Civic capacity: Building on transformational leadership to explain successful integrative public leadership

An emerging stream of work has been investigating the leadership processes necessary to guide public multi-sector collaborations. This stream of work argues that new leadership theory about integrative public leadership is needed because the context is different from that traditionally investigated by leadership researchers. In this paper, we advance the study of integrative public leadership by arguing that transformational leadership theory does apply to multi-sector collaborations, but needs to be augmented with an additional construct called “civic capacity.” We elaborate on this construct and suggest that it consists of three components: civic drive, civic connections, and civic pragmatism.     

Payout policy,taxes, and corporate insiders: evidence from the German Tax Reduction Act 2001

Based on a large panel data set of listed German firms we analyze the corporate payout behavior around the German Tax Reduction Act 2001 (GTRA). The GTRA has considerably changed the tax preference of shareholders and consequently affected the attractiveness of different forms of payout. Using the tax reform as an exogenous source of variation we examine whether payout decisions are driven by corporate insiders or by influential shareholders. We find that the GTRA 2001 reduced both the propensity to pay dividends as well as their size. However, we find that in those firms where management board members hold substantial stakes, dividend payout behavior has not changed in the aftermath of the GTRA. This effect does not depend on the existence of other influential shareholders as for instance institutional shareholders. Hence, we conclude that the dividend policy is strongly driven by the interests of corporate insiders.     

Migration to European Countries: A Structural Explanation of Patterns, 1980–20041

Various theoretical approaches have provided us with insights to explain the pattern of migration flows. Economic theory considers migration to be a reaction to labor market and economic incentives. Cultural theories predict that migration flows will occur according to a center‐periphery pattern, while social network analysis assumes that migrants follow already established migration networks. We test these three approaches simultaneously, using OECD and Eurostat data on the migrant inflow into the European countries between 1980 and 2004. The analysis demonstrates that migration flows react to economic incentives, mainly with regard to the labor market, but also to cultural and colonial linkages. There is no indication that the importance of the colonial past is declining over time. The response of migration patterns to shortages in the labor market is shown to be highly efficient, while the analysis shows that immigrants are not attracted by high levels of social expenditure.     

Blowing in the wind

Part of the answer to rising energy needs and costs may literally be blowing in the wind. Among sustainable sources of electricity, only wind energy has the capacity and technology needed to compete in the open marketplace. The largest onshore wind farm in Europe is being built in Scotland, the largest in the USA is planned for southern California, and the biggest offshore wind farm production in the world is slated for the Thames Estuary. But wind is intermittent. Marc Genton and Amanda Hering explain how advanced statistical techniques will enable wind energy to be more efficiently incorporated into the electrical grid.     

The informational basis of the theory of fair allocation

The theory of fair allocation is often favourably contrasted with the social choice theory in the search for escape routes from Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Its success is commonly attributed to the fact that it is modest in its goal vis-à-vis social choice theory, since it does not aspire for a full-fledged ordering of options, and settles with a subset of ‘fair’ options. We show that its success may rather be attributable to a broadened informational basis thereof. To substantiate this claim, we compare the informational basis of the theory of fair allocation with the informational requirements of social choice theory.This paper is derived from a part of an earlier draft of our paper entitled ‘Informational requirements for social choice in economic environments’. The authors thank A. Trannoy, an associate editor and three referees for comments, and participants at seminars in University of Cergy-Pontoise, University of Rochester, Hitotsubashi University, and Waseda University, and the 5th International Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in Alicante. Financial support from the Ministry of Education of Japan through Grant-in-Aid No. 10045010 (‘Economic Institutions and Social Norms: Evolution and Transformation’) and the 21st Century Center of Excellence Project on the Normative Evaluation and Social Choice of Contemporary Economic Systems is gratefully acknowledged.     

A unified view on skewed distributions arising from selections

Parametric families of multivariate nonnormal distributions have received considerable attention in the past few decades. The authors propose a new definition of a selection distribution that encompasses many existing families of multivariate skewed distributions. Their work is motivated by examples that involve various forms of selection mechanisms and lead to skewed distributions. They give the main properties of selection distributions and show how various families of multivariate skewed distributions, such as the skew‐normal and skew‐elliptical distributions, arise as special cases. The authors further introduce several methods of constructing selection distributions based on linear and nonlinear selection mechanisms.     

Cotton‐Top Tamarins' (Saguinus oedipus) Expectations About Occluded Objects: A Dissociation Between Looking and Reaching Tasks

Recent work with human infants and toddlers suggests a dissociation between performance on looking and reaching tasks. Specifically, infants appear to generate accurate representations of occluded objects and their actions when tested in expectancy violation looking tasks but often fail to use this information when reaching for occluded objects. We explore a similar dissociation in cotton‐top tamarin monkeys (Saguinus oedipus). We presented adult tamarins with an event in which a piece of food rolled behind an occluder and into a solid barrier. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to retrieve the hidden food using the location of the solid barrier. Like human toddlers, adult tamarins failed to take into account solidity information when reaching for an invisibly displaced object. In Experiments 2 and 3, we presented subjects with expectancy violation looking versions of the same solidity problem using an identical apparatus and setup. We presented subjects with an event in which a piece of food appeared to roll unexpectedly through a solid barrier or stopped at the appropriate spot. Although tamarins failed to locate the food in Experiment 1, the same subjects successfully detected violations of solidity in these 2 looking studies. This performance dissociation is discussed in light of similar dissociations in human toddlers and other primate species.     

Monetary Policy and the U.S. Stock Market

What is the influence of stock market valuations on monetary policy? We use a forward‐looking Taylor rule model to examine if monetary policy since the 19 October 1987 stock market crash has been influenced by the valuation of the stock market. We estimate the model using revised and real‐time data and find no empirical evidence that the Federal Reserve policy attempted to moderate stock market valuations during the late 1990s despite the “irrational exuberance” comments by Chairman Greenspan. Actually, the empirical evidence suggests that the Fed accommodated the high valuations of the stock market during this period.