LIBERAL ECONOMICS AND THE RISE OF LAISSEZ‐FAIRE ECOLOGY

The shift in thinking about how to manage national economies and economic systems in the 1980s was part of a broader revolution in intellectual thought. This is seen in ecology, where a shift in thinking about how to manage environments took place at the same time. Traditionally, the environment was viewed in determinist (structuralist) terms, as a system which was susceptible to management and manipulation. Ecosystems were thought to evolve through predictable stages, reaching a climax state. From the late 1980s, ecologists became increasingly convinced that ecosystems, like economic systems, are complex. They argued that while human intervention is often necessary, wherever possible it should be replaced with more natural controls, which can often fulfil policy aims as well if not better than deliberate intervention. Like economies, the best ecosystems are those which largely manage themselves.     

How well do urban growth boundaries contain development? Results for Oregon using a difference-in-difference estimator

Urban containment policies, including urban growth boundaries (UGBs), are a common tool used by city planners to promote compact development. We analyze how well UGBs do in containing development using fine-scale GIS data on cities in Oregon. Earlier studies on UGBs yield mixed results, with some authors finding no effects of UGBs on housing market variables and urbanization rates and others finding significant effects. A challenge in measuring these effects is that the location of the UGB is unlikely to be an exogenous determinant of a land parcel's value for development. The panel structure of our dataset allows us to estimate the UGB's effect on the probability of development using a difference-in-difference estimator applied to a narrow band of plots along each city's UGB. This estimator controls for time-invariant unobservable variables and common temporal effects among plots, thereby mitigating the potential for biased estimates due to the endogeneity of the UGB's location. We also pursue a novel approach to controlling for time-varying factors that exploits our fine-scale data. We find that UGBs contain development in many of the Oregon cities we examine, although there are some cities in which development rates are the same inside and outside of the UGB. Our results reveal that, in most cities, the effect of the UGB is small relative to pre-existing differences in development probabilities. This suggests that it may be difficult to identify UGB effects with cross-sectional data, the approach commonly taken in previous studies.     

When Less is More: Distinguishing Between Entrepreneurial Choice and Performance

This paper uses NCDS data on individual characteristics to distinguish determinants of entrepreneurial choice, income and job generation. A new model of utility from self-employment shows that relaxing liquidity constraints could inhibit performance. Empirically, we find that a range of inheritance enhances the performance of the self-employed and increases self-employment; while higher education also increases self-employment income and job creation, but reduces the probability of self-employment. Combining these choice and performance effects, we find that education has a positive net effect on job creation, as does inheritance up to a certain threshold.     

Shut the fridge door! HRM alignment,job redesign and energy performance

Anchored within the strategic HRM and alignment literature, and drawing on efficiency and legitimacy perspectives of organisational behaviour, we investigated a HRM intervention targeted at energy reduction goals in a large multinational retailer. The HRM intervention was focused on embedding the environmental and economic performance goals of the firm within the workplace through redesigning the job so that energy tasks were aligned with training and performance management systems, as well as organisational performance goals. Using a randomised control trial design, we tracked changes in energy behaviours and energy consumption in 769 retail stores (685 in the intervention condition, 84 in the control condition). The findings provide evidence that changing the alignment of HRM practices can influence both worker behaviour and organisational outcomes, including environmental outcomes. This work contributes to debates concerning the impact of HRM alignment on both the work and organisational performance context.     

Dynamics of partisan representation the American south, 1898–2010

This study addresses institutional representation in legislative delegations through the decomposition of the southern U.S. House delegation over time. Linear first-order difference equations are calculated to show the shift from the Solid South and the disintegration of Democratic dominance. These calculations also show that the qualitative behavior of partisan control varies over time given a series of critical events, including the Dixiecrat experience, the Congressional reforms of the 1970s, and the Republican Revolution of 1994. However, I also argue that the Republican Revolution was actually predictable, given the twentieth-century experience of the southern delegation.     

Audited reputation

We study reputations with imperfect audit and a reputation market. The main result shows the existence of a separating equilibrium in the reputation market, which contrasts with Tadelis [Tadelis, S., 2002, The market for reputations as an incentive mechanism, Journal of Political Economy 110(4), 854–882].