Regional Net Capital Flows

Are international borders barriers to capital flows? We use evidence on net capital flows among regions within a country as a benchmark. For this purpose we develop a data set of saving and investment rates of Japanese prefectures. We find that the correlation between saving and investment rates is higher for OECD countries than for Japanese regions in both time‐series and cross‐sectional data. After controlling for factors that are expected to contribute to a positive correlation in the absence of barriers to capital flows, we conclude that primarily long‐term capital flows are hindered by national borders, as reflected in the cross‐sectional evidence.     

Contagion as a domino effect in global stock markets

This paper shows that stock market contagion occurs as a domino effect, where confined local crashes evolve into more widespread crashes. Using a novel framework based on ordered logit regressions we model the occurrence of local, regional and global crashes as a function of their past occurrences and financial variables. We find significant evidence that global crashes do not occur abruptly but are preceded by local and regional crashes. Besides this form of contagion, interdependence shows up by the effect of interest rates, bond returns and stock market volatility on crash probabilities. When it comes to forecasting global crashes, our model outperforms a binomial model for global crashes only.     

The ‘fresh start’ for individual debtors: social,moral and practical issues

The concept of a “fresh start” for individual debtors has been introduced in the Netherlands in 1998. Until then a natural person could be pursued for the debts he could not pay indefinitely. Their position was not different from the unfortunate debtors in many European countries to day. The entrance to the “fresh start‐ procedure” in the Netherlands is surrounded by impediments, the access is linked to the debtor in good faith, but after three years the fresh start comprises all debts (except student loans), none excluded. In the United States the fresh start doctrine is long established law, the entrance is easy, but many debts may be excluded. Because of public dissatisfaction in both countries the concept has changed. In the Netherlands many debts may now be excluded from the fresh start and in the United States a means test has been introduced. The two concepts of a fresh start for the natural person in both countries, originally so differnt in approach, now converged. Will the twain meet? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.