The Discrepancy Between Two Approaches to Global Poverty: What Does it Reveal?

Social Indicators Research - For decades, international communities have developed poverty measures to inform needs assessment and aid allocation. Building on these efforts, this paper examines the...     

Top management team characteristics and organizational creativity

Drawing on the upper-echelon perspective, we investigated the impact of top management team (TMT) characteristics on organizational creativity. An organizational creativity index was used as a dependent variable to examine creativity at the organizational level. The results of the statistical analysis generally supported our hypotheses. The size of the TMT had a significant and negative impact on organizational creativity. The average age of the TMT was also negatively associated with organizational creativity. However, functional diversity of the TMT had a significantly positive impact on organizational creativity. These findings have important conceptual and practical implications. This study increased our understanding of the relationship between TMT characteristics and organizational creativity by introducing TMT characteristics as antecedents of factors influencing organizational creativity. This study suggests fruitful avenues for further research of this important yet understudied topic and useful managerial tools for composition of an adequate board for enhancing organizational creativity.     

Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India

The apparently inexorable rise in the proportion of “missing girls” in much of East and South Asia has attracted much attention among researchers and policymakers. An encouraging trend was suggested by the case of South Korea, where child sex ratios (males to females under age 5) were the highest in Asia but peaked in the mid‐1990s and normalized thereafter. Using census data, we examine whether similar trends have begun to manifest themselves in the two most populous countries of this region, China and India. The data indicate that child sex ratios are peaking in these countries, and in many subnational regions are beginning to trend toward lower, more normal values. This suggests that, with continuing economic and social development and vigorous public policy efforts to reduce son preference, the “missing girls” phenomenon could eventually disappear in Asia.     

The Decline of Son Preference in South Korea: The Roles of Development and Public Policy

For years, sex ratios at birth kept rising in South Korea despite rapid development. We show that this was not an anomaly: underlying son preference fell with development, but the effect of son preference on sex ratios at birth rose until the mid‐1990s as a result of improved sex‐selection technology. Now South Korea leads Asia with a declining sex ratio at birth. We explore how son preference was affected by development and by public policy. Decomposition analysis indicates that development reduced son preference primarily through triggering normative changes across society—rather than just in individuals whose socioeconomic circumstances had changed. The cultural underpinnings of son preference in preindustrial Korea were unraveled by industrialization and urbanization even as public policies sought to uphold the patriarchal family system. Our results suggest that child sex ratios in China and India may decline before those countries reach South Korean levels of development, since the governments of both countries vigorously promote normative change to reduce son preference.     

Bandwagon, underdog, and political competition: the uni-dimensional case

This article studies the effects of bandwagon and underdog on the political equilibrium of two-party competition models. We adapt for voter conformism the generalized Wittman?CRoemer model of political competition, which views political competition as the one between parties with factions of the opportunists and the militants that Nash-bargain one another, and consider three special cases of the general model: the Hotelling?CDowns model, the classical Wittman?CRoemer model, and what we call the ideological-party model. We find that the presence of voter conformism significantly affects the nature of political competition, and its effect on political equilibrium is quite different depending on the model one uses. In the Hotelling?CDowns model, political parties put forth an identical policy at the equilibrium, regardless of the type of voter conformism, and this is the only equilibrium. In both the ideological-party and classical Wittman?CRoemer models, parties propose differentiated policies at the equilibrium, and the extent of policy differentiation depends on the degree of voter conformism.