How does(n't) Urban Shrinkage get onto the Agenda? Experiences from Leipzig,Liverpool, Genoa and Bytom

This article discusses the question of how urban shrinkage gets onto the agenda of public‐policy agencies. It is based on a comparison of the agenda‐setting histories of four European cities, Liverpool (UK), Leipzig (Germany), Genoa (Italy) and Bytom (Poland), which have all experienced severe population losses but show very different histories with respect to how local governments reacted to them. We use the political‐science concepts of ‘systemic vs. institutional agendas’ and ‘policy windows’ as a conceptual frame to compare these experiences. The article demonstrates that shrinkage is hardly ever responded to in a comprehensive manner but rather that policies are only implemented in a piecemeal way in selected fields. Moreover, it is argued that variations in institutional contexts and political dynamics lead to considerable differences with regard to the chances of making shrinkage a matter of public intervention. Against this background, the article takes issue with the idea that urban shrinkage only needs to be ‘accepted’ by policymakers who would need to overcome their growth‐oriented cultural perceptions, as has been suggested in a number of recent writings, and calls for a more differentiated, context‐sensitive view.     

The eclectic theory of international production: A case study of the international hotel industry

This paper presents comprehensive data on the growth, structure and forms of involvement of multinational enterprises in the international hotel industry, and uses this data to provide empirical support for the eclectic theory of international production. Our understanding of the international hotel industry is that the ownership of a hotel often has the characteristics of portfolio investment and that the owners may have little knowledge of hotel operations. In these circumstances they will invariably employ a professional management company to run the hotel under a long term contract providing them with full control over the operation of the hotel. A particular feature of this paper is therefore to distinguish between, what we term, ‘equity-based control’ and ‘contract-based control’ of the enterprise and to point out the implications of this distinction for the analysis of the multinational enterprise.     

A Simple Test for Convergence of Metropolitan Income in the United States

The prevalent test for income convergence used in many recent studies of convergence across spatial economic units in the United States is to use a regression equation in which income growth is regressed against the initial level of income (this is known as β convergence). That method, however, has been crtiticized as an instance of Galton's fallacy of regression. We devise a simple test for the income β-convergence hypothesis which does not suffer from “Galton's fallacy” and apply it to all of the metropolitan areas of the United States for the period 1969–1995. For the test we use two income measures: per capita personal income and average wages. Our results conclusively support convergence of per capita personal income and of wage per worker for metropolitan areas in the United States. We also test for σ convergence, the hypothesis of diminishing dispersion in income among places over time, and find no support for the hypothesis.     

Household search and health insurance coverage

Health insurance in the United States is typically acquired through an employer-sponsored program. Often employees offered employer-provided health insurance have the option to extend coverage to their spouse and dependents. We investigate the implications of the “publicness” of health insurance coverage for the labor market careers of spouses. The theoretical innovations in the paper are to extend the standard partial–partial equilibrium labor market search model to a multiple searcher setting with the inclusion of multi-attribute job offers, with some of the attributes treated as public goods within the household. The model is estimated using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using a Method of Simulated Moments (MSM) estimator. We demonstrate how previous estimates of the marginal willingness to pay (MWP) for health insurance based on cross-sectional linear regression estimators may be seriously biased due to the presence of dynamic selection effects and misspecification of the decision-making unit.     

POLLUTION'S ROLE IN REDUCING URBAN QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

This paper surveys the recent literature exploring the consequences of urban pollution in the developing world for a city's productivity and resident quality of life. The environmental Kuznets curve literature predicts that developing nations will experience significant environmental degradation as a byproduct of economic development. In contrast, the recent literature that we review reverses this logic by arguing that geographic areas featuring lower levels of pollution will experience economic growth through improvements in health and human capital. In an economy where pollution reduces worker productivity, inhibits child development and repels the skilled from living in such an area, those cities featuring less pollution have a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining the skilled. Given the central role that human capital plays in urban economic growth, such cities will be more likely to achieve sustainable long‐term growth.     

Managers as informal third parties: The impact of supervisor-subordinate relationships on interventions

This research focuses on the distinctions between formal and informal third parties articulated by Kolb and Sheppard (1985), the most important of which is the relationship that exists between the third party and the disputants. Several hypotheses are advanced regarding the consequences of a sudden change in the relationship on the process and outcomes of the intervention. An experimental simulation of a supervisor-subordinate discussion (about a dispute among subordinates) is conducted with 62 undergraduate volunteers as participants. The supervisors in the experimental group receive negative affective information about the subordinate prior to the meeting, which is expected to influence the relationship and hence the intervention. Results indicate that in the experimental condition performance evaluations were lower, ratings of trust were lower, and the atmosphere in the discussion was rated as less friendly. Interestingly, in dyads where the negative information was discussed openly each of the ratings was higher than when the negative information was not discussed, as was the satisfaction reported by each of the participants. The implications of these findings for future research are discussed.     

Procurement mechanisms and the emergence of new governance structures in the CEECs: evidence from the Bulgarian wine industry

During transition, Bulgaria witnessed the dismantling of communist agri-food supply channels and a weakening of contract enforcement mechanisms. Wineries have had to establish grape procurement and purchasing relationships with a more diverse set of growers and intermediaries. In an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of procurement via spot markets, they have sought more interdependent contractual forms that secure greater control over the quality of inputs and minimise the possibility of opportunistic behaviour. The desired option by wineries is complete backward integration but attempts to achieve this have been limited by fragmented land ownership, credit constraints and incomplete property rights.     

Throwing good money after bad

An “investment bubble” is a period of “excessive, and predictably unprofitable, investment” (DeMarzo et al. in J Financ Econ 85:737–754, 2007). Such bubbles most often accompany the arrival of some new technology, such as the tech stock boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We provide a rational explanation for investment bubbles based on the dynamics of learning in highly uncertain environments. Objective information about the earnings potential of a new technology gives rise to a set of priors or a belief function. A generalised form of Bayes’ rule is used to update this set of priors using earnings data from the new economy. In each period, agents—who are heterogeneous in their tolerance for ambiguity—make optimal occupational choices, with wages in the new economy set to clear the labour market. A preponderance of bad news about the new technology may nevertheless give rise to increasing firm formation around this technology, at least initially. To a frequentist outside observer, the pattern of adoption appears as an investment bubble.     

Short-run efficiency in the labor-managed firm

This paper examines the short-run comparative statics of resource allocation in a labor-managed firm when workers are free to adjust work hours but not membership in a competitive market environment. It is found that the workers might encounter difficulties in attaining their utility-maximizing choices of work hours, but with the acceptance of a simple collective-choice decision rule, each worker's optimum becomes the Pareto-optimum.