addressing leakage in the eu ets border adjustment or output based allocation the eu ets has been criticised for threatening the competitiveness of european industry and generating carbon leakage i e increasing foreign greenhouse gas emissions two main options have been put forward to tackle these concerns border adjustments and output based allocation i e allocation of free allowances in proportion to current production we compare various configurations of these two options as well as a scenario with full auctioning and no border adjustment against this background we develop a model of the main sectors covered by the eu ets electricity steel cement and aluminium we conclude that the most efficient way to tackle leakage is auctioning with border adjustment which generally induces a negative leakage a spillover this holds even if the border adjustment does not include indirect emissions if it is based on eu rather than foreign specific emissions or for some values of the parameters if it covers only imports another relatively efficient policy is to combine auctioning in the electricity sector and output based allocation in exposed industries especially if free allowances are given both for direct and indirect emissions i e those generated by the generation of the electricity consumed although output based allocation is generally less effective than border adjustment to tackle leakage it is more effective to mitigate production losses in the sectors affected by the ets which may ease climate policy adoption c 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

carbon leakage and capacity based allocations is the eu right competitiveness and carbon leakage are major concerns for the design of co2 emissions permits markets in the absence of a global carbon tax and of border carbon adjustments output based allocation is a third best solution and is actually implemented australia california new zealand the eu has followed a different route free allowances are allocated to existing or new capacities in proportion to a benchmark independent of actual production this paper compares these two schemes in a formal setting and shows that the optimal one is in fact a combination of both schemes or output based allocation alone if uncertainty is limited a key assumption of our analysis is that the short term import pressure depends both on the existing capacities and the level of demand which is typical in capital intensive and internationally traded sectors a calibration of the model is used to discuss the eu scheme for the cement sector in the third phase of the eu ets 2013 2020 this allows for a quantification of various policies in terms of welfare investment production company profits public revenues and leakage

environmental policy under oligopoly with endogenous market structure emission taxes under both fixed number oligopoly and endogenous market structure which are the most relevant market structures for policy issues are examined in the latter case and contrary to what is expected under imperfect competition the optimal tax could exceed marginal external damages which implies that externalities generated by oligopolistic firms could be optimally controlled by overinternalizing environmental damages under endogenous market structure a scheme consisting of a license fee and a second best underinternalizing emission tax can increase social welfare as compared to the use of a single emission tax exceeding marginal damages copyright 1995 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

targeting capital a cultural economy approach to understanding the efficacy of two anti genetic engineering movements in the late 1990s the british anti genetic engineering ge movement effectively closed britain s market for genetically modified foods while the u s anti ge movement had a negligible impact in seeking to explain the different outcomes of these similar social movements the authors draw upon the global commodity chains gcc literature to extend the understanding of the economic and industry related openings and closures social movements face as they seek to promote social change this analysis not only illustrates the importance of economic structures and organization for movement outcomes but also shows how the economic sphere is culturally constituted in this fashion it broadens the social movement literature s understanding both of the way that political economy matters to movement efficacy and of the way that cultural processes infuse the economic sphere the study advances the gcc literature by showing how gccs are cultural as well as economic constructs

shaming the corporation the social production of targets and the anti sweatshop movement as social movements co evolve with changes in states and markets it is crucial to examine how they make particular kinds of actors into focal points for the expression of grievances and the demand for rights but researchers often bracket the question of why some kinds of organizations are more likely than others to become targets of social movement pressure we theorize the social production of targets by social movements rejecting a simple reflection model to focus on configurations of power and vulnerability that shape repertoires of contention empirically we extend structural accounts of global commodity chains and cultural accounts of markets to analyze the production of targets in the case of the anti sweatshop movement of the 1990s using a longitudinal firm level dataset and unique data on anti sweatshop activism we identify factors that attracted social movement pressure to particular companies firms power and positions strongly shaped their likelihood of becoming targets of anti swea

economists capitalists and the making of globalization north american free trade in comparative historical perspective why did globalization happen current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s such accounts disagree however about the key actors involved this article provides a reconciliation showing how two different combinations of actors and two different political economic pathways have led to globalization in recent decades in developed countries mobilization by business has been central elsewhere technocrats both constrained and empowered by international finance have pursued globalization more independently of business in both contexts economists technical authority has helped legitimate liberalization despite the limited diffusion of their ideas the article validates and elaborates this model using a comparative historical study of how the united states canada and mexico proposed negotiated and ratified agreements for free trade in north america

more on tax perception and labour supply the spanish case abstract we estimate the marginal tax rate perceived by married spanish males the results suggest the existence of prominent divergences between subjective perception and formal income tax rules the efficiency and welfare implications of this tax rate gap are also assessed

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

corporate unity in american trade policy a network analysis of corporate dyad political action this essay examines factors that produce political unity among large u s corporations advocating free trade expanding on old debates these data and analyses validate the importance of organizational and class cohesion approaches to corporate political action methodologically the political unity of pairs dyads of firms in trade policy activism is analyzed with quadratic assignment procedure regression shared membership in prominent policy networks and board interlocks positively predict corporate political unity across three areas of trade policy influence from the executive branch to the legislature non network organizational indicators also significantly predicted corporate trade policy activism the findings support business unity accounts of corporate political action and suggest that higher levels of firm embeddedness within intercorporate networks facilitate collective corporate political action

assessing empirical approaches for analyzing taxes and labor supply recent surveys on the labor supply responses of men document a divergence in the estimates of substitution and income effects obtained using various estimation approaches generally studies accounting for nonlinear tax schedules in a static setting via a piecewise linear approach produce estimates that typically imply higher substitution and lower income responses than are suggested by empirical work applying other approaches this paper demonstrates that maximum likelihood estimation of a consumer choice problem with nonlinear budget sets implicitly relies on the satisfaction of inequality constraints that translate into behaviorally meaningful restrictions these constraints arise not as a consequence of economic theory but instead as a requirement to create a properly defined statistical model in the analysis of piecewise linear budget sets the implicit constraints required by maximum likelihood in estimation amount to imposition of slutsky conditions at all wage income combinations associated with kink points in the analysis of differentiable budget sets the tacit constraints invoked by maximum likelihood also involve inequality restrictions on slutsky terms the empirical work presented in this study supports the contention that these implicit constraints play a major role in explaining the discrepancies in estimates found in the literature on men s labor supply

from production based to consumption based national emission inventories abstract under the united national framework convention of climate change unfccc countries are required to submit national emission inventories nei to benchmark reductions in greenhouse gas ghg emissions depending on the definition and system boundary of the nei the mitigation options and priorities may vary the territorial system boundary used by the unfccc has been critiqued for not including international transportation and potentially causing carbon leakage to address these issues past literature has argued in favour of using consumption based nei in climate policy this article discusses several issues in moving from the standard production based nei to consumption based nei first two distinct accounting approaches for constructing consumption based nei are presented the approaches differ in the allocation of intermediate consumption of imported products second a consistent method of weighting production based and consumption based nei is discussed this is an extension of the previous literature on shared responsibility to nei third due to increased uncertainty and a wide system boundary it may be difficult to implement consumption based nei directly into climate policy several alternative options for incorporating consumption based inventories into climate policy are discussed

competition in regional environmental policies when plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region model is presented in which an imperfectly competitive firm produces a good with increasing returns at the plant level production of the good causes local pollution the firm decides whether to maintain plants in both regions serve both regions from a single plant or shut down if the disutility of pollution is high enough the two regions will compete by increasing their environmental taxes standards until the polluting firm is driven from the market alternatively if the disutility from pollution is not as great the regions will usually compete by undercutting each other s pollution tax rates

leveraging reputational risk sustainable sourcing campaigns for improving labour standards in production networks ethical or socially sustainable sourcing mechanisms mandating labour standards among the suppliers and subcontractors that organisations source goods and services from are becoming more common the issue of how labour activist groups such as trade unions can encourage organisations to adopt and strengthen these mechanisms within domestic production networks is largely unexplored using three cases of domestic sustainable sourcing campaigns developed by unions in britain the strategies used by labour activists the characteristics of the organisations targeted and the motivations of lead firms for improving sourcing practices are analysed the article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that organisational susceptibility to reputational risk is a key factor influencing the capacity of activist groups to convince and compel their targets to improve sourcing practices it argues that different types of organisations are susceptible to reputational damage in different ways that risk events provide opportunities for unions to strengthen their leverage against target organisations and that the multidimensional nature of corporate reputation needs to be better considered for understanding how campaigns are framed and executed

efficient climate policy with internationally mobile firms a major concern in the design of an incomplete climate agreement is thatfirms that use fossil fuels intensively may respond to emission regulationsby relocating their plants from cooperating to non cooperating countries this paper analyses how the cooperating countries might deal with the issueof firm delocation through emission taxes trade provisions and alocalisation subsidy to mobile firms it is shown that firms should not beinduced to stay in the cooperating countries by lowering emission taxesbelow the pigouvian tax rate incentives to stay should be given partlythrough trade provisions and partly through a localisation subsidy a secondbest solution without localisation subsidies is also discussed in thatcase the efficient emission tax is lower than the pigouvian tax rate finally the paper discusses the implications of the first best and thesecond best policy regimes for the pattern of firm localisation

climate cooperation with technology investments and border carbon adjustment a central question in climate policy is whether early investments in low carbon technologies are a useful first step towards a more effective climate agreement in the future we introduce a climate cooperation model with endogenous r d investments where countries protect their international competitiveness via border carbon adjustments bca bca raises the scope for cooperation and leads to a non trivial relation between countries prior r d investments and participation in the coalition we find that early investments in r d render free riding more attractive therefore with delayed cooperation on emission abatement and ex ante r d investments the outcome is often characterized by high participation but inefficiently low technology investments and abatement

border adjustments supplementing nationally determined carbon pricing as agreed on in the paris agreement each country determines its own contribution to combat climate change on a voluntary basis there is no mechanism to force a country to comply with its own nationally determined contributions this bottom up approach builds on unilateral actions and yields a kind of carbon pricing which is not necessarily identical across countries as a consequence these nationally determined climate policies have drawbacks in terms of carbon leakage and loss of competitiveness for firms producing in high carbon price countries to reduce these negative effects border adjustments bas may be appropriate subsequent to more stringent environmental regulation we model a three stage game involving carbon price competition in the first stage the introduction of bas in the second stage and oligopolistic competition between firms in the third stage strategic trade theory suggests that the qualitative results about the optimal ba policy may vary with the underlying type of competition namely bertrand and cournot competition however our results are similar for both types of competition we conclude that bas are suitable for supporting a more stringent environmental policy moreover we find that anticipation of the implementation of bas in the second stage yields higher average carbon prices in the first stage since high carbon price countries increase their carbon prices whereas the other countries partially offset

coordinating climate and trade policies pareto efficiency and the role of border tax adjustments abstract this paper explores the role of trade instruments in globally efficient climate policies focusing on whether or not some form of border tax adjustment bta is warranted when carbon prices differ internationally the analysis shows that while there is no case for bta when all instruments can be freely deployed pareto efficiency does require a form of bta when carbon taxes in some countries are constrained its purpose then is to partly counteract the impact on emissions of inappropriate carbon pricing there or equivalently to undo the trade distortions such pricing creates the required form of bta is generally complex but a special case is identified in which it optimally has the simple structure envisaged in practical policy discussions it is also shown that the efficiency case for bta depends critically on whether climate policies are pursued by carbon taxation or by cap and trade

constructing polities and markets an institutionalist account of european integration as institutions and governance structures develop in modern markets they tend to feed back onto economic activity through such feedback loops market and political arenas can develop symbiotically into relatively coherent fields that gradually embed actors orientations and activities using these insights this article develops and tests a theory of european integration focusing on the case of the european community the first pillar of the european union traders organized interests courts and the ec s policy making organs over time have produced a self sustaining causal system that has driven the construction of the european market and polity the generality of this explanation to a sociology of markets and polity building projects is discussed in the conclusion

the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of married men in sweden abstract this paper presents labor supply functions estimated on a sample of prime age swedish males the model used takes account of the nonlinear character of individuals budget sets caused by the progressive income tax it also allows preferences to vary between individuals calculations with the estimated functions using a partial equilibrium framework indicate a sizeable effect of the income tax on hours of work the average expected deadweight loss of the income tax is found to be approximately 20 percent of tax revenue

european emission trading scheme and competitiveness a case study on the iron and steel industry abstract we quantify the impact of the european emission trading scheme ets on the two dimensions of competitiveness production and profitability for the iron and steel industry among those covered by the scheme this sector is one of the most exposed since it is both highly co 2 intensive and relatively open to international trade we also examine the robustness of these results to various assumptions marginal abatement cost curve trade and demand elasticities as well as pass through rates and updating of allocation rules of which the latter two are scarcely debated we conclude that for this sector competitiveness losses are small we prove this conclusion to be robust hence arguments against tightening the environmental stringency of the ets in phase ii are not justified on grounds of competitiveness loss our systematic sensitivity analysis allows us to identify the important assumptions for each output variable it turns out that pass through rates and updating rules are significant despite being often implicit and least debated in existing analyses

policy generosity employer heterogeneity and women s employment opportunities the welfare state paradox reexamined scholars of comparative family policy research have raised concerns about potential negative outcomes of generous family policies an issue known as the welfare state paradox they suspect that s

the rebirth of the liberal creed paths to neoliberalism in four countries1 since the 1970s market based economic policies have been institutionalized as a nearly global policy paradigm using four national case studies this article shows that economic and financial globalization played a critical role in fostering the transition to neoliberal policies but that local institutional conditions were decisive in shaping the nature and meaning of the shift while the analysis finds that developing countries appear more dependent upon direct external pressures than developed ones it also shows that institutionalized patterns of state society relations determined the way in which neoliberal transitions were carried out somewhat irrespectively of the level of economic development in chile and britain poorly mediated distributional conflict created the ideological conditions for a monetarist revolution in mexico and france on the other hand neoliberalism was understood mainly as a necessary step to adapt the country to the international economy

why free trade losers support free trade industrialists and the surprising politics of trade reform in brazil the rush to free trade that began in latin america in the 1980s remains inadequately explained among several puzzles connected with this shift the degree of support for free trade among industrialists especially stands out this article argues that the inability to account for industrialists behavior lies in political economy s tendency to derive preferences from market position instead the author argues that contextual factors shape preferences and behavior he makes the argument by examining brazilian industrialists a least likely group to endorse the policy shift the author provides evidence that brazilian industrialists supported commercial liberalization despite real distributive consequences factors that help explain support include the effects of economic crisis bundling of free trade with other desirable policies the prevalence of adjustment options and the absence of a distinct class of losers the author relies on survey evidence business rankings and documentary evidence to mak

border carbon adjustments addressing emissions embodied in trade approximately one fourth of global emissions are embodied in international trade and a significant portion flows from non carbon priced to carbon priced economies border carbon adjustments bcas figure prominently as instruments to address concerns arising from unilateral climate policy estimating the volume of emissions that could be potentially taxed under a bca scheme has received little attention until now this paper examines how a number of issues involved in the implementation of bcas can affect their ability to cover emissions embodied in trade and thus address carbon leakage these issues range from ensuring compliance with trade provisions and assumptions on the carbon intensity of imports to determining which countries are included and whether intermediate and final demand are considered here we show that the volume of co2 captured by a scheme that involved all annex b countries could be significantly reduced due to these issues particularly by trade provisions such as the principle of best available technology bat as a consequence the tariff burdens faced by non annex b parties could dwindle considerably these findings have important policy implications as they question the effectiveness and practicalities of bcas to reduce carbon leakage and alleviate competitiveness concerns adding further arguments against their implementation

economic behavior in institutional environments the corporate merger wave of the 1980s over the last 100 years the united states has experienced four waves of corporate merger activity the first occurred at the turn of the century then again in the 1920s the 1960s and the 1980s most research on merger waves has focused on individual mergers within a wave our research focuses on the wave itself we develop a theoretical model that centers on the actors who promote the mergers and on those changes in the political and economic environments that provide the resources these actors need to act specifically we argue that a permissive state combined with increased access to capital market funds encourages fringe players to initiate the innovations that enable them to execute mergers merger waves occur when these actors become increasingly successful and their innovations are imitated throughout the business community we provide empirical support for the model using data from the 1980 s merger wave

to b ta or not to b ta on the legality and desirability of border tax adjustments from a trade perspective this paper asks two questions concerning border tax adjustments for climate purposes when viewed from a trade perspective first under what conditions are btas possible in the wto world to address this issue the paper provides a detailed discussion of the relevant law and case law we also apply our main conclusions to what we consider to be paradigmatic cases of measures to address climate change where trade concerns are raised we conclude that the wto regime is no major obstacle to those aspiring to use btas although the allocation of the burden of proof could be a concern the second issue addressed is whether the economic literature on the desirability of btas adequately reflects concerns that have been raised in the trade policy community here we conclude that it has hardly addressed these concerns at all we also point to some aspects of btas that would need to be taken into account in a more complete analysis

is there a consensus among economists in the 1990 s in a 1976 survey kearl et al 1979 hereafter the 1976 survey concluded that the then widespread perception that there was little agreement among professional economists on matters of theory or policy was simply wrong however the most casual empiricism namely the continuing popularity of jokes about disagreements among economists suggests the perception of noneconomists has not changed much since the 1970 s what is the present state of consensus among economists this question is of interest because more than a decade has elapsed since the 1976 survey and during this time many issues confronting economists and the composition of the profession have changed 1 benjamin m friedman and lawrence h summers 1991 p ix for example have asserted that economic thinking in many subfields of the discipline now differs markedly from what it was in 1970 consensus among european economists has been examined by bruno s frey et al 1984 martin ricketts and edward shoesmith 1990 1992 focus exclusively on british economic opinion this paper provides the first general analysis of opinions of u s economists in more than a decade i the survey and questionnaire

acquisitions as exaptation the legacy of founding institutions in the u s commercial banking industry this study focuses on how founding institutions impact intraorganizational capabilities and how such imprints may have different external manifestations in subsequent historical eras we introduce the concept of exaptation to organizational theory identifying an important process whereby the historical origin of a capability differs from its current usefulness three founding conditions branching policy modernization and political culture influenced banks development of capabilities for managing dispersed branches and these capabilities subsequently led to variation in banks propensity to engage in acquisitions

intellectual property protection and antitrust in the developing world crisis coercion and choice after the economic crisis of the early 1980s developing countries adopted new policies regarding intellectual property protection only as a result of a coercive u s strategy consistent with a neorealist explanation based on power targeted countries have complied only on paper not in practice however in contrast hegemonic powers have not employed overt coercion in the area of antitrust policy consistent with interpretivist neoliberalism which emphasizes learning and voluntarism a nuanced analysis of power and ideas is necessary to account for the differences between the cases the different mechanisms through which the new policies have been adopted suggest different prospects for these new policies

why should trade negotiators negotiate about in recent years there have been growing demands to make trade liberalization contingent on adoption of common labor and environmental standards the straightforward economic answer is that this makes little sense neither the gains from trade nor the gains from appropriate regulation are compromised if other countries impose standards that are weaker than your own it is possible to offer second bet economic rationales for harmonization but these are empirically unconvincing the only serious argument in favor or regulation is political that regulation which is in the national interest may not be politically feasible unless other countries do the same

organizational environments in flux the impact of regulatory punctuations on organizational domains ceo succession and performance a central debate in organizational theory concerns how organizations evolve there are two diametrically opposing viewpoints adaptation theories predict that change occurs as fluid organizations adjust to meet shifting environmental demands while selection theories predict that change occurs through the differential selection and replacement of inert organizations as environmental demands vary over time our paper bridges these polar opposites by using a punctuated equilibrium framework to examine organizations responses to discontinuous industry level change this framework recognizes that the histories of many industries are occasionally punctuated by dramatic exogenous shocks such as radical technological innovation social and political turmoil major changes in government regulation and economic crashes our central thesis is that such environmental punctuations dramatically reduce pressures and rewards for organizational inertia and thereby alter both organizations propensities for change and their survival chances following change we focus on one form of punctuation major regulatory change and study firms in two industries general hospitals and savings and loan associations for organizations in both industries we examine three important outcomes shifts in organizational domain ceo succession and changes in financial performance our analyses show that punctuational regulatory change prompts shifts in organizational domains and executive leadership additionally post punctuation domain change and post punctuation ceo succession both affect subsequent performance we discuss our results in light of current thinking about the content and process effects of core organizational change which has been developed in the context of stable environments finally we argue for the development of more temporally sensitive theories of organizational action

optimal pollution taxation in a cournot duopoly it is well known that the optimal pollution tax in a competitive industry is equal to the marginal damage inflicted by the pollution it has also been shown that the optimal pollution tax on a monopoly is less than the marginal damage in this paper i derive the optimal pollution tax for a cournot duopoly if firms have different production costs the optimal tax rate may exceed the marginal damage this is so because the tax may be an effective instrument for allocating production from the less to the more efficient firm it is also shown that if one firm has a positive most preferred pollution tax the sum of consumer and producer surpluses will be declining in the tax at this level

system maker and privilege taker u s power and the international political economy there is striking consistency in the international economic behavior of the united states across the bipolar and unipolar eras the united states has been simultaneously a system maker and privilege taker and its ability to play that dual role has required the willing collaboration of foreign partners u s influence over those partners however has changed in important ways during the cold war the united states dominated international economic adjustment struggles its ability to prevail in those struggles after the cold war has been significantly compromised the united states notwithstanding its preponderant power no longer enjoys the same type of security leverage it once possessed and the very success of the u s centered world economy has opened a greater range of international and domestic economic options for america s supporters in the unipolar era the united states may continue to act its own way but it can no longer count on getting its own way

the economics of movement success business responses to civil rights mobilization1 this article explores why movements are successful in obtaining concessions from economic actors while social movement theorists have suggested that economic actors weigh the costliness of protests the author considers the vulnerability of movement targets to both the cost of disruptions in routine transactions and the cost of conceding to movement demands by addressing the magnitude of these costs and their interaction the author derives an economic opportunity structure to predict the receptivity of economic actors to movement demands and the likely struggles among them over the decision to yield also this cost assessment approach reveals patterns of vulnerability across economic sectors to the costs of disruptive mobilization the author tests this analysis based on case studies of the responses of economic actors to civil rights mobilization in the 1960s in five southern localities these cases depict how the character of protest and variation in the configuration of business communities defined

estimating the perceived tax scale within a labor supply model the swedish marginal tax scale is too complex to be known in detail by individuals this paper indicates that perceived tax scales can be estimated jointly with a labor supply equation the differe

the welfare consequences of pollution tax harmonization a key and often controversial issue in environmental negotiations is the appropriate extent of harmonization of environmental policies this paper within a general equilibrium model of international trade with endogenous pollution discharges identifies instances in which pollution tax harmonization can deliver potential pareto improvements

the contingent nature of public policy and the growth of u s commercial banking runner up academy of management s best published paper in organization and management theory in 2009

how environmentalists greened trade policy strategic action and the architecture of field overlap this article examines why and how environmental activists despite considerable political weakness and disproportionally few resources won substantive negotiating concessions that far outstripped labor achievements during nafta s negotiation despite a trade policy arena hostile to their demands environmentalists gained official recognition for the legitimacy of their claims obtained a seat at the negotiating table turned a previously technocratic concern into a highly visible populist issue and won an environmental side agreement stronger than its labor counterpart we argue that this unexpected outcome is best explained by environmentalists strategic use of mechanisms available at the intersection of multiple fields while field theory mainly focuses on interactions within a particular field we suggest that the structure of overlap between fields the architecture of field overlap creates unique points of leverage that render particular targets more vulnerable and certain strategies more effective

the econometrics of nonlinear budget sets traditional empirical analysis of consumer demand has usually made the assumption of linear budget sets that is the consumer is assumed to purchase any desired quantity at a constant price subject to a budget constraint the major exception to this framework is the analysis of demand when some goods are rationed 2 in the rationed case the price is constant up to a quantity limit in contrast to the rationed case here i consider the situation where the price varies with the amount of the good purchased empirical situations with nonconstant prices come readily to mind and of course they have received much recent attention from theorists since mirrlees 44 paper on optimal nonlinear taxation the following examples are meant to give a partial listing of cases when nonlinear budget sets occur i electricity prices many electric utilities engage in declining block pricing that is the marginal price of successive kwh s of electricity decrease at a given number of points determined by total demand thus the budget set is piecewise linear houthakker 36 was the first to propose an approach to this problem taylor 51 analyzes the problem at length and hausman kinnucin and mcfadden 31 use an instrumental variables estimator to provide consistent estimates of the demand function

beyond the policy frontier canada mexico and the ideological origins of nafta why are certain foreign policy options considered taboo or simply kept off the agenda as necessarily unthinkable or self destructive and under what conditions can governments transcend such policy frontiers this article seeks to answer these questions by examining the circumstances that brought about canada s and mexico s entry into the north american free trade agreement nafta a move that constituted a surprising reversal of historic prohibitions on formalizing bilateral economic integration that had long been entrenched in these two nations foreign policies policy frontiers develop as certain elements of the national interest sovereignty security and identity become equated with the legitimation of state elites when these leaders defend the policy frontier ostensibly to defend the nation they are also defending their own political power these barriers are constructed in a path dependent fashion through a critical juncture that first establishes the frontier and then are maintained over time by institutional and ideological mechanisms of reproduction for the frontier to be transcended a critical juncture combining an exogenous shock with an internal legitimacy crisis must undermine and then reconfigure both mechanisms of reproduction the origins of nafta in the canadian and mexican embrace of the once forbidden bilateral free trade option in 1985 and 1990 respectively illustrate this dynamic while the individual cases offer variations on the policy frontier model that can provide insights into the analysis of other cases of historically resisted foreign policy change

comparing policies to combat emissions leakage border carbon adjustments versus rebates we explore conditions determining which anti leakage policies might be more effective complements to domestic greenhouse gas emissions regulation we consider four policies that could be combined with unilateral emissions pricing to counter effects on international competitiveness a border charge on imports a border rebate for exports full border adjustment and domestic output based rebating each option faces different potential legal hurdles in international trade law each also has different economic impacts while all can support competitiveness none is necessarily effective at reducing global emissions nor is it possible to rank order the options effectiveness depends on the relative emissions rates elasticities of substitution and consumption volumes we illustrate these results with simulations for the energy intensive sectors of three different economies the united states canada and europe although most controversial full border adjustment is usually most effective but output based rebating for key manufacturing sectors can achieve many of the gains

industrial policy and the creation of new industries evidence from brazil s bioethanol industry industrial policy programs are frequently used by governments to stimulate economic activity in particular sectors of the economy this study explores how an industrial policy program can affect the creation and evolution of an industry and ultimately the long term performance of firms we examine the history of the brazilian bioethanol industry focusing on the industrial policy program implemented by the brazilian government in the 1970s to develop the industry we put together a novel data set containing detailed information about the history of bioethanol producers our findings show that plants founded during the industrial policy program tend to be in the long run more productive than those founded before the program was in place based on additional analyses and complementary fieldwork we infer that the wave of acquisitions that occurred after the end of the industrial policy program had an important effect on the performance of the plants founded when the program was in place industrial policy especially in conjunction with a competitive post industrial policy business landscape can succeed in nurturing competitive firms

the decline of social entrenchment social network cohesion and board responsiveness to shareholder activism shareholder activism through corporate governance proposals is a prominent avenue for investors to voice their concerns in corporate governance matters however shareholder proposals have an uneven effect on corporate governance this paper contributes to research on shareholder activism by joining social movement approaches to activism with network theoretic approaches to corporate governance the paper examines how firms position within cohesive sections of the board interlock network termed social entrenchment predicts 1 the likelihood of being targeted by activist investors and 2 firms responsiveness to proposal demands first a firm s position in the board network serves as a salient network prism attracting activists attention this is especially true for activist investors who lack other backchannel avenues for engagement or seek to use public reputational penalties as part of their activism strategy second the board network traditionally served as an important collective infrastruc

the state courts and maternity policies in u s organizations specifying institutional mechanisms we analyze the dynamic interaction of state institutions and organizational policies through an analysis of leave benefits in u s organizations following the pregnancy leave act of 1978 and the family and medical leave act of 1993 organizations have been required by law to allow workers to take time off from work for childbearing and childrearing yet organizations vary on whether they offer full time employees benefits that actually facilitate leave for family responsibilities we analyze the determinants of the organizational decision to offer paid maternity leave to full time employees we compare these findings to the determinants of the organizational decision to offer paid sick leave to full time employees our analysis suggests that organizations have taken an activist approach to their institutional environments in the face of federal definitions of the law that mandated gender neutral policies in the workplace and linked pregnancy to disability those organizations that most often deal with maternity issues e g those located in female dominated industries have institutionalized sick leave policies often instead ofmaternity leave to accommodate pregnant employees the analysis examines specific aspects of the institutional environment at the state and federal levels to illuminate these trends

from poverty to perversity ideas markets and institutions over 200 years of welfare debate to understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony we compare the u s 1996 personal responsibility and work opportunities reconciliation act and the english 1834 new poor law two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market driven ones despite dramatic differences across the cases both outcomes were mobilized by the perversity thesis a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor s condition from poverty to perversity we use the term ideational embeddedness to characterize the power of such ideas to shape structure and change market regimes the success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism theoretical realism and the conversion narrative in the poverty to perversity conversion narrative structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare s perverse incentives on poor people themselves

the political economy of international trade enduring puzzles and an agenda for inquiry a similar set of concepts has been central to the literatures on the formation of trade policy coalitions and the new economics of institutions the political and economic consequences of the degree to which assets are specific to a particular economic activity in this survey the authors take the necessary first step of summarizing the main findings of these two literatures and then suggest ways in which the issue might be joined in addition to providing a more coherent understanding of the findings of these two literatures and some new directions for them the authors show that many puzzles remain in the field of trade politics puzzles for which there are no appealing answers or where there are answers no strong evidence in support of them this essay then in addition to being a theoretical review of the literature puts forward an agenda for future study of international trade politics

phase transitions and emergence of entrepreneurship the transformation of chinese soes over time abstract configurational theory has been a key building block of organizational research an understanding of how certain configurations evolve over time especially during discontinuous changes such as economic transition has been largely a missing link in the literature considering economic transition as a process rather than an outcome this study examined strategic adaptations among chinese soes in two phases 1990 and 2002 findings from two surveys and from interviews revealed that environmental characteristics changed significantly over time and that firms responded with more entrepreneurial strategies aimed at firm growth rather than at satisfying state planners such changes were related to improved performance the study closes by offering implications for research and practice

character conformity or the bottom line how and why downsizing affected corporate reputation the aim of this study is to illuminate reputational change processes and identify the underlying theoretical mechanisms we draw upon extant literature to develop three distinct explanations for reputational change respectively emphasizing criteria of organizational character symbolic conformity and technical efficacy we evaluate these explanations by examining the reputational consequences of corporate downsizing our results show that downsizing exerted a strong negative effect on reputation consistently with the character explanation however significant moderation of this negative effect by other factors including stock market reaction and downsizing s overall prevalence indicates the need for a multitheoretical approach to reputational change

the state led transition to liberal capitalism neoliberal organizational world systems and social structural explanations of poland s economic success neoliberals argue that rapid liberalization and privatization can transform postcommunist economies into western style capitalist systems organizational sociologists argue that these policies produce a unique variety of capitalism while world systems theorists argue that they lead to underdevelopment this article advances a social structural alternative in a crucial case poland s relative economic success resulted from prolonged state ownership and an interventionist state employing various industrial policy tools that facilitated efficiency enhancing market oriented restructuring before ushering in beneficial foreign direct investment the resulting capitalist system closely resembles the typical pattern found in most late industrializers

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

on the origin of strategy action and cognition over time we develop a perspective on how managers search for a strategy in the spirit of cyert and march 1963 we aim for a perspective that reflects the reality of managerial behavior that respects both the reasoning power of managers and the bounds on their rationality and that permits organizations to change but within realistic limits our perspective employs the variable time to frame the question of strategy s origins in a distinctive way over time the cognitive and physical elements that make up a strategy become less plastic while mechanisms to search rationally for a strategy become more available this generates a fundamental tension in the origin of strategy managers struggle to understand their environment well enough to search rationally for an effective strategy before their firms lose the plasticity necessary to exploit that understanding a focus on time allows us to synthesize and extend the evolutionary and positioning models of strategic search toward this end we couple induction and deduction the inductive part of the paper uses detailed observation of the search for a strategy at one firm to identify constructs that play a crucial role in strategic search the deductive part steps beyond our focal firm and uses these constructs to derive theoretical propositions about the typical path of strategic search and the mortality associated with different approaches to search

the origins and sustainability of mexico s free trade policy standard explanations for trade liberalization do not fully account for mexico s turn toward free trade during the 1980s to a large extent the initiative came from within the country even many mexican entrepreneurs whose sectors seem likely to lose from increased competition now support trade liberalization four conditions lowered the political cost benefit ratio for policymakers and entrepreneurs first mexico s leaders dispersed implementation into several financial ministries thereby better insulating this policy from lobbying by the likely losers second potential losers were less well informed than were likely winners third under these conditions the liberal ideological biases of mexican elite policymakers and investors flourished prompting them to accept a higher political cost than would have been tolerated otherwise finally many mexicans came to perceive trade liberalization as a necessary tool in the fight against inflation each of these hypotheses however also flags a possible threat to the policy s future political survival