THE LIMITS OF CAREER CONCERNS IN FEDERALISM: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

Performance‐based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who have risen from low to high positions within the province they govern (“locals”) spend a higher share of budgetary resources on education and health care and invest less in construction infrastructure than party secretaries who have made their most significant career advancements in other provinces (“outsiders”). Identification comes from variation in central leadership and term limits. As the promotion mechanism rewards infrastructure investments, locals are less likely to be promoted at the end of the term. We explore various mechanisms and provide evidence that the difference between locals and outsiders is not driven by knowledge or experience. Several pieces of evidence suggest that locals cater to low‐level provincial elites, who helped them rise to power. Thus, local career trajectories limit the power of career concerns by fostering competing allegiances.     

Shareholder activism among portfolio managers: rational decisions or 15 minutes of fame?

This paper investigates shareholder activism by observing Swedish portfolio managers’ behavior at firms’ annual general meetings. Institutional shareholders’ voting behavior and tendencies for raising opinions at the general meetings are related to firm characteristics, suggested by both agency theory and institutional perspectives. The results show that institutional shareholders are more likely to be active in large firms, which appear a lot in media, and have a large proportion of institutional ownership. Portfolio managers appear not to consider bad firm performance as a reason for targeting firms. Instead, managers’ behavior is consistent with the institutional notion that they benefit from the activism themselves, without trying to improve target firms’ performance. In view of this notion, it is rational for managers to be active in large firms, with large media coverage, achieving their 15 minutes of fame at the general meetings.     

Governing Project-based Firms: Promoting Market-like Processes within Hierarchies

This article takes an empirical point of departure in an in-depth study of an R&D organization that was transformed into a strongly project-based organization. As demonstrated in the analysis, its mode of governance differed radically from traditional bureaucratic and cultural conceptions of governance. Instead the new “rules-of-the-game” introduced amounted to creating an institutional framework, promoting new individual responsibilities and enabling lower level market-like processes of self-organizing discovery. The specific set-up used, included anew organization structure, new responsibilities, etc and the use of “prices”, playing a role both in shaping incentives and guiding knowledge work. The interpretation put forward relies on combining economic theories of governance with more “fine-grained” organization theories, and suggests that there is some discretion for top managers to engage in the design of a market-promoting mode of governance for their project-based firms. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW): Design and results from the baseline of a 5-year study

This paper presents the background, design and baseline results of the Intervention Project on Absence and Well-being (IPAW). IPAW is a 5-year psychosocial work environment intervention study including 22 intervention and 30 control work-sites from three different types of work-site (a large pharmaceutical company, municipal technical services, and municipal nursing homes) in Copenhagen, Denmark. The baseline survey reported in this paper was conducted in 1996-97, and the cohort was followed until 2002. Interventions took place during 1996-98 at the organizational and interpersonal level and focused on psychological demands, social support, control, meaning of work, and predictability. The main end-points are self-rated health, perceived stress, absence from work, job satisfaction, and labour turnover. Analyses of the baseline data show good reliability of the psychosocial scales and a number of clear associations between psychosocial work environment factors and health indicators. The baseline data also demonstrate several discrepancies between the planned design of the study and the actual implementation of the project in practice.     

A spatial analysis of indigenous cover patterns and implications for ecological restoration in urban centres,New Zealand

High levels of endemism, the sensitivity of species that have evolved without humans, and the invasion of exotic species have all contributed to severe depletion of indigenous biodiversity in New Zealand. We considered the contribution that urban restoration can make to maximising biodiversity by analysing landcover patterns from two national databases along an urban–rural gradient. Thirteen of 20 land environments in New Zealand are represented in cities, and nearly three-quarters of all acutely threatened land environments are represented within 20 km of city cores nationally. Despite this, remaining indigenous landcover is low within urban cores, with less than 2% on average, but increasing to more than 10% on average in the periurban zone. Threatened lowland environments are most commonly represented within cities, and least represented within protected natural areas. Restoration of existing urban habitat is insufficient to halt biodiversity loss. Ecosystem reconstruction is required to achieve a target of 10% indigenous cover within cities. A co-ordinated national urban biodiversity plan to address issues beyond a local and regional focus is needed. Analysis of national patterns of urban land environments, indigenous cover and remnant ecosystems will support action at a regional and local level while enhancing national and global biodiversity goals.     

Finite-Sample Properties of Some Alternative GMM Estimators

We investigate the small-sample properties of three alternative generalized method of moments (GMM) estimators of asset-pricing models. The estimators that we consider include ones in which the weighting matrix is iterated to convergence and ones in which the weighting matrix is changed with each choice of the parameters. Particular attention is devoted to assessing the performance of the asymptotic theory for making inferences based directly on the deterioration of GMM criterion functions.     

Gender Differences in the Development of Dieting From Adolescence to Early Adulthood: A Longitudinal Study

This study examines gender differences in the development of dieting among a representative sample of 1,368 Norwegian boys and girls. The respondents were followed over 3 time points from ages 13/14 to 20/21. Latent growth curve analyses were conducted showing that girls' dieting scores increased while boys' scores remained constant. Gender differences in the development of dieting could be explained neither by differences in the development of appearance dissatisfaction nor by changes in relation to parents. In contrast, the dieting differences between boys and girls could be partially explained by a greater increase in emotional problems among girls compared with boys. Further research is needed, targeting in particular younger age groups, in order to acquire knowledge on whether appearance dissatisfaction serves as mediator of gender differences in dieting at other ages.     

Young and out: An application of a prospects-based concept of social exclusion

We develop a forward-looking empirical concept of social exclusion based on the estimated transition probabilities from a random effects multinominal Logit-model. Youths are considered socially excluded if they are currently outside school/work and have a low predicted probability of re-entering in the near future. Implemented on extraordinary rich event-history data of compulsory school graduates, we estimate social exclusion among Norwegian youths and find that social exclusion propensity is (i) non-cyclical; (ii) much more prevalent among young adults in their early twenties than among teenagers; (iii) strongly dependent on family background; and (iv) independent of gender.     

Health economic modeling to support surgery management at a Swedish hospital

Elective surgery management typically deals with a queue of patients that have to be scheduled for surgery within a certain time frame, considering both medical and economic constraints. In order to prevent the patient queue and waiting times from growing, surgery management has to decide whether to temporarily increase patient throughput at the regional hospital or have some patients scheduled for surgery at another hospital. In Sweden, a newly passed law states that patients who decide to receive surgery should not have to wait more than 90 days before this surgery is carried out. Therefore, if a patient decides to apply the new law by requesting surgery within 90 days, the regional hospital is obliged to arrange and pay for either in-house surgery or surgery at another hospital. In this paper, we suggest an approach using simulation including optimization for modeling surgery management decisions. We study a case based on data from a General Surgery Department at a Swedish hospital and present our results as a health economic evaluation. The results indicate an increase in the mean waiting times for medium prioritized patients when the new law is applied.