The Verdict of History

The state prevents the market from discovering the imperfections of the welfare state. To prove itself state welfare must be open to competing methods of producation.     

Project management infrastructure: The key to operational performance improvement

Process improvement programs such as Six Sigma, Lean, and Lean Sigma are very important and deserve serious academic research attention. However, definition problems make it difficult to study any specific type of process improvement program. Therefore, this study defines two organizational level program management factors, Strategic Project Selection (SPS) and Project Management Infrastructure (PMI), that are independent of any specific process improvement program. Drawing upon current literature, this study develops and tests theoretical models that relate SPS and PMI to operational performance improvement and to each other. Using empirical data collected from 53 supplier plants of one large high-tech firm, this study finds that at the plant level, SPS mediates the relationship between PMI and operational performance improvement. This insight contributes to both theory development and practice, suggesting that a viable strategy for a process improvement program’s success is to focus on PMI in order to enhance SPS and ultimately improve performance. Not to be reproduced or quoted without written permission from the authors.     

Social learning with differentiated products

Learning from friends is a key process by which consumers acquire information about available products. This article embeds social learning in a model of firms producing differentiated products. I consider how the structure of social relationships between consumers influences pricing and welfare. In particular, how a variety of characteristics of social networks ‐ distribution of friendships, homophily, clustering, and correlations between an individual's preferences and number of friends ‐ influence these outcomes. I also find conditions under which consumer awareness and the sensitivity of demand to prices are useful measures of the informational efficiency of markets.     

Financial Participation: Does the Risk Transfer Story Hold in France?

Several articles report a positive effect of financial participation (profit sharing (PS) and employee share ownership) on firms' economic performance. This increase can be obtained in two main ways: by increasing the effort (extrinsic, intrinsic or commitment) of workers, directly or indirectly through worker selection; or by transferring more risk to the workers. The question is, of course, not neutral. Indeed, if the risk transfer story is true then it means that the increase of economic performance is obtained at the expense of workers, who take on the burden of more risks. The question is especially important in France where financial participation is associated with tax exemption for firms and where it is forbidden by law to substitute base wage and PS. The purpose of our article is to use an employer–employee dataset to answer the question of whether financial participation schemes are mainly designed as a risk transfer (from firms to workers) device.     

Coping with extreme climate events: Institutional flocking

The article explores the governance structures that would be needed to cope with extreme and unpredictable climate change. The impacts on the Netherlands of a Gulf Stream collapse in the Northern Atlantic are taken as a case. This hypothetical situation of serious risks and high uncertainties requires governance arrangements with high potentials for rapid and radical change. Using the metaphor of the flocking of birds, we characterize these arrangements as ‘institutional flocking’. Main features of institutional flocking are: (1) flexible opportunities for actors to swiftly respond to change through creative forms of collaboration and participation; (2) rapid and pervasive processes of learning and institutionalization of new knowledge among actors; (3) strong and institutionalized care for coherence and solidarity, to bind the various parts of the ‘flock’. We illustrate and articulate these features for two sectors in Dutch society, urban infrastructure and rural planning.     

Should more local governments purchase a bond rating?

We investigate whether issuers that choose to forgo a bond rating suffer an interest cost penalty greater than the cost of the rating. We use estimated ratings provided by Moody’s Investor Service to proxy for what the rating would have been if it had been purchased. We find that the primary factors associated with an issuer’s decision to purchase a rating are the rating expected by the issuer and the extent to which an issue is marketed locally. After controlling for self-selection bias, we find that the issuers that forgo a rating do not suffer an interest cost penalty.

Controlling Episodic Air Pollution with a Seasonal Gas Tax: The Case of Cache Valley,Utah

Using daily data spanning 10 years, we establish a statistical relationship between episodic particulate-matter \((\hbox {PM}_{2.5})\) concentrations and vehicle trips in Cache Valley, Utah, and estimate an average gas-price elasticity for the region. We also estimate the benefits and costs associated with a seasonal gas tax set to reduce vehicle trips during the winter-inversion season and thereby lower health costs through concomitant decreases in the \(\hbox {PM}_{2.5}\) concentrations. We find a strong positive relationship between vehicle trips reduced and associated reductions in \(\hbox {PM}_{2.5}\) concentrations. Further, we estimate a mean gas price elasticity of approximately \(-\)0.3 in what we call a “high price variability environment.” Incorporating these results, cost-benefit analysis suggests that the social net benefit for Cache Valley associated with the imposition of a seasonal gas tax during the winter-inversion season is highly dependent upon the type of benefit estimation method used.     

The Hero as Traveler,The Traveler as Hero

This article uses an insight from the French scholar Michel de Certeau to the effect that all stories are travel stories involving spatial transference and the theories of the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp, as elaborated in his classic work Morphology of the Folktale, to argue all heroes are travelers of one sort or another. It suggests, that in addition to the fact that all heroes are travelers, all travelers are—broadly speaking—heroes and heroines.