Environmental Change, Leadership Succession and Incrementalism in Local Government

A theoretical model of strategic budgetary choices in local government is developed and tested. The model assumes that expenditure decisions are a function of changes in environmental circumstances and the characteristics of local leaders. Environmental change is operationalized through measures of workload, munificence and regulatory controls. Leadership succession is defined as the turnover in managerial and political élites. These environmental and leadership variables are included in a multivariate statistical model of budgetary incrementalism. The model is tested on the spending decisions of 402 English local authorities from 1981 to 1996. The empirical results suggest that the extent of budgetary change is influenced strongly by environmental change but weakly by leadership succession. Furthermore, environmental constraints became tighter during the study period. The characteristics of public sector organizations that impose limits on the strategic choices of new leaders are identified.     

Positioning the World Bank

This article examines the rationale for the World Bank and explores whether its objective is best served by its current mix of activities. We are critical of the Bank's reliance on conditionality, and advocate evolution into a Knowledge Bank, which would lend with few conditions to countries with good policies and good institutions, and would concentrate on the provision of knowledge and technical assistance, rather than lending, in countries where the policy framework is poor. We also advocate an expansion in the Bank's role as a provider of global public goods; we critically examine the Banks role in relation to financial crises.     

Are Corporate Restructuring Events Driven by Common Factors? Implications for Takeover Prediction

Abstract:  The paper shows that variables commonly used in takeover prediction models also help to explain the likelihood of several other restructuring events, including divestitures, bankruptcies and significant employee layoffs. This finding helps to explain the larger misclassification errors in binomial takeover prediction models commonly used in prior research. The results show that modelling takeover prediction models in a binomial setting is likely to lead to misspecification in the parameter estimates and, further, result in erroneous conclusions about the determinants of takeover likelihood. The paper shows that controlling for other restructuring events by using a multinomial framework results in consistently lower misclassification errors in out-of-sample prediction tests, when compared to the benchmark of a typical binomial model.     

The NHS: Quasi-market, Quasi-hierarchy and Quasi-network?

It has been argued that the British National Health Service (NHS) has moved from a hierarchical and bureaucratic organization to a market and, more recently, towards a network. The authors believe that this view is too simplistic: the three organizational forms have co-existed and continue to do so. It is more accurate to view moves over time as a changing mix between quasi-hierarchies, quasi-markets and quasi-networks.     

An empirical study of the impact of information technology intensity in strategic investment decisions

This paper focuses on two issues of the management of strategic information technology investment decisions (SITIDs). First, it examines the outcomes of strategic investment decisions (SIDs) according to the extent of IT intensity in the investment project (termed IT-ness). Second, IT-ness is assessed in realtion to a numberr of dimensions, including decision formulating process, evealuation process and decision content. Empirical testing is based on a sample of 80 SIDs from Taiwanese enterprises. Thw results show that IT-ness is negatively associated with the effectiveness of SIDs and several constructs in the decision process. The implicaitons of this for the evaluaiton and management of SITIDs, and on agenda for further research into the effectiveness of SITIDs, are discussed.     

Takeover Prediction and Portfolio Performance: A Note

This paper empirically tests whether it is possible to generate abnormal returns from investing in a portfolio of predicted successful takeover targets. Portfolios are formed on the basis of predictions from models similar to those estimated by Palepu (1986). However, unlike Palepu (1986), the portfolios in this paper are formed using a decision rule that results in smaller portfolios with higher average takeover probabilities. This provides a stronger test of whether share prices reflect future takeover probabilities. The results show that while the models have significant explanatory power, the portfolios fail to beat the return on the market over a 12-month holding-period.     

THE INCOME AND CONSUMPTION EXPERIENCES OF A SAMPLE OF FARM FAMILIES*

The way in which the consumption of farm families is adjusted to fluctuations in income has important implications at the national, regional and farm levels. In this paper, hypotheses about the consumption of farm families are examined using data from 16 families in a wheat-sheep region of New South Wales for the eight-year period 1968/69 to 1975/76. The results of the study indicate that lagged effects are important in explaining consumption by farm households. It was not possible to partition these lag effects between partial adjustment and normal income influences. Estimates of the short-run (one-year) marginal propensity to consume (mpc) were quite low, ranging from 0.13 to 0.16. The best estimates of the long-run mpc ranged from 0.19 to 0.25.     

The heterogenous relationship of food stamp participation with body mass: Quantile regression model

This study explores the heterogenous relationship between Food Stamp Program (FSP) participation and body mass index (BMI) for low income individuals whose per capita family income falls in the bottom two quintiles. We estimate changes in the dispersion of the entire distribution of BMI following FSP participation using a quantile regression model in both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. For women, we find that the mean OLS estimate of FSP participation underestimates the extent of the positive association with BMI at the top quantiles in both cross-sectional and longitudinal individual fixed effects models. Controlling for individual fixed effects in the quantile regression model reduces the estimated magnitude of the association by a factor of three to four, although the estimates remain statistically significant for women. For men, a marginally statistically significant positive association of FSP participation with BMI is found at the top quantiles compared to no statistically significant mean estimate although the association is no longer statistically significant when time-constant individual heterogeneity is adjusted for in the individual fixed effect models.