IS IT IS OR IS IT AIN'T MY OBLIGATION? REGIONAL DEBT IN A FISCAL FEDERATION*

This article studies the repayment of regional debt in a multiregion economy with a central authority: Who pays the obligation issued by a region? With commitment, the central government will use its economy‐wide taxation power in support of its objective to smooth distortionary taxes and consumption across regions. Absent commitment, this tool of the central government may be exploited to induce it to bail out regional government deficits. We characterize the conditions under which bailouts occur and their welfare implications. In particular, we show when the gains from a federation may outweigh the welfare costs of a bailout. We use these insights to comment on actual fiscal relations in three quite different federations: the United States, the European Union, and Argentina.     

The impact of abusive supervision and co-worker support on hospitality and tourism student employees’ turnover intentions in Ecuador

Ram (2015. Hostility or hospitality? A review on violence, bullying and sexual harassment in the tourism and hospitality industry. Current Issues in Tourism. doi:10.1080/13683500.2015.1064364) posits that violence and harassment are areas of concern within the hospitality industry, and scholarly interest in abusive supervision in the workplace has grown since the last decade. This study extends Ram's (2015. Hostility or hospitality? A review on violence, bullying and sexual harassment in the tourism and hospitality industry. Current Issues in Tourism. doi:10.1080/13683500.2015.1064364) assertion by examining the effect of abusive supervision experiences on student employees’ turnover intentions in a hospitality and tourism context in a high power distance culture, Ecuador. The results showed that abusive supervision was positively related to turnover intentions, and its effect was stronger than co-worker support, with the abusive supervision–turnover intentions relationship being fully mediated by perceived organizational support (POS). In addition, co-worker emotional support was found to attenuate the negative effects of abusive supervision on POS. All in all, the findings highlight the roles of POS in explaining the relation between abusive supervision and turnover intentions and co-worker emotional support in buffering the negative effect of abusive supervision. The important role of culture is discussed.     

Trade Structure and Trade liberalization: The emerging pattern between the EU and Transition Economies

The purpose of this study is to find empirical evidence for the assumption that trade liberalization unlocks the potential of the Transition Economies (TEs) to achieve technological upgrading, productivity progress and catching-up (in terms of income). The study examines the trade structure now emerging between the European Union (EU) and the TEs in the light of two sets of differently liberalized trade items identified by the European Agreements. The aim is to determine whether trade liberalization has helped to supersede the structures – reflected mainly in the low quality of products – inherited by the TEs from the command economy. The empirical results are interpreted in the light of the Flam-Helpman quality-cycle model. We find evidence of an ongoing division of labor between high quality products (EU) and low quality products (TEs) according to a cycle. The first stage comprises the already well established dominance of quality advantage products by EU countries producing and exporting high-quality products, which crowd out the TEs' production of similar products. The second stage is the exploitation of cost-advantages by TEs in less liberalized trade, and there they appear to achieve better results. All these results may be taken as support for an active government in TEs.     

Rent Management – The Heart of Green Industrial Policy

At the heart of green industrial policy is rent management: government creating and withdrawing opportunities for profitable investment. This paper asks what the key factors are for rent management to succeed. Drawing on a range of literatures, the paper first deals with the critical success factors for ‘normal’ rent management and then turns to one of the most pressing and controversial issues of our time: how to bring about the transition to green energy. This is extra challenging because technological uncertainties are high, time horizons for investment are long, yet action is required now.     

Competitive analysis

Despite the strategic importance of understanding competitive structure and the dynamics of competitive behavior, there has been almost no empirical study of how managers perform these analyses. We provide a conceptualization of how competitive analyses can be framed by decision makers and for researching how human biases in decision making and corporate culture impact on the nature and use of competitive analysis information.We are grateful for the comments of George Day, Peter Dickson, Pete Fader, Don Lehmann, Rajan Varadarajan, and David Wheaton on an earlier version of this paper.