institutional adaptability in china local developmental models under changing economic conditions summary distinct patterns of regional development have emerged in china s political economy since the initiation of economic reforms in late 1970s in particular the localities of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan each achieved dramatic economic growth during the first three decades of reform earning them national reputations as developmental models for other cities in china to recognize and emulate however the local states of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan responded differentially to changing conditions in the broader domestic and global economy and the global financial crisis at the end of the 2000s affected the three localities with varying levels of severity this article thus seeks to explain why previously well performing developmental models diverged in their performance and capacity to recover from a major economic shock drawing on national economic census data in depth field interviews and relevant secondary literature we argue that variation in the institutional adaptability of suzhou wenzhou and dongguan throughout the course of their developmental experiences had a defining effect on how these cities fared during the financial crisis the process tracing case studies reveal that a locality s ability to adjust to changing market conditions may be conditioned by structural endowments but ultimately hinges on agent centric factors including motivated and capable local leadership openness to new policy ideas and state capacity for policy implementation ultimately our analysis makes the broader observation that in a dynamic environment factors that promote economic success at one point can become barriers later on hence exploring a region s institutional adaptability and identifying the factors that facilitate or impede such adaptability in local economic governance provides a more nuanced means for understanding a locality s evolving developmental patterns and performance during normal times as well as more challenging periods

cyclicality mortality and the value of time the case of coffee price fluctuations and child survival in colombia recent studies demonstrate procyclical mortality in wealthy countries but there are reasons to expect a countercyclical relationship in developing nations we investigate how child survival in colombia responds to fluctuations in world arabica coffee prices and document starkly procyclical child deaths in studying this result s behavioral underpinnings we highlight that 1 the leading determinants of child health are inexpensive but require considerable time and 2 as the value of time declines with falling coffee prices so does the relative price of health we find a variety of direct evidence consistent with the primacy of time in child health production

converging or diverging a comparative analysis of trends in contingent employment practice in europe over a decade this paper makes a unique contribution to the hrm convergence divergence debate by examining whether organisations operating in europe over the 10 year time period preceding 2000 are converging in their adoption of contingent employment practice the susceptibility of contingent employment practice to both convergent and divergent pressures acts as a useful analytical lens data are drawn from organisations operating in germany spain sweden the netherlands and the uk in 1991 2918 organisations 1995 2048 organisations and 2000 1555 organisations the results suggest that convergence is limited by the institutional embeddedness of organisations

a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy this paper proposes a coevolutionary framework for analysing a transition to a sustainable low carbon economy based on the coevolution of ecosystems technologies institutions business strategies and user practices within a multi level micro meso macro perspective this builds on and develops previous coevolutionary analyses of long term technological and industrial change and recent renewed interest within ecological economics on coevolutionary approaches previous work has analysed how the coevolution of technologies and institutions has led to the lock in of current high carbon energy systems and how the coevolution of physical and social technologies and business strategies has brought significant material and welfare benefits to the minority of the world s population living in industrialised countries the coevolutionary framework proposed here may be used to undertake 1 detailed empirical analyses at a micro meso level of the challenges relating to the innovation and adoption of particularly low carbon technologies 2 as a framework for analysing the multi level interaction of social and technological elements within potential transition pathways to a low carbon energy system 3 to assess the implications for economic growth and prosperity of a transition to a low carbon economy and 4 to assist in the development of more formal multi level evolutionary economic models

two stage residual inclusion estimation addressing endogeneity in health econometric modeling the paper focuses on two estimation methods that have been widely used to address endogeneity in empirical research in health economics and health services research two stage predictor substitution 2sps and two stage residual inclusion 2sri 2sps is the rote extension to nonlinear models of the popular linear two stage least squares estimator the 2sri estimator is similar except that in the second stage regression the endogenous variables are not replaced by first stage predictors instead first stage residuals are included as additional regressors in a generic parametric framework we show that 2sri is consistent and 2sps is not results from a simulation study and an illustrative example also recommend against 2sps and favor 2sri our findings are important given that there are many prominent examples of the application of inconsistent 2sps in the recent literature this study can be used as a guide by future researchers in health economics who are confronted with endogeneity in their empirical work

an information interpretation of financial analyst superiority in forecasting earnings the results of recent empirical tests comparing the accuracy of financial analysts forecasts faf of firm earnings to the accuracy of predictions from univariate time series ts forecasting models are consistent with faf forecast superiority see brown et al 1987a and their references the source of this apparent superiority however is not well understood an issue related to earnings forecast superiority is that of determining the most accurate surrogate for the earnings expectations of capital market participants researchers have compared the association between earnings surprise and stock returns across alternative surrogates for earnings expectations and have argued that the best surrogate is generated from the earnings forecast model whose errors exhibit the highest

do deployment policies pick technologies by not picking applications a simulation of investment decisions in technologies with multiple applications abstract the role of deployment policies that aim to foster technological change has grown considerably especially in the fields of energy and climate however recent research has shown that the adoption of deployment policies carries the potential of locking in the technology that is most cost effective at the point of policy introduction but may be inefficient in the long term the present paper contributes to the emerging literature on the role of deployment policies in creating path dependency and eventually technology lock in while previous studies focused on the relationship between lock in and the technology specificity of deployment policies this paper introduces a new factor the existence of multiple applications for a technology we argue that this factor is highly relevant for technological lock in and should be considered by policy makers to support our argument we simulate the competition among four stationary battery technologies across energy system applications in an investment simulation model this simulation shows that the degree of competition among technologies differs strongly across applications which corresponds with a highly varying lock in probability hence selecting applications in deployment policies very likely corresponds to selecting technologies we discuss the implications of these results for both policy makers and for the academic debate on deployment policies and technological lock in as well as on technology assessment and governance more generally based on the notion that policies can have different technology specificity levels we develop the idea of the application specificity of policies and provide examples of currently enacted deployment policies that vary in terms of their technology and application specificity

are nonconvexities important for understanding growth everyday experience and a simple logical argument show that nonconvexities are essential for understanding growth compared to previous statements of this well known argument the presentation here places more emphasis on the distinction between two of the fundamental attributes of any economic good rivalry and excludability it also emphasizes the difference between public goods and the technological advances that are fundamental to economic growth like public goods technological advances are rionrival goods hence they are inextricably linked to nonconvexities but in contrast to public goods which are nonexcludable technological advances generate benefits that are at least partially excludable hence innovations in the technology are for the most part privately provided this means that nonconvexities are relevant for goods that trade in private markets consequently an equilibrium with price taking in all markets cannot be sustained concluding remarks describe some of the recent equilibrium growth models that do not rely on price taking and highlight some of the implications of these models this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

analysts use of managerial bonus incentives in forecasting earnings abstract this study presents evidence on whether analysts earnings forecasts anticipate management s discretionary accruals choices if analysts anticipate discretionary accruals earnings forecast errors are composed of at least two parts cash flow and discretionary accruals forecast errors management s bonus maximizing incentives allow for identification of circumstances in which discretionary accruals forecast errors are expected to offset cash flow forecast errors and circumstances in which they are expected to exacerbate cash flow errors controlling for the unexpected cash flow variability the empirical results are consistent with these predictions

the economic impacts of climate change evidence from agricultural output and random fluctuations in weather fisher et al 2012 hereafter fhrs have uncovered coding and data errors in our paper deschenes and greenstone 2007 hereafter dg we acknowledge and are embarrassed by these mistakes we are grateful to fhrs for uncovering them we hope that this reply will also contribute to advancing the literature on the vital question of the impact of climate change on the us agricultural sector fhrs main critiques of dg are as follows i there are errors in the weather data and climate change projections used by dg ii the climate change projections are based on the hadley 2 model and scenarios rather than the more recent hadley 3 model and scenarios iii standard errors are biased due to spatial correlation iv the inclusion of state by year fixed effects does not leave enough weather variation to obtain meaningful estimates of the relationship between agriculture profits and weather v storage and inventory adjustment in response to yield shocks invalidate the use of annual profit data and vi fhrs argue that a better specified hedonic model produces robust estimates unlike the results reported in dg four of these critiques have little basis and we respond to them here in the introduction specifically with respect to ii the more recent daily climate predictions were not available when we wrote dg nevertheless the most important issue is providing the reliable estimates of climate change and in this note we report estimates based on the climate model we used in dg and a more recent one that we gained access to in the meantime iii in the primary table on agricultural profits dg reports two sets of standard errors with the first clustered at the county level and the second based on a variance covariance matrix that accounts for spatial correlation using the method proposed in conley 1999 thus the claim of fhrs 2012 seems overblown nevertheless to ease comparisons of papers in this literature this note will adopt the fhrs convention of reporting estimated standard errors clustered at the county and state levels we find that inference is largely unaffected by the choice between these different assumptions about the variance covariance matrix

energy paths in the european union a model based clustering approach this paper examines typical energy paths i e the intertemporal development of the energy mixes of the member states of the european union over 1971 2010 we apply model based clustering to detect major energy profiles and their compositional dynamics the seven identified clusters show typical combinations of energy carriers dominating the primary energy consumption of a country we find that countries tend to take a path towards higher quality energy mixes over time however path inertia and dependencies arise from both infrastructure and resource endowments higher energy quality profiles are usually associated with higher national income and energy use per capita providing some evidence of the existence of a national level energy ladder we also find convergence in energy intensity over time and a relationship between a country s own resources and import dependency

toward a model of risk in declining organizations an empirical examination of risk performance and decline scholars who study organizational decline have argued that declining organizations reduce or eliminate their riskier activities such as innovation further they cite reduced risk taking as a primary contributor to further decline scholars with an interest in risk per se come to the opposite conclusion low performing firms often take more risks than other firms and such risks reduce subsequent performance this study attempts to resolve these conflicting views by examining the risk of firms in decline our model based on cyert march s cyert r m j g march 1963 a behavioral theory of the firm prentice hall englewood cliffs nj behavioral theory of the firm includes six basic variables 1 performance 2 slack 3 aspirations 4 expectations 5 risk income stream uncertainty and 6 organization size as a measure of decline the estimated model includes prior levels of risk and performance in the risk and performance equations respectively as controls this study uses data on 34

the need for policy to address the food system lock in a case study of the finnish context abstract the introduction of synthetic fertilizers transformed the food system into the one we know today in the western world the present paper argues that this transformation has become an irreversible self feeding process referred to as food system lock in which threatens planetary boundaries of nitrogen and phosphorus hence the food security in the future a system in a lock in state can undermine its own existence by deteriorating the capacity to cope with upcoming crises of resource scarcity and environmental instability in this paper the roots of lock in are explored and empirically grounded in the historical narrative of the food system transition in finland in the past 60 years the theoretical framework builds on socio technical studies and the economic theory of increasing returns the aim of the paper is to identify through an evolutionary analysis the processes of increasing returns that have become path inefficient and have reinforced the lock in in the food system three separate but interdependent processes in the production in the policy and institutions and in the supply chain create systematic resistance towards sustainability transition these findings indicate that more attention should be paid at the public policies that are currently too narrow in their scope and do not effectively bridge the entire system from food production to consumption public intervention is critical for the unlocking but individuals in the various parts of the food system are those who create new paths

varieties of capitalism in an internationalized world domestic institutional change in european telecommunications this article examines how internationalization affects domestic decisions about the reform of market institutions a developing literature argues that nations maintain different varieties of capitalism in the face of economic globalization because of diverse domestic settings however in an internationalized world powerful forces for change applying across border scan affect decision making within domestic arenas the article therefore analyzes how three factors transnational technological and economic developments overseas reforms and european regulation affected institutional reform in a selected case study of telecommunications regulation in britain france germany and italy between the 1960s and 2002 the author argues that when different forms of internationalization are strong and combined they can overwhelm institutional inertia and the effects of different national settings to result in rapid change and cross national convergence in market institutions hence different varieties of capi

evolutionary dynamics in club goods binary games abstract a dynamic adjustment mechanism based on replicator dynamics in discrete time is used to study the time evolution of a population of players facing a binary choice game with social influence characterized by payoff curves that intersect at two interior points also denoted as thresholds so besides the boundary equilibria where all players make the same choice there are two further steady states where agents playing different strategies coexist and get identical payoffs such binary game can be interpreted as a club good game in which players have to choose either joining or not the club in the presence of cost sharing so that they can enjoy a good or a service provided that a participation threshold is reached at the same time congestion occurs beyond a second higher threshold these binary choice models can be used and indeed have been used in the literature to represent several social and economic decisions such as technology adoption joining a commercial club r d investments production delocalization programs for environmental protection existence and stability of equilibrium points are studied as well as the creation of more complex attractors periodic or chaotic related with overshooting effects the study of some local and global dynamic properties of the evolutionary model proposed reveals that the presence of the participation threshold causes the creation of complex topological structures of the basins of coexisting attracting sets so that a strong path dependence is observed the dynamic effects of memory both in the form of convex combination of a finite number of previous observation moving average and in the form of memory with increasing length and exponentially fading weights are investigated as well

the effects of health events on the economic status of married couples this paper uses measures of exogenous health shocks to identify the different channels through which changes in health conditions affect income wealth and consumption behavior the results indicate that serious health conditions have strong effects on household wealth but that the effects for women are larger and more significant than the effects for men the source of the asymmetry arises from the fact that general living expenses increase when wives become seriously ill while for husbands health shocks do not affect these expenditures

the industrial organization of congress or why legislatures like firms are not organized as markets this paper provides a theory of legislative institutions that parallels the theory of the firm and the theory of contractual institutions like market institutions legislative institutions reflect two key components the goals or preferences of individuals here representatives seeking reelection and the relevant transactions costs we present three conclusions first we show how the legislative institutions enforce bargains among legislators second we explain why given the peculiar form of bargaining problems found in legislatures specific forms of nonmarket exchange prove superior to market exchange third our approach shows how the committee system limits the types of coalitions that may form on a particular issue

time matters postindustrialization new social risks and welfare state adaptation in advanced industrial democracies western welfare states were built during the postwar years with one key objective to protect family male breadwinners against the consequences of losing their ability to extract an income from

increasing returns path dependence and the study of politics it is increasingly common for social scientists to describe political processes as path dependent the concept however is often employed without careful elaboration this article conceptualizes path dependence as a social process grounded in a dynamic of increasing returns reviewing recent literature in economics and suggesting extensions to the world of politics the article demonstrates that increasing returns processes are likely to be prevalent and that good analytical foundations exist for exploring their causes and consequences the investigation of increasing returns can provide a more rigorous framework for developing some of the key claims of recent scholarship in historical institutionalism specific patterns of timing and sequence matter a wide range of social outcomes may be possible large consequences may result from relatively small or contingent events particular courses of action once introduced can be almost impossible to reverse and consequently political development is punctuated by critical moments or junctures that shape the basic contours of social life

globalizing carbon lock in this paper extends the arguments surrounding carbon lock in elaborated in unruh energy policy 28 2000 817 30 2002 317 to countries currently undergoing industrialization it argues that for numerous reasons industrializing countries are unlikely to leapfrog carbon intensive energy development on the contrary carbon lock in may be globalizing and could further constrain climate change mitigation options it is then argued that many policy recommendations ignore carbon lock in possibly limiting their potential for successful implementation the paper then discusses four policy approaches that appear to have advantages given lock in conditions it is recognized however that relative ease of implementation does not necessarily equate with superiority instead it is merely a path dependent outcome of past development decisions pursuing policies on the basis of relative implementation ease may help address the issue of climate change but could also result in sub optimal outcomes along other dimensions of sustainable development

setting international standards technological rationality or primacy of power standards have become one of the most important nontariff barriers to trade especially national product standards that specify design or performance characteristics of manufactured goods divergent national standards often inhibit trade whereas regional and international standards increasingly serve as instruments of trade liberalization consequently the setting of international standards seemingly technical and apolitical is rapidly becoming an issue of economic and political salience but who sets international standards who wins who loses this article offers a fresh analytical approach to the study of international standards which the authors call the institutional complementarities approach it builds on insights from realism and the battle of the sexes coordination game but emphasizes complementarities of historically conditioned standardization systems at the national level with the institutional structure of standardization at the international level it posits that after controlling for other factors that influence involvement in international standardization differences in institutional complementarities play a critical though largely accidental role in placing firms from different countries or regions in a first or second mover position when standardization becomes global the authors illustrate the insightfulness of this approach through statistical analyses of the first scientific set of data on standards use and standardization collected by the authors through an international online survey

the new economics of organization over the last ten years or so an important new approach to the study of organizations has emerged within economics it is perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a theoretical focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this paper provides political scientists with an overview of the new economics of organization and explores its implications for the study of public bureaucracy so far positive political theory has not contributed much to our understanding of public bureaucracy in part this is due to the unsympathetic treatment that rational modeling and most other modes of quantitative analysis have long received from students of public administration the other side of the coin however is that positive theorists have not made much of an effort to develop theories of bureaucracy their concerns have centered around two basic mechanisms of social choice voting and markets and they have devoted little systematic attention to a third mechanism that is clearly important for understanding how societies and other aggregates make collective decisions this third and relatively unexplored mechanism is hierarchy movement toward a positive theory of hierarchies would fill a serious gap in the social choice literature while at the same time making a theoretical contribution that strikes to the essence of public bureaucracy indeed of all organizations in fact significant steps toward a positive theory of hierarchies have very recently been taken but by economists not political scientists in small numbers of course economists made contributions to the study of public bureaucracy some time ago with the pioneering works of downs 1967 tullock 1965 and niskanen 1971 but this new wave of theoretical work is different it is already a large complex body of literature that is the focus of innovation and excitement among a growing number of economists and it reflects an unusual degree of theoretical coherence and cumulative effort work in this tradition tends to receive orientation from a distinctive economic approach to the analysis of organizations an approach perhaps best characterized by three elements a contractual perspective on organizational relationships a focus on hierarchical control and formal analysis via principal agent models this approach has emerged from recent attempts to move beyond the neoclassical theory of the firm which assumes away all organizational considerations to a theory of economic organizations that can explain why firms corporations and other enterprises behave as they do propo

differential mortality and wealth accumulation the issue of asset accumulation and decumulation is central to the life cycle theory of consumer behavior and to many policy questions one of the main implications of the life cycle model is that assets are decumulated in the last part of life most empirical studies in this area use cross sectional data of estimate mean or median wealth age profiles the use of cross sections to estimate the age profile of assets is full of pitfalls for example if wealth and mortality are related in that poorer individuals die younger one overestimates the last part of the wealth age profile when using cross sectional data because means or other measures of location are taken over a population which becomes richer as it ages this paper examines the effect of differential mortality on cross sectional estimates of wealth age profiles our approach is to quantify the dependence of mortality rates on wealth and use these estimates to correct wealth age profiles for sample selection due to differential mortality we estimate mortality rates as a function of wealth and age for a sample of married couples drawn from the survey of income and program participation sipp our results show that accounting for differential mortality produces wealth profiles with significantly more dissaving among the elderly

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

product market pricing power industry concentration and analysts earnings forecasts this is the first study to establish a link between product market power and analysts earnings forecast accuracy and bias relating two different dimensions of market power to earnings forecastability we document that a a firm s relative pricing power and b its industry concentration are strong positive determinants of analysts earnings forecast accuracy we find that forecasting earnings of higher market power firms is less complex due to their ability to withstand cost shocks as well as greater informational efficiency enjoyed by such firms further forecast optimism increases with weakening product market pricing power and with lower industry concentration the knowledge derived from this study will hopefully improve the accuracy of equity valuation and thereby engender better buy side stock selections and sell side recommendations by analysts our analysis also suggests that brokerage firms compensating analysts based on forecast accuracy need to adjust for the differential in the information complexity of different industries

the crisis of german and japanese capitalism stalled on the road to the liberal market model german and japanese opinion leaders demand a decisive move toward the liberal market model yet their governments have been slow to act why can t germany and japan reform to unravel this puzzle we must understand how the german and japanese models of capitalism bind the potential winners from liberal reform such as competitive manufacturing exporters to the potential losers such as workers and protected service industries competitive exporters are reluctant to embrace reforms that might undermine valued relationships with workers financial institutions and other business partners moreover they cannot forge a strong reform coalition because they must work through industry associations and political parties that represent both competitive and protected sectors as a result germany and japan proceed cautiously with reform they package delicate compromises often compensating the potential losers they design reforms to preserve core institutions and they seek novel ways to build on the strengths

explaining institutional change policy areas outside options and the bretton woods institutions i propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations like firms in markets international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change in comparison institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power to test the theory empirically i exploit common features of the bretton woods institutions the international monetary fund and world bank to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics the empirical tests show that despite having identical membership and internal rules bargaining outcomes in the bretton woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory

temperature and income reconciling new cross sectional and panel estimates this paper presents novel evidence and analysis of the relationship between temperature and income first using sub national data from 12 countries in the americas we provide new evidence that the negative cross country relationship between temperature and income also exists within countries and even within states second we provide a theoretical framework for reconciling the substantial negative association between temperature and income in the cross section with the even stronger short run effects of temperature estimated by panel models the theoretical framework suggests that half of the negative short term effects of temperature may be offset in the long run through adaptation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

historical origins of firm ownership structure the persistent effects of the african slave trade this paper uses evidence from the historical african slave trade to extend prior theory linking modern firm ownership structure to institutions and social capital we argue that institutions and so

social policy through labor markets understanding national differences in the provision of economic security to wage earners recent work in comparative political economy has emphasized the existence of functional equivalents to the welfare state in the area of labor market policy in many european countries in australia and in new zealand labor laws minimum wages and collective agreements have traditionally played an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of economic security for workers and their families this article tries to explain why different countries have developed different instruments for providing economic security to wage earners it compares labor legislation and practices across several european countries and focuses on the detailed trajectory of france germany and the united kingdom it finds that state society relationships and ideological influences at key historical moments can help understand the original divergence which is perpetuated through a typical path dependent development

searching for good policies policymaking is hard policymakers typically have imperfect information about which policies produce which outcomes and they are left with little choice but to fumble their way through the policy space via a trial and error process this raises a question at the heart of democracy do democratic systems identify good policies to answer this question i introduce a novel model of policymaking in complex environments i show that good policies are often but not always found and i identify the possibility of policymaking getting stuck at outcomes that are arbitrarily bad notably policy stickiness occurs in the model even in the absence of institutional constraints this raises the question of how institutions and the political environment impact experimentation and learning i show how a simple political friction uncertainty over voter preferences interacts with political competition and policy uncertainty in a subtle way that surprisingly improves the quality of policymaking over time

income and health in tanzania an instrumental variable approach there is a substantial debate over the direction of the causal relation between income and health this is important for our understanding of the health production process and for the policy debate over improving healthcare we instrument income with rainfall measurements by matching satellite information on timing and positioning of 21 rainfall stations to longitudinal data 1991 94 of over 4 000 individuals in 51 villages in tanzania a 10 increase in income reduces the number of illnesses by 0 02 we also find that a 10 increase in income implies an increase of about 0 1 vaccinations of children under six

a low carbon industrial revolution insights and challenges from past technological and economic transformations recent efforts to promote a transition to a low carbon economy have been influenced by suggestions that a low carbon transition offers challenges and might yield economic benefits comparable to those of the previous industrial revolutions this paper examines these arguments and the challenges facing a low carbon transition by drawing on recent thinking on the technological economic and institutional factors that enabled and sustained the first british industrial revolution and the role of general purpose technologies in stimulating and sustaining this and subsequent industrial transformation processes that have contributed to significant macroeconomic gains these revolutions involved profound long drawn out changes in economy technology and society and although their energy transitions led to long run economic benefits they took many decades to develop to reap significant long run economic benefits from a low carbon transition sooner rather than later would require systemic efforts and incentives for low carbon innovation and substitution of high carbon technologies we conclude that while achieving a low carbon transition may require societal changes on a scale comparable with those of previous industrial revolutions this transition does not yet resemble previous industrial revolutions a successful low carbon transition would however amount to a different kind of industrial revolution

rhetoric and reality in protected area governance institutional change under different conservation discourses in mount elgon national park uganda abstract the approach to governance of protected areas has been in transition over last decades partly driven by evolving policy discourses that shape the ways in which conservation is thought to be delivered the most influential discourses are the fortress approach community conservation and back to the barriers how different discourses translate and are instituted on ground are however complex and disputed inclusive policy strategies in relation to local involvement in developing countries are of particular concern the study analyses how conservation policy discourses have become manifested taking the case of mount elgon national park menp uganda it outlines main conservation policy discourses analyses actor s interests and power relations and further examines how institutions for park governance have evolved and changed according to the different discourses the results indicate that conservation discourses and donor support come and go while menp seems to outlast all the worrying reality is that menp administration strongly influenced by the interplay of path dependent institutional forces rooted in the fortress discourse simply sticks to its guns maintaining the application of law enforcement as key management instruments in its approach to governance especially to local people interactions there is an apparent gap between rhetoric and reality in protected area governance

limiting the unintended consequences of institutional change students of institutional change pay insufficient attention to the conditions under which institutional reform produces unintended procedural and policy consequences the authors contend that the b

saying yes to taxes the politics of tax reform campaigns in three northwestern states 1965 1973 this article analyzes factors shaping popular support for new taxes by examining variation in the outcomes of votes in nine american states during the 1960s and early 1970s new taxes were endorsed in five states but rejected in four using comparative and historical methods focused on the cases of oregon washington and idaho the author argues that the sequence of policy making shapes popular vetoes through three mechanisms the mobilization of interest groups the information available to voters about a policy and how the costs and benefits of a policy appear to voters the findings demonstrate that voter perceptions of the potential gains and losses of a new policy are sociologically mobilized through the policy process controlling when popular veto points appear in a policy process is an understudied strategy that is employed by american state builders to overcome ambivalence toward the fiscal imperatives of the activist state

how responsive is body weight to transitory income changes evidence from rural tanzania we use time series of rainfall to estimate the response of body weight to transitory changes in household income in rural tanzania we find that the response of body weight to income changes is positive on average but that the impact is highest for female children and lower for adults for female children a ten percent increase in household income implies an increase in body weight by about 0 4 kg in contrast the body weight of adolescents and young adults is virtually invariant to income changes

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

healthy bodies and thick wallets the dual relation between health and economic status there is abundant evidence of a quantitatively large association between many measures of economic status including income and wealth and a variety of health outcomes such as mortality or morbidity however considerable and often heated debate remains especially across disciplines about the direction of causation and about why the association arises although medical scientists are often convinced that the dominant if not exclusive pathway is that variation in socioeconomic status produces health disparities they are increasingly debating among themselves about why low economic status might lead to poor health at least for modern industrial countries 1 the old standby arguments the less well to do have access to less or lower quality medical care or a stronger pattern of deleterious personal behaviors have been rejected as insufficient instead a series of intriguing competing theories have arisen that emphasize long term impacts of early childhood or even inter uterine environmental factors the cumulative effects of prolonged exposures to individual stressful events or reactions to macro societal factors such as rising levels of income inequality a common link is that each theory attempts to document the physiological processes through which low economic status leads to poorer health while these scientific questions are extremely important this research has taken place with little input from economists economists are now making contributions about the alternative pathway the impact poor health may have on economic resources poor health may restrict a family s capacity to earn income or to accumulate assets by limiting work or by raising medical expenses at a minimum this work should provide a caution against exaggerating the magnitude of causation from economic status to health outcomes but the potential contribution runs deeper as people age the evolving variation in individual health outcomes may offer additional statistical information to estimate parameters of household savings and consumption behavior that so far have proven to be somewhat elusive thus incorporating health uncertainty and risk into economic models should eventually enrich our understanding of basic tenets of household behavior the first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure household wealth section two deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings and eventually wealth and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects section three shifts attention to the alternative pathway the links between economic status and health and summarizes 2major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues

the firm information environment and capital structure international evidence abstractthis article investigates the effect of the firm information environment characterized by the analyst characteristics on firms capital structure choices and whether this effect varies according to country level institutional environments using a comprehensive international data set that covers 19 939 firms across 41 countries between 2000 and 2010 we document two key findings first firms with lower analyst coverage higher forecast dispersion and higher forecast errors have higher leverage second the effect of the firm information environment on corporate leverage is attenuated in countries with stronger governance mechanism and better information transparency this result suggests that a firm s information environment is an important factor influencing its capital structure decision and that country level institutional environments matter to this effect

theorizing path dependence a review of positive feedback mechanisms in technology markets regional clusters and organizations the concept of path dependence has often been criticized as vague and only narrowly applicable although we can find some very refined definitions of the concept we also find a wide range of empirical phenomena being described as path dependent we argue that more detailed accounts of the positive feedback mechanisms that form paths can take path dependence beyond this state of being overdetermined but under specified reviewing three well described cases of path dependent dynamics in technology markets regional clustering and organizations we define a core set of positive feedback mechanisms that constitute path dependence at different analysis levels and clarify the relationship between positive feedback and increasing returns we show that path dependent processes that is processes driven by positive feedback that veer toward rigidity or lock in can be but do not have to be found under many labels including structural inertia coevolution or institutional persistence we conclude that a precise definition of path dependence does not need to be at odds with the concept s widespread use in understanding organizational and industrial development processes copyright 2013 the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

the strength of a weak agency enforcement of title vii of the 1964 civil rights act and the expansion of state capacity 1965 1971 this article analyzes the anomalous case of early title vii enforcement to challenge the standard political institutional pi account of state capacity title vii prohibited employment discrimination but the equal employment opportunity commission was granted scant enforcement resources yet the early eeoc aggressively enforced and developed title vii to solve the anomaly the authors integrate insights from the literatures on social movements and the sociology of law in the absence of conventional administrative resources apparently weak state agencies can expand their capacity through the legal strategy of broad statutory construction this strategy is more likely with the presence of social movement pressure from below the authors argue that state capacity is a moving target with state and societal actors building on legal as well as administrative resources to construct and transform capacity by reconceptualizing state capacity the authors contribute to nuanced explanations of state policy

taking credit redistribution and borrowing in an age of economic polarization several recent studies link rising income inequality in the united states to the global financial crisis arguing that us politicians did not respond to growing inequality with fiscal redistribution instead americans saved less and borrowed more to maintain relative consumption in the face of widening economic disparities this article proposes a theory in which fiscal redistribution dampens the willingness of citizens to borrow to fund current consumption a key implication is that pretax inequality will be more tightly linked with credit in less redistributive countries the long run partisan composition of government is in turn a key determinant of redistributive effort examining a panel of eighteen oecd democracies the authors find that countries with limited histories of left wing participation in government are significantly more likely see credit expansion as prefisc inequality grows compared to those in which the political left has been more influential

welfare policy expansion in botswana and mauritius explaining the causes of different welfare regime paths how come two developing countries with similar economic institutional and democratic attributes have developed vastly different welfare regimes drawing inspiration from the welfare regime literature the author subjects botswana and mauritius to a comparative historical analysis that explores the economic and political trajectories of their welfare policy development the findings offer both support and modifications to the established and mostly western oriented literature first politics affect welfare policy development in developing countries the rural population can promote welfare policy expansion but it is middle class interests that shape the direction of policy development second given the importance of politics conceptualizations of welfare policies need to include both the spending and the financing side finally the causes of different welfare regime paths need to be examined with attention to the particular economic contexts of developing countries and how welfare and economic poli

analysis and comparison of earnings forecast agents recent policy making activities of the sec 1978 1979 and the aicpa 1980 have rekindled interest in the subject of management s public disclosures of forecasts much of the forecasting literature and related policy considerations concern the comparative accuracy of managerial forecasts relative to other sources of earnings forecasts the basic premise is that if management forecasts are more accurate than those of other sources then it may be socially desirable to have the fasb or the sec govern forecast disclosures the economic implications of this policy issue were first discussed by gonedes dopuch and penman 1976 much of the subsequent empirical work has centered on assessments of the accuracy of managements forecasts in an effort to determine if they are potentially more informative a review of published research suggests that a number of conflicting results have been obtained one study reports that firm specific box and jenkins 1970 forecasts are superior to more accurate than those of management lorek mcdonald and patz 1976 while another concludes that analysts forecasts are superior to firm specific box jenkins forecasts and several other naive forecasting models brown and rozeff 1978 if one ignores differences in the samples and the time periods of these studies the results imply that analysts forecasts are more accurate

institutional development through policy making a case study of the brazilian central bank a number of contemporary studies rightly emphasize the notion that policy outcomes result from institutional determinants but as a growing literature on institutional development notes these institutions are themselves impermanent sometimes in crisis moments institutions are replaced wholesale more frequently institutions evolve gradually over time using the brazilian central bank as a case study this article illustrates that the policy making process itself can be a central driver of gradual institutional development with institutions evolving through the accumulation of policy choices made over many years and under different policymakers in response to contemporaneous events and unforeseeable economic and political challenges

loss aversion in politics we study how loss aversion affects the political equilibrium in a simple majority voting model first we show a status quo bias which leads to path dependence second loss aversion implies a moderating effect on the most extreme voters third in a dynamic setting the effect of loss aversion diminishes with the length of the planning horizon of voters however in the presence of a projection bias majorities are partially unable to understand how fast they will adapt to a new policy this makes changes less likely and induces time inconsistency policy changes are timid at the beginning while in later periods they are made progressively more radical fourth in a stochastic environment loss aversion yields a significant distaste for risk but also a smaller attachment to the status quo the application of these results to a model of redistribution leads to empirically plausible implications

equilibrium institutions the federal proportional trade off durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas a quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions each involves some trade off between the size of the country the territorial structure of government and the electoral system specifically the larger the country the more important is federalism in comparison to proportional representation electoral rules for the durability of democratic institutions the explanatory power of the model is positively tested on all current durable democratic countries it is also illustrated with a few both fitting and deviant cases a relevant implication is that the room for manipulation of the choice of institutions is large but not unlimited as the choices for a durable democracy are constrained by bounded trade offs between the values of major institutional variables

institutional emergence in an era of globalization the rise of transnational private regulation of labor and environmental conditions1 why have systems of transnational private regulation recently emerged to certify corporate social and environmental performance different conceptions of institutional emergence underlie different answers to this question many scholars argue that firms create certification systems to solve problems in the market a view rooted in a conception of institutions as solutions to collective action problems the author develops a different account by viewing institutions as the outcome of political contestation and by analyzing conflict and institutional entrepreneurship among a wide array of actors using a comparative case study design the analysis shows how these arguments explain the formation of social and environmental certification associations both theoretical approaches are needed but strong versions of the market based approach overlook an important set of dynamics that the author calls the political construction of market institutions the analysis shows how both problem solving in markets and

innovative social business of selective waste collection in brazil cleaner production and poverty reduction abstract in brazil municipal solid waste management mswm faces several challenges in its transition from a waste disposal model to another based on selective collection with recycling and reuse each municipality has adopted different institutional arrangements to meet the responsibility shared by the state industries and consumers to operate public policies in this field the consequence has been an inefficient recycling rate high costs and the exclusion of waste collectors from the official system therefore the objectives of this study are as follows i to submit a sustainable institutional arrangement based on cooperation between agents with an intensive use of information technology and logistics and ii to assess the economic financial feasibility of the model the research method was based on a multilevel interdisciplinary and systemic analytical structure for the study of path dependent processes proposed by hoff 2011 associated to critical moment identification approach from collier collier 1991 in addition an economic valuation model based on discounted cash flow was used the path dependence analysis reveals the following determinants of this situation recent legislation the existence of socially excluded collectors contractual formats in public private partnerships and the need to raise citizens awareness of their co responsibility regarding environmental education in this scenario the alternative found by the actors is a social business that is inclusive for those at the bottom of the pyramid bop and decentralised in micro cooperatives with different forms of relationship with public authorities different from what the experiments indicate the economic and financial viability of the model in addition to the environmental social and legal benefits are confirmed

an integrated theory of budgetary politics and some empirical tests the u s national budget 1791 2010 we develop a general theory of budgetary politics and examine its implications on a new data set on u s government expenditures from 1791 to 2010 we draw on three major approaches to budgeting decision making theories primarily incrementalism and serial processing policy process models and path dependency we show that the incrementalist budget model is recursive and that its solution is exponential growth and isolate three periods in which it operates in pure form the equilibrium periods are separated by critical junctures associated with wars or economic collapse we assess policy process dynamics by examining the deviations within equilibrium periods we offer three takeaways 1 exponential incrementalism is fundamental to a theory of budgeting 2 disjoint shifts in the level of exponential incrementalism are caused only by critical moments 3 temporally localized dynamics cause bends in the exponential path longer returns to the path within budgetary eras and annual punctuations in budget changes

seeking the local state gender caste and the pursuit of public services in post tsunami india summary how do ordinary citizens access the state in the world s largest democracy this paper examines a critical case from india exploring the channels formal and informal through which residents of two tsunami affected villages pursued public services following the 2004 disaster external shocks such as the proliferation of aid and ngos created moments in which individuals interacted differently with public agencies different village level groups attempted to access state resources through distinct sets of intermediaries marginalized groups women and caste minorities appeared most willing and likely to utilize formal government channels while men from the locally dominant caste turned to informal non state channels

firm characteristics and analyst following abstract this paper examines the major determinants of the number of analysts following a firm a simple model of analyst following is proposed and several firm characteristics are suggested that are likely to influence the extent of a firm s analyst following by either affecting the aggregate demand for or supply of analyst services or both for the firm almost all of these characteristics are found to be strongly significant in affecting the extent of analyst following of firms and the empirical results generally accord well with economic intuition

innovation policy rationales lessons and challenges innovation policy has emerged as a new field of economic policy during the last few decades this paper explores the rationales for national innovation policies as laid out in the existing literature on the subject and considers what the lessons and challenges for theory and practice in this area are innovation policy attempts to influence innovation activity often with the purpose of increasing economic growth but it can also have more specific aims such as preventing unwarranted climate change improving national health and so on the increasing attention given to innovation policy at the national level from the 1990s onwards went hand in hand with the development of a new systemic understanding of innovation which in a better way than before accounted for the stylised facts of innovation activity as identified by empirical work the system approach as the paper shows came to have a significant influence on the subsequent policy discourse drawing on recent advances in innovation systems theory a synthetic framework for the analysis of innovation policy is developed and used to highlight issues of particular relevance for the conduct of innovation policy and future scholarly work in this area less

the transformation of the swedish model economic ideas distributional conflict and institutional change this article examines the transformation of the swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective while the majority of arguments about the decline of the swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the swedish model the article details how during the 1930s and 1940s economic ideas provided the swedish state and its trade union allies with the means to construct the institutions of the swedish model by the 1970s however swedish business suffered diminishing returns to continued participation within these institutions and responded to labor s challenges by adopting a two pronged strategy of withdrawal from and ideological contestation of labor s supporting institutions the politics of ideas was key in this regard during the 1980s swedish business marshaled alternative economic ideas to contest and thus delegitimate existing institutions and the patterns of distribution they made possible swedish business thus began the process of overturning the swedish model long before capital mobility or domestic inflation was ever a problem by highlighting these factors the article offers an explanation of the transformation of the swedish model that stresses the centrality of ideational contestation for understanding institutional change in general

traps and sustainable development in rural areas a review summary the concept of a poverty trap commonly understood as a self reinforcing situation beneath an asset threshold has been very influential in describing the persistence of poverty and the relationship between poverty and sustainability although traps and the dynamics that lead to traps are defined and used differently in different disciplines the concept of a poverty trap has been most powerfully shaped by work in development economics this perspective is often constraining because as many studies show poverty arises from complex interactions between social and environmental factors that are rarely considered in development economics a more integrated understanding of poverty traps can help to understand the interrelations between persistent poverty and key social and ecological factors facilitating more effective development interventions the aim of this paper is to provide a critical appraisal of existing trap conceptualizations in different disciplines and to assess the characteristics and mechanisms that are used to explain poverty traps in rural contexts thereby broadening the traps concept to better account for social ecological interactions complementarities and tensions among different disciplinary perspectives on traps are identified and our results demonstrate that different definitions of traps share a set of common characteristics persistence undesirability and self reinforcement yet these minimum conditions are not sufficient to understand how trap dynamics arise from complex social ecological interactions to broaden the utility of the concept we propose a more social ecologically integrated definition of traps that includes four additional considerations cross scale interactions path dependencies the role of external drivers and social ecological diversity including these wider dimensions of trap dynamics would help to better account for the diverse social ecological feedbacks that produce and maintain poverty traps and could strengthen strategies to alleviate poverty in a more integrated way

saving children controlling families punishment redistribution and child protection this study shows that state efforts at child protection are structured by the policy regimes in which they are enmeshed using administrative data on child protection criminal justice and social welfare interventions i show that children are separated from their families and placed into foster care far more frequently in states with extensive and punitive criminal justice systems than in states with broad and generous welfare programs however large welfare bureaucracies interact with welfare program enrollment to create opportunities for the surveillance of families suggesting that extensive and administratively complex welfare states engage in soft social control through the surveillance and regulation of family behavior the article further shows that institutionalization a particularly restrictive form of foster care placement is least common in states with broad and generous welfare regimes and generally more common under punitive regimes taken together these findings show that policy regi

path shifting of the welfare state electoral competition and the expansion of work family policies in western europe what explains the surprising growth of work family policies in several west european countries much research on the welfare state emphasizes its institutional stickiness and immunity to major change yet over the past two decades governments in germany the netherlands and the united kingdom have introduced important reforms to their welfare regimes enacting paid leave schemes expanded rights to part time work and greater investments in child care a comparison of these countries reveals a similar sequence of political and policy change faced with growing electoral instability and the decline of core constituencies party leaders sought to attract dealigning voter groups such as women this led them to introduce feminizing reforms of their party structures and adopt policies to support mothers employment in all three cases women working within the parties played an important role in hatching or lobbying for these reforms after comparing three countries that moved in a path shifting direction this article engages in a brief traveling exercise examining whether a similar set of dynamics are lacking in two countries austria and italy that have moved more slowly in reforming these policies against the prevailing scholarly literature that emphasizes path dependence and slow moving change this article reveals the continued power of electoral politics in shaping redistributive policies

testing a causal model of corporate risk taking and performance the determinants of organizational risk taking and its impact on economic performance are critical issues in strategic management using a model that included risk performance performance expecta