Welfarist evaluations of decision rules for boards of representatives

We consider a decision board with representatives who vote on proposals on behalf of their constituencies. We look for decision rules that realize utilitarian and (welfarist) egalitarian ideals. We set up a simple model and obtain roughly the following results. If the interests of people from the same constituency are uncorrelated, then a weighted rule with square root weights does best in terms of both ideals. If there are perfect correlations, then the utilitarian ideal requires proportional weights, whereas the egalitarian ideal requires equal weights. We investigate correlations that are in between these extremes and provide analytic arguments to connect our results to Barberà and Jackson (J Polit Econ 114(2):317–339, 2006) and to Banzhaf voting power.     

Upgrading change management

Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. Zeitschrift für Angewandte Organisationspsychologie (GIO) - Claus Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)...     

Differences in Child Health Across Rural,Urban, and Slum Areas: Evidence From India

The developing world is rapidly urbanizing, but an understanding of how child health differs across urban and rural areas is lacking. We examine the association between area of residence and child health in India, focusing on composition and selection effects. Simple height-for-age averages show that rural Indian children have the poorest health and urban children have the best, with slum children in between. With wealth or observed health environment held constant, the urban height-for-age advantage disappears, and slum children fare significantly worse than their rural counterparts. Hence, differences in composition across areas mask a substantial negative association between living in slums and height-for-age. This association is more negative for girls than boys. Furthermore, a large number of girls are “missing” in slums; we argue that this implies that the negative association between living in slums and health is even stronger than our estimate. The missing girls also help explain why slum girls appear to have a substantially lower mortality than rural girls, whereas slum boys have a higher mortality risk than rural boys. We estimate that slum conditions (such as overcrowding and open sewers), which the survey does not adequately capture, are associated with 20 % to 37 % of slum children’s stunting risk.     

Welfarist evaluations of decision rules under interstate utility dependencies

We provide welfarist evaluations of decision rules for federations of states and consider models, under which the interests of people from different states are stochastically dependent. We concentrate on two welfarist standards, viz. that the expected average utility for a person in the federation be maximized or that the expected utilities for the different people be equal. We discuss an analytical result that characterizes the decision rule with maximum expected average utility, set up a class of models that display interstate dependencies and run simulations for different dependency scenarios in the European Union. We find that the results that Beisbart and Bovens (Soc Choice Welf 29:581–608, 2007) established for two types of models without interstate dependencies are fairly stable if interstate dependencies are switched on. There are exceptions, though: sometimes the way in which alternative decision rules shape the welfare distribution is significantly affected by such dependencies. These exceptions particularly include cases in which the interests of people from different states are partly anti-correlated.     

The Optimal Income Taxation of Couples

This paper analyzes the general nonlinear optimal income tax for couples, a multidimensional screening problem. Each couple consists of a primary earner who always participates in the labor market, but makes an hours‐of‐work choice, and a secondary earner who chooses whether or not to work. If second‐earner participation is a signal of the couple being better (worse) off, we prove that optimal tax schemes display a positive tax (subsidy) on secondary earnings and that the tax (subsidy) on secondary earnings decreases with primary earnings and converges to zero asymptotically. We present calibrated microsimulations for the United Kingdom showing that decreasing tax rates on secondary earnings is quantitatively significant and consistent with actual income tax and transfer programs.     

Der Personalverantwortliche als strategischer Partner

Since Ulrich (Human resource champions: the next agenda for adding value and delivering results, Boston, Harvard Business School Press, 1997) shaped the strategic role of HR managers, his concept of an HR business partner has been controversially discussed by researchers and practitioners. Explanations about when and how HR managers act as strategic business partners have found limited attention in the literature. Based on the theory of reasoned action developed by Ajzen und Fishbein (Understanding attitudes and predicting social behavior, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1980; J Pers Soc Psychol 27(1):41?C57, 1973), we hypothesize a positive relation between personal attitudes as well as subjective norm and the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner. Results of the German Cranet survey in 2009 show that expected positive consequences influence the personal attitude, whereas the acceptance of the human resources as well as the existence of an HR strategy within the organisation is positively related with subjective norm. Hence, both attitude and subjective norm positively influence the behaviour of HR managers to act as a strategic business partner.