Translating socially responsible workforce reduction—A longitudinal study of workforce reduction in a Swedish company

This article seeks to add to our understanding of the significance and impact of processes of translation in the context of socially responsible workforce reduction. Abandoning the tendency among researchers and policy-makers to regard socially responsible workforce reduction as a stable feature or model that can be passed on and implemented in any organisation regardless of the local context, it will be claimed here that any attempt to understand what socially responsible workforce reduction means in practice must take account of the context in which it occurs and the processes whereby new ideas are imitated and translated by local actors. This claim will be supported by field data from a large Swedish company that has been undergoing extensive restructuring since the beginning of the 1990s. The implications of the article highlight the need for researchers to take account of the way workforce reduction practices are connected over time and to consider the space for translation available to local actors when it comes to defining the meaning of socially responsible workforce reduction in their own local context. The paper also contributes to our understanding of the interrelationship between the translation of such ideas and the processes of institutionalisation.     

苹果、蜜蜂与合同:正溢出效应下的科斯-张定理

本文通过经济的“核”分析，以形式化的方式研究了科斯-张定理。特别地，本文说明了在某些条件下，德布鲁-斯卡夫的核收缩定理可应用于有正生产溢出效应的经济中。     

Metamodelling phosphorus best management practices for policy use: a frontier approach

This article presents a modelling system for synthesising heterogeneous productivity and nutrient loading potentials inherent in agricultural cropland for policy use. Phosphorus abatement cost functions for cropland farmers in a southeastern Minnesota watershed are metamodelled using frontier analysis. These functions are used to evaluate policies aimed at reducing nonpoint phosphorus discharges into the Minnesota River. Results indicate an efficiently targeted policy to reduce phosphorus discharge by 40% would cost US$167,700 or 844 per farm.     

Financial Contracts in PIPE Offerings: The Role of Expert Placement Agents

We examine how Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) contracts allocate contingent cash flow rights between investors and issuers and the role of placement agents in PIPE contract design. Issuers advised by expert agents agree to more investor‐friendly terms than issuers advised by nonexpert agents. Expert agents appear to help issuers understand the payoff consequences of negotiable terms. Moreover, expert agents allow issuers to negotiate more attractive pricing when they agree to investor‐friendly terms. Issuers earn higher postoffering stock returns when they use expert agents or agree to more investor‐friendly terms. These results suggest that the involvement of expert agents is beneficial to PIPE issuers.     

Geographic clustering and outward foreign direct investment

This study addresses an important neglected question: To what extent do geographic clusters promote outward foreign direct investment (ODI)? We find evidence that clusters do promote ODI and so support Porter's argument that advantages gained in clusters can be the foundations of successful internationalisation. Digging deeper, we find that certain cluster incumbents promote more ODI than others, with more experienced firms and firms with stronger resource bases accounting for more ODI. We also find that firms located in clusters within major global nodes/cities engage in more ODI. Finally, we find that both localisation and urbanisation economies promote ODI. However, the former, within-industry effects, are more important. Overall, this study echoes Dunning's call for more focus on the ‘L’ component of the ownership, location, internalisation (OLI) paradigm and particularly on the advantages that reside in clusters that make them not only attractive destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI) but also fertile environments from which FDI can spring.     

Taxation, Labor Market Policy and High-Impact Entrepreneurship

Public policy affects the prevalence and performance of both productive and high-impact entrepreneurship. High-impact entrepreneurship prospers when knowledge is successfully generated and exploited in the economy. This process depends on complementary key actors who use their competencies in what we denote a competence bloc. Although variations in economic contexts make prescribing a general panacea impossible, a number of relevant policy areas that affect key actors can be identified. In this paper this is done in the areas of tax policy and labor market policy. It is shown that high and/or distortive taxes and heavy labor market regulations impinge on the creation and functioning of competence blocs, thereby reducing high-impact entrepreneurship.     

GENUINE SAVING AND POSITIONAL EXTERNALITIES

Much evidence suggests that people are concerned with their relative consumption. Yet, positional externalities have so far been ignored in savings‐based indicators of sustainable development. This article examines the implications of relative consumption concerns for measures of sustainable development by deriving analogues to genuine saving when people are concerned with their relative consumption. Unless the positional externalities have been internalized, an indicator of such externalities must be added to genuine saving to arrive at the proper measure of welfare change. We also show how relative consumption concerns affect the way public investment ought to be reflected in genuine saving.     

Individual Demand for Local Public Schooling: Evidence from Swedish Survey Data

In this paper we investigate the demand for local public school expenditures in Sweden using survey data, a method previously never applied to Swedish data. We compare our results to those of earlier US studies, where the same method is used in a different institutional setup. Estimating a linear demand specification, we find that demand is inelastic with respect to income and taxprice, much in line with previous Swedish findings in a median voter framework. Estimation of a log-linear demand specification indicates that the elasticities of demand for schooling are higher in Sweden than in the US. Testing the hypothesis that municipal employees tend to have a higher demand for public spending than others, we conclude that income, as well as taxprice and grants, enters the demand function differently for the two groups of employees.