Dealing with Endogeneity to Understand the Societal Impact of the Third Sector: Why Should We Care and What Can We Do about It?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Endogeneity is often regarded as a key barrier in establishing the causal relationship between the third sector and its...     

Subcontracting and the incidence of change orders in procurement contracts

In public procurement, most contracts are renegotiated ex post and involve subcontractors. We examine whether there is a causal link between subcontractor use and the incidence of change orders to amend the original scope of a project. Since subcontracting is likely related to unobserved project complexity, we use a novel IV, the predicted level of subcontracting from a method modeled after Christakis et al. (2010), to estimate the likelihood of renegotiation. The results establish that subcontractors are associated with an increased likelihood of change orders as well as a higher dollar amount renegotiated.     

SIMPLE LM TESTS FOR THE UNBALANCED NESTED ERROR COMPONENT REGRESSION MODEL

This paper derives several Lagrange Multiplier tests for the unbalanced nested error component model. Economic data with a natural nested grouping include firms grouped by industry; or students grouped by schools. The LM tests derived include the joint test for both effects as well as the test for one effect conditional on the presence of the other. The paper also derives the standardized versions of these tests, their asymptotic locally mean most powerful version as well as their robust to local misspecification version. Monte Carlo experiments are conducted to study the performance of these LM tests.     

Individual performance as a multidimensional construct: a test of construct validity

While much of the extant literature in public management has focused on individual performance using only in-role or job performance, there is a need to consider another approach to individual performance, one that includes extra-role performance. However, public sector organizations have rarely emphasized the integration of these two types of behavioral performance to measure individual performance. Using confirmatory factor analysis and other statistical analyses, this study examines the construct validity of a multidimensional measure of individual performance. This analysis supports a multidimensional approach to individual performance. The implications and limitations of the findings are discussed.     

A Qualitative Study of Victim Offender Mediation: Implications for Social Work

Restorative justice has grown extensively in recent years. However, existing research data indicate a lack of information regarding its process. This qualitative study aimed at providing an understanding of the experiences of participants in the delivery process. In addition to observation, 34 face-to-face interviews were conducted with 37 individuals. Analyses yielded important insights into multiple layers of participants' experiences. Though the participants indicated having had positive experiences, some insensitive approaches toward victims were also pointed out. This article discusses the implications in moving toward victim-sensitive restorative justice and for the social work profession.     

Impacts of buyers' order batching on the supplier's demand correlation and capacity utilization in a branching supply chain

There are several ways for a manufacturer to cope with demand uncertainty, e.g. inventories, capacity and cash. Among these, this study focuses on the second one, the capacity, especially on the problem of investing in flexible facilities and enhancing their utilization via demand management. In a supply chain, demands that an upstream firm (supplier) faces are the purchase orders from the downstream members (buyers). We analyse the impacts of buyers' order batching on the supplier's demand correlation and capacity utilization in a simple branching supply chain, where a supplier does business with two buyers whose market demands are correlated. Our results show that: (i) a supplier whofacesa smaller demand correlation coefficient (i.e. closer to-1) would invest more in flexible facilities; (ii) an increase in order lot size mitigates the correlation of purchase orders; and (iii) a supplier whose facilities are flexible would prefer frequent orders with smaller lots only when market demands are highly negatively correlated. This means that even suppliers whose facilities are flexible would rather prefer infrequent orders with larger lots in the presence of positively correlated demands. Additionally, some managerial implications are discussed.     

Liquidity spreads in the corporate bondmarket: Estimation using a semi-parametric model

This study utilizes the liquidity risk associated with Treasury bonds to directly determine the degree to which liquidity spreads account for corporate bond spreads. This enhances understanding of their relative contributions to the yield spreads of corporate bonds. To capture time variation on instantaneous spreads and volatility and to reduce modeling bias, semi-parametric techniques are applied to estimate the time-varying intensity process. Empirical results indicate that our semi-parametric model is good at capturing the time variation in default and liquidity intensity processes. The credit spreads are due to default risk and reflect the relative liquidity of the corporate bond market, indicating that liquidity risk plays an important role in corporate bond valuation.     

The Challenges of Governing Biotechnology in Korea

This paper explores the development of biotechnology governance and current challenges to its improvement in Korea. It aims to identify what element would be crucial to foster an effectively working system of biotechnology governance in Korea. The analysis is focused on two cases, the legislation of the Bioethics and Biosafety Act, and the development of ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) research. Our analysis finds that communication and consensus building between scientists and bioethics advocates in a broader sense is critical for improved governance. During the prolonged dispute over this legislation, the stakeholders advocating scientific advancements and those emphasizing the importance of ethics did not reach an agreement, which was reflected in the limitations of the act. The nascent ELSI research attempted to facilitate interdisciplinary communication and understanding between biotechnology scientists and those in humanities and social sciences, but was met with only limited success. Good governance of biotechnology requires scientists and other stakeholders to willingly comply with regulations and internalize certain norms. Based on our experience in ELSI research, a few suggestions are made to contribute to this end.