Post-Partnership Strategies for Defining Corporate Responsibility: The Business Social Compliance Initiative

While cross-sectoral partnerships are frequently presented as a way to achieve sustainable development, some corporations that first tried using the strategy are now changing direction. Growing tired of what are, in their eyes, inefficient and unproductive cross-sectoral partnerships, firms are starting to form post-cross-sectoral partnerships (?post-partnerships’) open exclusively to corporations. This paper examines one such post-partnership project, the Business Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), to analyse the possibility of post-partnerships establishing stable definitions of ?corporate responsibility’. We do this by creating a theoretical framework based on actor-network theory (ANT) and institutional theory. Using this framework, we show that post-partnerships suffer from the paradox of striving to marginalise those stakeholders whose support they need?for establishing stable definitions of ?corporate responsibility’. We conclude by discussing whether or not post-partnership strategies, despite this paradox, can be expected to establish stable definitions of ?corporate responsibility’.     

Did Globalisation Influence Credit Market Deregulation?

We investigate whether globalisation influenced credit market deregulation over the period 1970–2010. Globalisation is measured by the KOF indices of globalisation. Credit market deregulation is measured by the credit market freedom indicators of the Fraser Institute. The results from both cross‐sectional and panel regressions using ordinary least squares indicate a positive correlation between globalisation and credit market deregulation. We account for reverse causality using predicted trade openness as an instrumental variable and show that this approach gives rise to different conclusions. Two‐stage least squares estimations do not show that globalisation had a causal influence on credit market deregulation.     

The globalisation–welfare state nexus: Evidence from Asia

How globalisation influences social expenditure has been examined for industrialised countries. Globalisation has often been shown to be positively associated with social expenditure in established industrialised countries, a finding that corroborates the compensation hypothesis. Scholars have focused on industrialised countries, because social expenditure is difficult to measure in developing countries. I use new data on social expenditure for Asian non‐OECD countries. Globalisation is measured by the new KOF Globalisation Index. My results do not suggest that globalisation influenced social expenditures in Asia. Neither do the results suggest that the nexus between globalisation and social expenditures varied across high‐income countries, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and lower‐income Asian countries or across Asian regions. It is conceivable that Asian citizens did not demand increasing social support when globalisation proceeded rapidly because they enjoyed family and other private assistance. Asian countries also have weaker tax and labour market institutions than OECD countries and have therefore more difficulties in increasing social expenditure.     

Transnational Governance of Workers’ Rights: Outlining a Research Agenda

In twentieth century Europe and the USA, industrial relations, labour, and workers’ rights issues have been handled through collective bargaining and industrial agreements between firms and unions, with varying degrees of government intervention from country to country. This industrial relations landscape is currently undergoing fundamental change with the emergence of transnational industrial relations systems that complement existing national industrial relations systems. Despite the significance of this ongoing change, existing research has only started to explore the implications of this change for how workers’ rights are governed around the globe. This paper addresses this gap by outlining an agenda for future research into the transnational governance of workers’ rights. Fulfilling such a research agenda would be both challenging, as it requires combining the so far divergent industrial relations and business ethics research streams, and rewarding, as it provides ample scope for promising future research.

Lifetime versus Annual Tax‐and‐Transfer Progressivity: Sweden, 1968–2009

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of tax‐and‐transfer progressivity in Sweden over both annual and lifetime horizons. Using a rich micro panel covering the period 1968–2009, we calculate tax rates over a cohort's entire working life cycle. Our main finding is that taxes are considerably less progressive over the lifetime than in any single year. Social insurance transfers to transitory low‐income earners account for most of this result. We offer a number of robustness checks of the measurement of lifetime incomes and progressivity, but none of them changes our overall findings.     

Public Expenditures on Education and Cultural Affairs in the West German States: Does Government Ideology Influence the Budget Composition?

Abstract. This paper examines whether government ideology influenced the allocation of public expenditures on education and cultural affairs in the West German states in the 1974–2006 period. I explicitly consider the allocation of policy responsibilities between the federal and the states' governments. The results suggest that leftist governments slightly increased public spending for schooling, whereas rightwing governments spent somewhat more on universities and cultural affairs. This spending pattern appears to be in line with the preferences of the governing parties' constituencies and indicates political competition in a time of declining electoral cohesion.     

Mind the gap: the role of HRM in creating,capturing and leveraging rare knowledge in hostile environments

Abstract

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) have increasingly entered markets in less developed regions of the world afflicted with weak institutions and political conflict. Some are characterised by ‘extreme’ cases of institutional voids and terrorism, creating a hostile environment for the organisation and its people. This in-depth qualitative study of a service company, a European telecommunications joint venture in Afghanistan, seeks to shed light and build theory on the human resource management (HRM) dimension of managerial learning and knowledge acquisition in hostile environments, as part of the MNE’s organisational learning process. Specifically, we investigate how knowledge gaps can be addressed through supportive HR practices, and how knowledge classified as ‘rare’ can be captured and leveraged through HR interventions such as debriefing. We stipulate that HR practices and interventions adapted to hostile environments, together with expatriate willingness to learn and share new knowledge, play a critical role in the creation, capturing and leveraging of rare knowledge for subsequent use by the MNE in other hostile locations. The study has implications for international HRM and organisational resilience, under the proposition that competitive advantage can be gained through exploitation of rare knowledge acquired in hostile environments.     

Tests for cointegration rank and the initial condition

Many economic events involve initial observations that substantially deviate from long-run steady state. Such initial conditions are known to affect the power of univariate unit root tests diversely, whereas their impact on multivariate tests is largely unknown. This paper investigates the impact of the initial condition on the power of tests for cointegration rank, such as Johansen??s widely used likelihood ratio test, tests with prior adjustment for deterministic terms, and a test based on the eigenvalues of the companion matrix. We find that the power of the likelihood ratio test is increasing in the magnitude of the initial condition, whereas the power of the other tests is generally decreasing. We exploit these findings in an application to price convergence.     

The Prescribing Physician’s Influence on Consumer Choice Between Medically Equivalent Pharmaceuticals

This paper reports on a study of the prescribing physician??s influence on consumers?? choice between medically equivalent pharmaceuticals. The study was performed using a dataset of 666,000 observations in which consumers were asked whether they were prepared to pay the price difference in order to obtain the prescribed pharmaceutical instead of the cheapest available substitute. The main results support the hypothesis that prescribing physicians have an impact on consumers?? choice between medically equivalent pharmaceutical products.     

TNC Motives for Signing International Framework Agreements: A Continuous Bargaining Model of Stakeholder Pressure

Over the past decade, discussion has flourished among practitioners and academics regarding workers’ rights in developing countries. The lack of enforcement of national labour laws and the limited protection of workers’ rights in developing countries have led workers’ rights representatives to attempt to establish transnational industrial relations systems to complement existing national systems. In practice, these attempts have mainly been operationalised in unilateral codes of conduct; recently, however, negotiated international framework agreements (IFAs) have been proposed as an alternative. Despite their growing importance, few studies have empirically studied IFAs. This paper starts to fill this gap by studying why corporations adopt IFAs, based on a qualitative study of the process leading to the signing of a recent IFA. The study’s findings complement existing research into why corporations adopt IFAs, codes of conduct, and CSR policies by demonstrating that corporate motives can be linked to a desire to retain a trusting relationship with the labour union movement. In addition, the findings indicate that the discrete campaign model of stakeholder pressure dominant in previous research should be complemented by a continuous bargaining model of stakeholder pressure. The paper concludes by discussing differences between these conceptual models of stakeholder pressure and avenues for future research.