Finding default? Understanding the drivers of default on contracts with farmers’ organizations under the World Food Programme Purchase for progress pilot

During the past two decades, food assistance policy has shifted toward local or regional food purchases and away from purchases from donor countries. Although most local and regional procurement occurs through hard tendering processes open to large‐scale firms and farms, there is growing interest in identifying how and whether to procure from smallholder farmer organizations (FOs). To date, little is known about the drivers of successful contracting with FOs. We utilize data from the United Nations World Food Programme Purchase for Progress pilot in three East African countries to predict defaults on contracts. We examine four possible explanations: country contexts, FO characteristics, prior experience with contracts, and contract modalities and their relationship to local spot market prices. The single most important predictor of default is the increase in market prices between contract approval and delivery. Yet, although increases in market prices are linked to increases in default, this relationship is decreasing in contract size, indicating search costs associated with breaking contracts. Our findings yield both generalizable and context‐specific insights about whether—and when—procuring from smallholder farmers can be successfully integrated into the food assistance toolkit.     

‘ALL EYES ON ME’: The (In)Formal Barriers to Market Trade in Europe

Studies of marketplaces in the global North have often conceptualized markets as important public spaces of social encounter and conviviality where visitors, regardless of race, age, class or gender, feel they have an equal right to be. Yet comparatively little has been written about how inclusive European marketplaces are for the traders who (want to) work there. In this article we argue that the common conception of marketplaces as accessible to everyone, and as vehicles of socioeconomic mobility, is oversimplistic and romanticized. We draw on empirical data from marketplaces in four European countries to focus on the more or less informal ways in which markets are regulated by managers and traders themselves, and on the exclusionary and inclusionary effects of this process that may ultimately determine traders’ access to and success in these markets. This article not only challenges dominant conceptions of marketplaces as accessible and inclusive, but also addresses prevalent stereotypes about economic practices in the global North and assumptions about the ways in which these differ from practices in the global South.     

Entrepreneurial behaviors that shape performance in small family and non-family hotels during times of crisis

International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal - Recent economic and public health crises have posed important challenges to family businesses – particularly those in the hospitality...     

Cost management and corporate payout decisions

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - We investigate the relationship between cost management and dividend payout decisions. Prior studies document that firms with consistent earnings or...     

Thinking out of the box—by thinking in other boxes: a systematic review of interventions in early entrepreneurship vs. STEM education research

Management Review Quarterly - Scholars increasingly converge on the view that entrepreneurship education (EE) should start early during the formative years of individuals’ educational...