The Economics of Administering Import Quotas with Licenses-on-Demand in Agriculture

A Nash equilibrium is determined for licenses-on-demand import quotas where licenses are allocated on a prorated basis. Inefficiency is incurred because licenses are allocated to high-cost firms. The ability to overbid exacerbates the inefficiency due to proportionate reductions in licenses. Quota expansion causes high-cost firms to decrease their bids but reduces inefficiency. The entry of a new firm causes all incumbent firms to increase bids or bid the quota. Not penalizing firms for the non-use of licenses increases inefficiency. The inefficiency impacts of tariff reductions, license fees, limits per firm, and imperfect information are also addressed.     

Self-selection and the power of incentive schemes: an experimental study

We examine how self-selection of workers depends on the power of incentive schemes and how it affects team performance if the power of the incentive schemes is increased. In a laboratory experiment, we let subjects choose between (low-powered) team incentives and (high-powered) individual incentives. We observe that subjects exhibiting high trust or reciprocity in the trust game are more likely to choose team incentives. When exposed to individual incentives, subjects who chose team incentives perform worse if both the unobservable interdependency between their efforts and their incentive to cooperate under team incentives are high.     

Markteintritts- und Marktbearbeitungsstrategien kleiner und mittlerer Personalberatungen im Ausland

This article presents the results of an empirical research concerning the strategies of foreign market entry of small- and medium-sized Executive Search Firms from a resource-based perspective. The results show that they tend to mainly use cooperative forms of market entry, although not exclusively. In addition to this, they also opt for export strategies or the establishment of wholly-owned offices. The choice of a specific strategy is highly dependent on the social and human capital of an Executive Search Firm as well as on the experiences and attitudes of the management. The study is embedded in and broadens the existing knowledge of the internationalization of Professional Business Services as well as the internationalization of both small and medium-sized enterprises.     

Channels of restructuring in privatized Czech companies1

The main contribution of this paper to the literature on restructuring in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe is the analysis of productivity‐growth effects for different channels of restructuring. It examines a panel of 737 voucher‐privatized Czech companies in the first years after the transfer of ownership (between 1993 and 1998). The results indicate that asset sales and employee incentives serve as restructuring channels through which productivity of the privatized companies increases. The analysis also indicates that capital expenditures, labour shedding and CEO replacements are not significantly correlated to productivity growth. Furthermore, the analysis suggests that the availability of bank loans is positively associated with productivity growth, but not for less profitable firms. This provides some evidence in support of soft budget constraints accommodated via bank lending.     

Why does shareholder protection matter for abnormal returns after reported insider purchases and sales?

We use a unique data set of more than 240,000 reported insider transactions across 15 European countries and the USA to analyze the link between country-level shareholder protection and abnormal returns following insider trades. We show that abnormal returns after insider transactions are positively correlated with country-level shareholder protection against expropriation by corporate insiders, which supports the information-content hypothesis. Market reaction to insider purchases increases with shareholder protection because shareholder protection enhances the transparency and trustworthiness of insiders’ actions, and limits possibilities for direct profit diversion, so that more information is eventually reflected in stock prices. For insider sales, shareholder protection decreases their negative information content. We conjecture that this is due to the effect of greater transparency and trustworthiness strengthening the diversification and liquidity reasons for selling in better shareholder protection countries. We find limited support for the rent-extraction hypothesis that conjectures that shareholder protection is associated with insider trading dollar profits.     

Welcome waste – interpreting narratives of radioactive waste disposal in two small towns in Ontario,Canada

After briefly reviewing the production of nuclear energy and waste in Canada, this paper uses two small Ontario towns as case studies to examine the treatment of low-level radioactive waste and the communities’ responses and narratives to it. Both towns, Port Hope and Kincardine, have long histories of dealing with such waste. Using interviews, relevant websites and past accounts, this paper employs a discourse analysis to understand the differences in risk perceptions and living with the presence of these materials. Ideas from landscape narratives are employed to show that responses in Port Hope are dominated by death, elegy and crime, whereas those in Kincardine are predominately linked to progressivism and optimism. We explore the characteristics of each case to highlight the reasons for these differences. We conclude by emphasizing the potential role of narrative analysis in informing policymaking.     

Contemporaneous and long run canonical correlations in the linear IV model: Implications for instrument selection

In the normal linear simultaneous equations model, we demonstrate a close relationship between two recently proposed methods of instrument selection by presenting a fundamental relationship between the two sets of canonical correlations upon which the methods are based.     

Die Pflegevisite als Kontrollinstrument

Aufgrund der politischen Entwicklungen der letzten Jahre haben qualit?tssichernde und -weiterentwickelnde Methoden auch in der Pflege an Bedeutung gewonnen. Seit 2009 ist in den Richtlinien des Medizinischen Dienstes für station?re Altenpflegeeinrichtungen die Prüfung der Pflegevisiten vorgesehen, in denen es vorrangig um die gemeinsame Einsch?tzung der Wirksamkeit der Pflege geht und welche Fortschritte Betroffene im Umgang mit ihrer Erkrankung machen konnten.