INFORMAL SECTOR, NETWORKS AND INTRA-CITY VARIATIONS IN ACTIVITIES: FINDINGS FROM DELHI SLUMS

Based on a micro-survey of around 800 slum households in Delhi this paper highlights the role of networks in accessing jobs in the urban labor market. Primarily three types of networks have been identified, which operate through kinship bonds, caste and ethnicity bonds, and formal channels like NGOs and employment exchanges. The type of networks used seems to vary across occupations. Based on a multinomial logit model the paper notes that given the differences in the nature of economic activities performed in different parts of the city, factors like networks and the urge to reside near the contact person and the work place make the urban labor market highly segmented. Hence, certain pockets within the city tend to get crowded by the growth of slums, and secondly inter-spatial variations in terms of activities/occupations make slum population in the city a heterogeneous set, and thus their problems and need vary substantially. Hence, any uniform policy for clusters located in different zones may not be able to tackle effectively the problems of slum dwellers in the city.     

“My Country’s Future”: A Culture-Centered Interrogation of Corporate Social Responsibility in India

Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand out: nation-building facade, underlying neoliberal logics, CSR as voluntary, CSR as synergetic, and a clear urban bias. Next, I outline a CCA-inspired CSR framework that allows corporate responsibility to be re-claimed and re-framed by subaltern communities of interest. I identify such resistive openings via interrogations of culture (I focus on oft-cited Gandhian ethics here), structure (State policy, organizational strategy, and global/local flows), and agency (subaltern reframing of institutional responsibility, engagement with alternative modes of agency, and deconstructive vigilance).     

The Effects of Individual Difference Factors on the Acceptability of Ethical and Unethical Workplace Behaviors

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether the individual attributes of locus of control, gender, major in college and years of job experience affect the acceptability of certain workplace behaviors. A total of 198 college students of a mid-sized southeastern university formed the sample for this study. Locus of control, gender and years of job experience were found to have some affect on whether an individual considered a certain behavior acceptable or unacceptable.     

TAX-PRICE REFORM WITH DIRECTLY UNPRODUCTIVE PROFIT-SEEKING (DUP) ACTIVITIES*

This paper explores the extent to which insights available from existing writings on directly unproductive profit-seeking (DUP) activities in international trade modify rules of tax and tariff reform in normative public economics and examines in what way these should affect advice on tax policy usually given to developing countries. The analysis proceeds by developing two models. The first incorporates revenue seeking directly into a standard open economy public finance model and examines whether analysis of policy reform and economic costs of distortionary tariffs must be modified. The second includes a political component in the form of lobbying for subsidies – the expenditure side of the budget – as well as a normative economic component that raises taxes – the revenue side – to finance the social costs of such lobbying. The model can be used to determine the effects of politically determined expenditures on tax setting. The analysis shows that the grammar of welfare-theoretic arguments that underlies the reform and design of tax and tariff structures is robust to the inclusion of DUP activities of the type considered here. In particular, the latter lend no presumption in favor of uniformity in tax and tariff structures. It is argued that existing policy advice on tax and tariff reform derived from models where DUP activities have traditionally played no role continues to be appropriate when account is taken of formal treatments of DUP-type phenomena extant in the current literature.     

The empirical relationship between ownership characteristics and audit fees

The present study examines the empirical relationship between ownership characteristics and audit fees. The basic premise is that the level of ownership sophistication and the extent to which ownership is large and substantial impact the effectiveness of stockholder monitoring on corporate affairs including the financial reporting process. Furthermore, high managerial ownership firms may experience a decline in agency problems in financial reporting due to a decrease in managerial propensity to misreport financial results. By employing a cross-sectional least squares regression analysis for a sample of 358 New York Stock Exchange-listed firms audited by the Big Five auditors, we find evidence of a significantly positive relationship between diffused institutional stock ownership (i.e., having less than 5% individual shareholding) and audit fees, and a significantly negative relationship between institutional blockholder ownership (i.e., having 5% or more individual shareholding) and audit fees. Finally, we document that managerial stock ownership is negatively associated with audit fees. We do not, however, find evidence of any relationship between noninstitutional blockholder ownership (with at least 5% individual stock ownership) and audit fees. The study's main results hold in various specification tests including when the effects of board-related and audit committee variables are factored in the analysis. Based on the observed relationship between the ownership variables and audit fees, we suggest that the ownership characteristics of a firm as a part of its governance mechanism constitute an important determinant of audit fees.

The new urban landscape: Developers and edge cities

In this paper we model the decisions of an edge city developer who chooses business district capacity and location strategically to maximize profits. The developer competes against a core city with historically given downtown capacity for employment and, implicitly, residential population. Moving nearer the core city enhances production efficiency by increasing the efficiency of the exchange of information between businesses in the core and edge city. On the other hand, it increases typical residential rents and commuting costs (and hence wages demanded by employees) and weakens the developer's local monopsony power. The developer's choice of location and capacity play out in a complex but fascinating fashion, depending on the historical capacity of the downtown.