Leader Behavior and the Natural Resource Curse

We discuss political economy mechanisms which can explain the resource curse, in which an increase in the size of resource rents causes a decrease in the economy's total value added. We identify a number of channels through which resource rents will alter the incentives of a political leader. Some of these induce greater investment by the leader in assets that favour growth (infrastructure, rule of law, etc.), others lead to a potentially catastrophic drop in such activities. As a result, the effect of resource abundance can be highly non-monotonic. We argue that it is critical to understand how resources affect the leader's "survival function", i.e. the reduced-form probability of retaining power. We also briefly survey decentralised mechanisms, in which rents induce a reallocation of labour by private agents, crowding out productive activity more than proportionately. We argue that these mechanisms cannot be fully understood without simultaneously studying leader behaviour.Natural resource endowment, resource curse, political economy

Supporting students’ transition from college to university: staff perspectives on developing a coherent tertiary system in Scotland

Scottish policy, funding, and quality systems have been tasked to provide “a more coherent and streamlined tertiary education system from the student perspective that delivers the best learning experience for students” (Scottish Funding Council, n.d.). This paper helps to inform this process, by presenting the findings from the second stage of Quality Assurance Agency Enhancement Theme project: Mind the Gap? College Students’ Experience of University. This stage investigated the perspectives of staff who support students making the transition from college to university.While there is a relatively broad literature covering the student perspective of this transition, the staff perspective is less well understood. This paper uses the themes developed from the first stage of the project – a qualitative research synthesis on the lived experiences of students (Robertson & Cunningham, 2023) – to investigate staff perceptions of this transition. These themes considered are: (1) the responsibility for enabling effective transition; (2) the extent to which alignment between colleges and universities is achievable or, indeed, desirable; and (3) the extent to which college to university transitions genuinely widen participation.This paper reports the findings from a series of focus groups with university academic staff, university student support staff, and college academic staff from three institutions (two universities and one college). Using theoretical thematic analysis, the paper considers how sectoral, academic, identity and social, and logistical factors affect, or are identified in, the practice of the participants and what this means for the development of policy and practice around a ‘coherent tertiary model’

Signalling, Incumbency Advantage, and Optimal Reelection Rules

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection hurdle, signals will tend to cluster just above the threshold needed for reelection. This generates a skew distribution of signals leading to an incumbency advantage in the probability of election. Second, voters can exploit the signalling behavior of politicians by precommitting to a higher threshold for signals received. Raising the threshold discourages signalling effort by low quality politicians but encourages effort by high quality politicians, thus increasing the separation of signals and improving the selection function of an election. This precommitment has a simple institutional interpretation as a supermajority rule, requiring that incumbents exceed some fraction of votes greater than 50% to be reelected.Supermajority, incumbency advantage, signalling

Onboard System Health Assessment

Viewgraphs and discussion of onboard system health assessment are presented. Success of the space station program will be measured by how well it addresses the basic requirements for (1) maintaining the orbiting Space Station Freedom fully operational for its projected life of thirty years, and (2) the cost-effective execution of the overall space station program. Onboard system health assessment must provide complete and thorough testing capabilities along with effective associated redundancy/fault management

“On the edge of glory and hanging on a moment of truth”: PgCAP in a rapidly changing and uncertain world

The last three years have seen rapid changes to learning, teaching and assessment in Higher Education. This paper shares our experiences of leading, teaching and reaccrediting a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PgCAP) during this time. The PgCAP, much like the staff enrolled on the course, has had to adapt, innovate, and experiment to meet the various challenges. This has included an unplanned move online, to a planned online approach, through to our current blended by design delivery method. Throughout we have sought to model best practice with the risks and rewards this brings. Our revised PgCAP was approved internally in 2022 and subsequently successfully reaccredited with Advance HE on the Professional Standards Framework (PSF). Some of this process was exciting: we felt at the forefront of changes to learning and teaching, to be charting new developments in technology and interaction which our learners could then use in their own teaching. But part of this process was also daunting, feeling we were one moment away from crashing and failing. We tried to learn from those failures and become comfortable working on the edge, with an ever-changing set of priorities and expectations (from ourselves, our learners, and our institution). Our case study: (1) reflects on the challenges, pressures and opportunities associated with PgCAP programmes to model best practice (even in times of crisis), (2) shares how our blended by design approach came about, how it works, and the feedback we have received from participants, (3) demonstrates how we refreshed our content, intended learning outcomes and assessments to map to the PSF 2023