The political economics of investment Utopia: public–private partnerships for urban infrastructure finance

This article explores the policy disconnect between the pursuit of private investment return and the public desire for enhanced social value from public–private partnership (P3) investments in urban infrastructure. Investors view infrastructure finance as an opportunity for relatively safe, high-return investing. But infrastructure-financing architecture to achieve high private returns frequently clashes with financing models that sustain long-term social benefits. The full implications of relational tensions in the structuring of P3s are analyzed. The principal policy conclusion is that, because of these tensions, the use of P3s for this purpose should be restricted.     

Airport infrastructure spillovers in a network system

Airports in the US air transport network have become increasingly congested, leading to delays for business travelers and freight shipments. Since disruptions in one part of the network exacerbate problems throughout the system, airport infrastructure expansions to enhance air traffic flows confer travel-time savings and reliability benefits, and thus increased worker productivity and shipping efficiency for manufacturing firms. We evaluate such spillovers, and find that higher own-state airport infrastructure implies lower manufacturing costs from both labor- and materials-savings. Airport expansion in connected states has a comparable effect for states with hub airports, and an even greater impact for other states.     

Freedom and the market

Those who believe that the free market is positively related to both economic efficiency and individual freedom are prone to regard resistance to the establishment of the global market essentially free from any serious sociopolitical constraint as a politically insignificant expression of impatience, ignorance, and hypocrisy. This article attempts to endow the manifestation of discontent with the status quo evident in public protests in Seattle and Washington DC with political significance through explicating it as an expression of a fundamental conflict between economic efficiency and individual freedom inherent in the global implementation of the principle of self-regulating markets. This analysis of the antiglobalization movement is conducted from the perspective of the theoretical foundation of the evaluation of the dynamics of capitalism by Polanyi, Hayek, and Keynes, and its conclusions are brought to bear upon the validity of their contesting views of the relationship between economic efficiency and individual freedom.     

Does Having a Dysfunctional Personality Hurt Your Career? Axis II Personality Disorders and Labor Market Outcomes

Despite recent interest in how psychiatric disorders affect work outcomes, little is known about the role of personality disorders (PDs), which are poorly understood yet prevalent (15%) and impairing. We used nationally representative data for 12,457 men and 16,061 women to examine associations of PDs with any employment, full-time employment, chronic unemployment, being fired or laid off, and having trouble with a boss or co-worker. Antisocial, paranoid, and obsessive-compulsive PDs demonstrated the broadest patterns of associations with adverse outcomes. Findings suggest that PDs may have implications for the productivity of co-workers as well as that of the disordered employees themselves.     

Broadening the Concept of International Entrepreneurship: Internationalisation, Networks and Politics

In this article, the situation where a company internationalises over an extended period without changing operation mode is explored. The focus of the empirical research is the Australian company CSR and its large-scale sugar exporting operations, which developed over a period of about 75 years. Because of the highly politicised nature of the sugar industry in many countries, CSR was called upon to make extensive investments in political networks in order to achieve its global sugar exporting operations. Overall the CSR experience demonstrates that it is possible to stretch the use of a given mode, although this may demand considerable creativity in market, network and policy responses of a kind which illustrate that international entrepreneurship may come in many guises, and may need to be viewed in a broader way.     

The Discriminating Beta: Prices and Capacity with Correlated Demands

Uniform customer‐class pricing can do much of the work of congestion‐based or time‐of‐day pricing in communication or wireless networks. A monopolist exploits differences in the stochastic characteristics of demands. If demands are correlated and the firm faces a capacity constraint, then it can set prices to reduce the variability of aggregate demand, thereby reducing the probability of excess demand and the associated service quality deterioration. Demands that covary negatively with aggregate demand are valuable to the firm in much the same way that securities that covary negatively with the market are valuable in a stock portfolio. Customer classes that exhibit low covariance with aggregate demand realize lower optimal prices. Optimal capacity is also affected by these covariances. As long as demands are not perfectly positively correlated, expected costs of joint production are less than expected costs of serving demands separately.