United Nations Global Compact: The Promise–Performance Gap

Organizational deviance represents a costly behavior to many organizations. While some precursors to deviance have been identified, we hope to add to our predictive capabilities. Utilizing social cognitive theory and psychological contract theory as explanatory concepts, we explore the role of moral disengagement and turnover intentions, testing our hypotheses using two samples: a sample of 44 nurses from a hospital system in the Southwestern United States (Study 1), and a sample of 52 working adults collected from an online survey system (Study 2). Results strongly supported our hypotheses in both samples, indicating that the self-regulatory deactivation inherent in moral disengagement led to increased organizational deviance; effects that were much more pronounced when turnover intentions were high. Our findings support the increased role of cognition in determining behavior when environmental pressures stemming from the psychological contract have been altered, leading to a number of theoretical and practical implications, particularly in industries with high turnover rates.     

Reluctant employees and felt stress: The moderating impact of manager decisiveness

Job stress is an integral part of the organizational landscape and particularly severe in the sales profession. A host of studies have looked at felt stress, its antecedents, and consequences. This research examines how employee resistance to change and a manager's decisiveness affect the salesperson's felt stress and turnover intentions. This study shows that the salesperson's resistance to change is positively associated with felt stress. Study results also show that the impact of an employee's resistance to change on felt stress is moderated by a manager's decisiveness. Model hypotheses are tested with responses from 255 bank salespeople in India.     

The Global Disconnect: The Role of Transactional Distance and Scale Economies in Gravity Equations

Recent empirical analyses show that asset flows can be modelled by the same 'gravity' equations that trade economists have used so successfully for the past few decades. This is something of a surprise. Trade economists do not yet have a unified theory of why gravity models should work‐and the situation is worse for asset flows. Reasonable theories would predict that greater distance between countries should generate more asset flows rather than less as the econometric results seem to consistently show. In this paper we discuss how host and source country GDPs, language, and distance the core explanatory variables in the traditional gravity models‐fare in trade and asset flows estimations. While the 'distance puzzle' is not resolved, it is considerably reduced by going beyond consideration of physical distance to concepts of transactional distance and scale economies.     

The redistributive effects of political reservation for minorities: Evidence from India

We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative assemblies in India generated by national policies that cause reservations to be revised and the time lags with which revised reservations are implemented. Using data on sixteen major Indian states for the period 1960-2000, we find that increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes significantly reduces poverty while increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes has no impact on poverty. Political reservation for Scheduled Tribes has a greater effect on rural poverty than urban poverty, and appears to benefit people near the poverty line as well as those far below it.     

Untangling gender differentiated food security gaps in Bhutan: An application of exogenous switching treatment regression

Using nationally representative data from Bhutan, and applying an exogenous switching treatment regression model, this study assessed the food security status between male‐headed households (MHHs) and female‐headed households (FHHs). The study demonstrates that there is no significant difference between MHHs and FHHs in terms of food security, but when MHHs are compared with de jure FHHs, the food security is significantly lower among the de jure FHHs. The food security gap between MHHs and de jure FHHs is due to the differences in both observable and unobservable characteristics of the households. The food security gap between de facto and de jure FHHs can be explained by the influence of connections and wider access to off‐farm income. Most of the previous studies consider all FHHs as a homogenous entity and ignore the concept of de jure FHHs (i.e., a household run by single, widowed, or divorced woman) and de facto FHHs (i.e., a household where there is a husband, but he is not physically present because of his work off‐farm). As the present research takes this into account, the econometric findings from our study, thus have important implications in formulating special food security policies targeting the most vulnerable FHHs.