Third-party endorsements of CEO quality,managerial discretion,and stakeholder reactions

Research on the influence of third-party endorsements of CEO quality generally does not account for the context in which such signs manifest. To address this limitation, the present study examines how a CEO's level of managerial discretion shapes boards' and shareholders' responses to external endorsements of his or her quality. Managerial discretion refers to the range of strategic options that executives have at their disposal in a given business context. The findings indicate that boards only react to CEO endorsements in high-discretion settings, and this reaction is positive (i.e., more pay). In contrast, shareholders – regardless of discretion levels – positively respond to CEO endorsements in the short-term, while these responses become more equivocal over the time. These results suggest that – at least in the short term – directors more adeptly interpret and respond to external information about CEO quality than shareholders.     

Endogenous fertility, multiple growth paths, and economic convergence

"This paper extends the Cass-Koopmans optimal growth model to allow for endogenous fertility choice. It is shown that if agents choose their fertility rate, then the net rate of return on capital (marginal product of capital minus the population growth rate) may not be monotonically decreasing in capital. In this case, multiple steady states and growth paths may emerge, which can explain the persistent differentials in income between poor and rich countries, as well as the existence of development miracles and disasters. The paper provides also empirical evidence which supports the existence of multiple convergence groups and is consistent with the theoretical model."     

Optimal fiscal policy in a dynamic multicountry world with public services

The authors construct a dynamic one‐good multicountry growth model with productive government spending and perfect capital mobility to study fiscal interdependence among countries. In the case of a source‐based tax, it is found that there is no strategic interaction and that the equilibrium spending/tax mix coincides with the optimal one. In the case of a residence‐based tax system, however, there is strategic interaction across countries and, under noncooperation, countries tend to spend and tax over and above the optimal Pigouvian level.     

Why Austrian socialism?

Socialist objectives can be achieved in a market context with the rule of law if market socialism were to take the form of competitive worker-owned and self-managed enterprises, supplemented by universally available welfare redistributions, which could include a basic income, universal capital grants, or education and health insurance vouchers.      

Comparing the Administrative and Financial Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions in 7 EU Countries

The challenge of providing qualitatively competitive higher education to an ever increasing percentage of the population, despite the limited availability of public funds, has led many countries to grant broader administrative and financial autonomy to higher education institutions in an attempt to improve results by means of better incentives. Can a correlation be shown between this autonomy and scientific output? The preliminary evidence presented here (using OECD data for 7 Western European countries) provides some support for a positive answer to this question.     

HETEROGENEOUS CAPITAL GOODS AND THE HARROD–BALASSA–SAMUELSON EFFECT

This paper shows that in a world of ‘production of commodities by means of commodities’ there is not an unambiguous relation between the long‐period relative commodity prices and the sectoral total factor productivities. Consequently, the Harrod–Balassa–Samuelson effect is not verified and/or makes no sense.     

Commentary. 'Work first': workfare and the regulation of contingent labour markets

The paper presents a critical review of UK and US welfare-to-workstrategies, stressing their implications for changing formsof labour regulation. The favoured policy orientation - 'workfirst' - forcefully redistributes the risks and burdens of job-marketinstability from the state to unemployed individuals, the solutionto whose 'welfare dependency' is presented in terms of a one-waytransition into (low) waged work. At a systemic level, the analysissuggests that a regressive regulatory accommodation may be emergingbetween mandatory welfare-to-work programming on the one handand the lowest reaches of deregulated, 'flexible' labour marketson the other, as the destabilisation of welfare via work-activationmeasures creates a forced labour supply for contingent jobs.     

Income inequities between black and white populations in southern nonmetropolitan counties

This article examines differences in the income status of black and white populations in Southern nonmetropolitan counties and discusses how various labor market, social, and human capital characteristics influence the income status of the respective groups. The data show an inconsistent pattern between black and white populations’ income level in Southern nonmetropolitan counties. The data also show that various structural/institutional (e.g., local labor market and human capital) and social/cultural (e.g., population) factors affect the income of black and white populations differently.     

Design as a social process: A complex systems perspective

Design is increasingly perceived as a social process, but despite a wide exposition of the concepts of cooperation or collaboration, a coherent account of the important dimensions of design as a social multi-agent process is still missing. It is argued that a generic, abstract concept is required to be able to capture the social distributed character of design, without making a-priori assumptions about the kinds of interdependencies that exist among agents (in terms of goals, knowledge or roles), or about their dispositions towards cooperation or conflict. The paper suggests that the most appropriate concept for this purpose is the concept of coordination. A model of coordination as a distributed learning control is thus presented as a vehicle for focussing on the important dimensions and qualities of coordination. Motivated by this discussion, the paper subsequently delves further into the issue of sociality by considering the question of the micro-macro link extensively discussed in sociology. In particular, the paper shows how coordination can offer a resolution of the question in the context of design, and discusses the effects of such an approach for our understanding of the relationship between complexity and design.