IS E‐GOVERNMENT LEADING TO MORE ACCOUNTABLE AND TRANSPARENT LOCAL GOVERNMENTS? AN OVERALL VIEW

This paper seeks to assess to what extent e-government enables accountability and transparency in EU local governments. It also provides an overall view about how local governments are implementing ICTs initiatives to bring citizens closer to governments. Although the mere capacity of the Internet for the dissemination of information improves accountability and makes benchmarking easier, our results show that the expected benefits are far from being achieved because e-government projects are still in the early stages. The results also show that, at present, ICTs have not had a dramatic impact on EU local government accountability.     

The impact of minimum wages on youth employment in Portugal

On January 1, 1987, the legal minimum wage for workers aged 18 and 19 in Portugal was raised by 49.3%. This shock is used as a “natural experiment” to evaluate the impact of the minimum wage change on teenagers’ employment. The method is to compare, based on firm-level microdata, the employment growth of 18-19-year-old workers with employment growth of older workers. The main findings are that the increase in the minimum wage significantly reduced employment of 18 and olds, but increased employment of 20- olds.     

Strategic market games with a finite horizon and incomplete markets

Summary. We study a strategic market game associated to an intertemporal economy with a finite horizon and incomplete markets. We demonstrate that generically, for any finite number of players, every sequentially strictly individually rational and default-free stream of allocations can be approximated by a full subgame-perfect equilibrium. As a consequence, imperfect competition may Pareto-dominate perfect competition when markets are incomplete. Moreover - and this contrasts with the main message conveyed by the market games literature - there exists a large open set of initial endowments for which full subgame-perfect equilibria do not converge to -efficient allocations when the number of players tends to infinity. Finally, strategic speculative bubbles may survive at full subgame-perfect equilibria.Received: 24 January 2002, Revised: 21 February 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D43, D52. Correspondence to: Gaël GiraudWe thank Tim Van Zandt for his comments.     

When a Sinner Does a Good Deed: The Path‐Dependence of Reputation Repair

This study examines how shareholders will interpret a socially desirable action taken by firms with a damaged corporate reputation status. We first explain theoretically why shareholders’ path‐dependent judgments of a tainted firm increase the likelihood of shareholders making less favourable judgments of the firm's socially desirable actions. We then test the theoretical predictions using a sample of Chinese listed firms that were sanctioned for securities fraud and subsequently made donations to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake relief funds. We find that the shareholders evaluate the donations made by fraud‐tainted firms less favourably than those made by firms that have not been sanctioned for fraud. Furthermore, the shareholders’ evaluations of the donations made by fraud‐tainted firms is less favourable if the firms have committed more serious fraud and undertaken fewer positive remedial actions in the post‐fraud period. Overall, our evidence demonstrates that shareholders’ path‐dependent judgments of fraud‐tainted firms constitute a major obstacle that constrains the effectiveness of reputation repair.     

Uncovering Micro‐Practices and Pathways of Engagement That Scale Up Social‐Driven Collaborations: A Practice View of Power

This paper explores how large‐scale social‐driven collaborations might grow in scale and help promote political change. We present the results of a qualitative investigation of a complex platform where multiple and hybrid collaborations co‐exist and where civil society plays a central role. Based on a longitudinal comparative case study, we draw a processual model describing micro‐practices and pathways of engagement. We show that the emergence of these collaborations requires a new type of convener, one that is able to manage the interplay between the sharing/co‐creation of abundant resources and the coordinated decentralization of informal authority. Our study extends existing debates on the role of resources and authority, showing the complementarity between possession and practice perspectives of power. Finally, we identified synergies between collaboration and social movement literatures, particularly showing that large‐scale collaborations could be mobilized to refine social movement agendas and achieve more purposive collective action.     

Control Premium and Corporate Regulatory Changes: Theory and Evidence

We propose a model to estimate the private benefits of control in control transfer transactions for a broad range of regulatory environments, from private negotiations to mandatory tender offers. The Barclay and Holderness' and Dyck and Zingales' Block Premium models are nested as special cases. With corporate control transfer regulation around the world moving from the Market Rule to the Equal Opportunity Rule, our theoretical model is a flexible tool for empirical studies. We apply our model to study the effect of the implementation of Chile's Tender Offer Law in 2000 and find that control premiums fell significantly. This drop is statistically unrelated to the targets' affiliation to an economic group. Our results suggest that improved corporate governance practices and the Equal Opportunity Rule alignment effect reduced the scope for extraction of private benefits of control.     

Sexual orientation and household decision making.: Same-sex couples' balance of power and labor supply choices.

This study estimates the effect of intra-household-bargaining on gay and lesbian couples' labor supplies, in order to determine how homosexual and heterosexual decision making compare, in a collective-household framework. Data from the 2000 US Census show that couples of all types exhibit a significant response to bargaining power shifts, as measured by age and non-labor-income differences between partners. Among gay, lesbian, and heterosexual cohabiting couples, a relatively young or rich partner has more bargaining power and supplies less labor, the opposite being true for his/her mate. Among married couples, the older spouse is instead more powerful, or the richer. No such patterns are found among same-sex roommates.     

Strategic manipulation of a pollution permit market and international trade

We consider a framework where firms which compete in an international product market are not all submitted to a pollution permit market. Using the Brander and Spencer’s framework (J Int Econ 18:83–100, 1985), we seek to determine the optimal strategies of both a dominant firm in the pollution permit market and the regulator in a such context. We first show that the dominant firm pursues a strategic manipulation to increase its profit. We also find that the regulator uses a sophisticated strategic policy to increase the domestic welfare by using two instruments: the initial allocation of pollution permits and the pollution cap.