Does credit quality matter for homeownership?

While micro-level household data on wealth and income are available for assessing income- and wealth-based constraints to homeownership, lack of data on household credit ratings has precluded evaluation of credit quality as a potential barrier to homeownership. The study, for the first time, measures the relative importance of credit-, income-, and wealth-based constraints and estimates how the effects of these constraints have evolved over the past decade. The results show that financing constraints continue to have an important impact on potential homebuyers. The wealth constraint has the largest impact, although its importance declined substantially during the 1990s. Credit quality based constraints have become more important barriers to homeownership during the 1990s, mostly reflecting an increase in the number of households with impaired credit quality. Thus, both wealth and credit constraints persist as barriers to the attainment of homeownership.     

Does past unemployment experience explain the transition happiness gap?

The profound economic and political changes of the 1990s had detrimental social effects in many domains of life in post-socialist countries, including diminishing life expectancy and growing unhappiness. Despite economic improvements in the second decade of transition, research has documented that happiness lagged behind. We test whether past unemployment experience can explain this “transition happiness gap in the context of Ukraine”, a country with a painful delayed transition from planned to market economy. We analyze unique longitudinal data for the period 2003–2012. Current unemployment substantially reduces subjective wellbeing, and the effect is roughly 50% larger for men than for women. The effect of past unemployment is significant, but small in magnitude compared to the effect of current unemployment. However, it does correspond to around 8% of the ‘’transition happiness gap” found by Guriev and Melnikov (2017), suggesting that past unemployment experience can be considered as a partial explanation.     

A multi-country,multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - In this study, we assess the internal and external validity of Gelfand et al.’s (2011) recently developed measure of cultural tightness-looseness (CTL)....     

Where Grass Has No Roots: The Concept of ‘Shared Strategic Communication’ as an Answer to Unethical Astroturf Lobbying

As researchers pursue connections between strategic communication and management, they need to critique practices to develop norms that increase strategic communication’s long-term contribution to society. Norms of strategic communication are shaped by socially constructed standards of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and guide how strategic communication fosters organization-public relationships (OPR). Such norms are particularly important regarding deliberative strategic communication, which uses political CSR to guide corporations’ political role. Although principles of OPR and political CSR should foster more ethical strategic communication, some practices weaken such standards. To make that case, this article (1) reviews the historical foundations of deliberative discourse, (2) examines principles of OPR and political CSR, and (3) applies normative principles of deliberative discourse (4) to critique three cases of strategic political communication, known as astroturf lobbying, a deceptive lobbying practice that undermines and fakes grassroots movements. We conclude by integrating the findings into theory building that shifts CSR outcomes from advantaging individual organizations adding value to society. This theme uses ‘creating shared value’ to advocate shared strategic communication. This notion includes the normative claims of political CSR (open discourse, participation, transparency, accountability) to arrive at shared strategic communication that supports the ‘good’ organization and society simultaneously.     

Sustainable development of global entrepreneurship: infrastructure and perspectives

Development of the modern global entrepreneurship is one of the most perspective and promising means of overcoming the consequences of the global economic crisis, as well as prevention of future crises of economic systems, as it ensures full level of optimization of production and distribution processes. The purpose of the article is to determine perspectives of sustainable development of the global entrepreneurship. For determining the level of sustainability of development of the modern global entrepreneurship, the authors use the methods of statistical analysis of time rows (method of horizontal and trend analysis). The authors perform a complex analysis of dynamics of development of global companies and performed evaluation of their sustainability. Also, the necessity for changing the model of managing the development of modern global entrepreneurship for increasing its sustainability is substantiated. As a result, it is concluded that modern global entrepreneurship is developing in the unstable way, and practical recommendations are offered for solving this problem. A perspective model of sustainable development of the modern global entrepreneurship is developed and presented. A certain limitation of the results of the performed research is the framework character of the offered recommendations.

     

Fixed effects instrumental variables estimation in correlated random coefficient panel data models

We provide a set of conditions sufficient for consistency of a general class of fixed effects instrumental variables (FE-IV) estimators in the context of a correlated random coefficient panel data model, where one ignores the presence of individual-specific slopes. We discuss cases where the assumptions are met and violated. Monte Carlo simulations verify that the FE-IV estimator of the population averaged effect performs notably better than other standard estimators, provided a full set of period dummies is included. We also propose a simple test of selection bias in unbalanced panels when we suspect the slopes may vary by individual.     

Corruption: Theory and evidence from the Russian Federation

In this paper, we provide theory and evidence on the problem of corruption in the Russian Federation. Our theoretical model indicates that in the presence of official corruption, the numbers of tax inspection (collection) employees could be inversely related to per capita tax collection. Our empirical analysis supports our theoretical model, shedding light on one of the most intractable problems in the Russian Federation.