Social capital, community governance and credit market

Abstract Financial contracts represent an exchange of financial resources today, such as money, for a promise to return more financial resources tomorrow. The aim of the paper is to test whether cheating or respecting a promise, in particular a “financial one”, is also a matter of community norms in which the individuals are involved. According to the social capital literature, where a community is characterised by a high level of social capital, then a higher level of civic engagement, trustworthiness and self monitoring among its members occur. These elements characterise the so called community governance. By using regional data from Italy, the paper will analyse the association between the community governance, through different aspects of social capital, and credit market variables such as interest rate, credit supply and insolvency rate without and with legal institutional enforcements. Empirical evidence shows that, in absence of legal enforcement, indicators of structural social capital, civic engagement and outcome-based social capital are positively related to better credit market performances. When legal enforcement is included in our models still social capital, through the civic engagement aspect, negatively affects the insolvency rate by confirming our hypothesis of complementarity among community state and market

Job Security as an Endogenous Job Characteristic

This paper develops a hedonic model of job security (JS). Workers with heterogeneous JS-preferences pay the hedonic price for JS to employers, who incur labor-hoarding costs from supplying JS. In contrast to the Wage-Bill Argument, equilibrium unemployment is strictly positive, as workers with weak JS-preferences trade JS for higher wages. The relation between optimal job insecurity and the perceived dismissal probability is hump-shaped. If firms observe demand, but workers do not, separation is not contractible and firms dismiss workers at-will. Although the workers are risk-averse, they respond to the one-sided private information by trading wage-risk for a higher JS. With two-sided private information, even JS-neutral workers pay the price for a JS guarantee, if their risk premium associated with the wage-replacement risk is larger than the social net loss from production.job security; hedonic market; implicit contract theory; guaranteed employment contract; severance pay contract; asymmetric information; prudence

The Strategy of Boilerplate

That boilerplate is pervasive is hardly surprising. In a variety of ways, standardized terms in day-to-day contracts serve an essential cost-saving function. By this measure, one might expect less frequent reliance on boilerplate in high-value contracts among sophisticated parties. Yet standard terms would appear to be no less widespread in contracts among the sophisticated. Notwithstanding their representation by able counsel, charged to craft comprehensive and detailed, but also particularized, contracts, such parties will commonly conclude agreements comprised heavily of traditional terms--contracting norms of a sort-rather than terms tailored to the distinct features of their particular bargain. Examples of seemingly suboptimal but persistent contracting norms the choice of standard contract terms over Pareto preferred tailored ones are abundant. Several scholars have highlighted the longstanding inclusion of unanimous action clauses in sovereign debt contracts, notwithstanding the widespread perception of such terms as inefficient. To similar effect, Michael Klausner and Marcel Kahan have pointed to the standard put-at-par remedy offered in event risk covenants, as well as the use of a standardized rating decline trigger, as suboptimal technologies. Bill Bratton, finally, has noted the curious absence of business covenants restricting the creation and offering of certain new classes of preferred stock

Contracting with General Dental Services: a mixed-methods study on factors influencing responses to contracts in English general dental practice

Background: Independent contractor status of NHS general dental practitioners (GDPs) and general medical practitioners (GMPs) has meant that both groups have commercial as well as professional identities. Their relationship with the state is governed by a NHS contract, the terms of which have been the focus of much negotiation and struggle in recent years. Previous study of dental contracting has taken a classical economics perspective, viewing practitioners’ behaviour as a fully rational search for contract loopholes. We apply institutional theory to this context for the first time, where individuals’ behaviour is understood as being influenced by wider institutional forces such as growing consumer demands, commercial pressures and challenges to medical professionalism. Practitioners hold values and beliefs, and carry out routines and practices which are consistent with the field’s institutional logics. By identifying institutional logics in the dental practice organisational field, we expose where tensions exist, helping to explain why contracting appears as a continual cycle of reform and resistance. Aims: To identify the factors which facilitate and hinder the use of contractual processes to manage and strategically develop General Dental Services, using a comparison with medical practice to highlight factors which are particular to NHS dental practice. Methods: Following a systematic review of health-care contracting theory and interviews with stakeholders, we undertook case studies of 16 dental and six medical practices. Case study data collection involved interviews, observation and documentary evidence; 120 interviews were undertaken in all. We tested and refined our findings using a questionnaire to GDPs and further interviews with commissioners. Results: We found that, for all three sets of actors (GDPs, GMPs, commissioners), multiple logics exist. These were interacting and sometimes in competition. We found an emergent logic of population health managerialism in dental practice, which is less compatible than the other dental practice logics of ownership responsibility, professional clinical values and entrepreneurialism. This was in contrast to medical practice, where we found a more ready acceptance of external accountability and notions of the delivery of ‘cost-effective’ care. Our quantitative work enabled us to refine and test our conceptualisations of dental practice logics. We identified that population health managerialism comprised both a logic of managerialism and a public goods logic, and that practitioners might be resistant to one and not the other. We also linked individual practitioners’ behaviour to wider institutional forces by showing that logics were predictive of responses to NHS dental contracts at the dental chair-side (the micro level), as well as predictive of approaches to wider contractual relationships with commissioners (the macro level) . Conclusions: Responses to contracts can be shaped by environmental forces and not just determined at the level of the individual. In NHS medical practice, goals are more closely aligned with commissioning goals than in general dental practice. The optimal contractual agreement between GDPs and commissioners, therefore, will be one which aims at the ‘satisfactory’ rather than the ‘ideal’; and a ‘successful’ NHS dental contract is likely to be one where neither party promotes its self-interest above the other. Future work on opportunism in health care should widen its focus beyond the self-interest of providers and look at the contribution of contextual factors such as the relationship between the government and professional bodies, the role of the media, and providers’ social and professional networks. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research Health Services and Delivery Research programme

More than Dollars for Scholars: The Impact of the Dell Scholars Program on College Access, Persistence and Degree Attainment

Although college enrollment rates have increased substantially over the last several decades, socioeconomic inequalities in college completion have actually widened over time. A critical question, therefore, is how to support low-income and first-generation students to succeed in college after they matriculate. We investigate the impact of the Dell Scholars Program which provides a combination of generous financial support and individualized advising to scholarship recipients before and throughout their postsecondary enrollment. The program's design is motivated by a theory of action that, in order to meaningfully increase the share of lower-income students who earn a college degree, it is necessary both to address financial constraints students face and to provide ongoing support for the academic, cultural and other challenges that students experience during their college careers. We isolate the unique impact of the program on college completion by capitalizing on an arbitrary cutoff in the program's algorithmic selection process. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that although being named a Dell Scholar has no impact on initial college enrollment or early college persistence, scholars at the margin of eligibility are significantly more likely to earn a bachelor's degree on-time or six years after high school graduation. These impacts are sizeable and represent a nearly 25 percent or greater increase in both four- and six-year bachelor's attainment. The program is resource intensive. Yet, back-of-theenvelope calculations indicate that the Dell Scholars Program has a positive rate of return

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Water scarcity and user behavior:Economics of Cooperation under extraction caps

Fresh water is a scarce and depletable resource that has been studied by analyzing declinations of groundwater tables in various regions throughout the world. Climate change effects on water resources are pressing all types of water users to implement adaptation measures. So far, the management of groundwater has been mainly studied from the supply-side and engineering perspectives. This is necessary, but not sufficient to solve the problem of overexploitation of groundwater resource. There has been less research on the demand side of the problem, on how to induce cooperation among users to conserve water resources. Water scarcity in a location results when extraction rates of users, exceed the available water stock and the recharge capacity of the aquifer. Therefore, adaptation to water scarcity depends on how the water users adjust their water extraction - over time - to the recharge capacity of the aquifer. This requires water users to have knowledge on water extraction volumes of all water users of the aquifer, and the recharging capacity of the aquifer. Based on this information, water users might consider the connection between water inflows, outflows and stock determinants of the water balance, as a key concept for sustainability of ground water resource management. This research was focused upon the demand side of water scarcity in three Colombian municipalities Corozal (Sucre), Guamal (Magdalena), and Riohacha (La Guajira) with the objective to better understand the nature of cooperation among water users. This researcher analyzed drivers of cooperation, behavior and institutional mechanisms, using complementary lenses of common pool resource theory, behavioral economics and institutional economics. This general research question used for structuring this research was: 1. How does information on water scarcity affects the extraction behavior of water users, and how can current information provision strategies be improved? Subquestions involve: 2. What are the main drivers and inhibitors of cooperation among water users in water management systems in dry regions?3. How do social rules coexist with legal rules in the overexploitation of aquifers in dry regions?4. How does egoistic behavior and free riding from neighbor users affect collective action in the adaptation to climate variability?The research strategy to collect empirical data involved field experiments, review of historical documents on institutional developments in water management in Sucre and la Guajira, and interviews of water users. Experimental sessions were designed to understand the decision-making processes of farmers, by providing them information on competing extraction sources and information on well capacity. The effect of information on decision-making was measured as part of the experiments. For each type of information, two experimental groups, were organized: (i) information on water extraction quantity was provided to all participants and free communication was allowed, and (ii) information on time remaining before aquifer exhaustion. In the two control groups, as part of the experiment, communication among participants was limited and also, allowed to test the effects of the possibility to design agreed upon decisions on extractions.The field experiments were implemented as games in which players were asked to allocate water caps under diverse scenarios of depletion including suggestions to extract a balanced volume of water or take into account the remaining time for sustainable aquifer management. Participants were asked to allocate water resources for their current and future use, for themselves and their neighbors. Collaborative behavior of participants was tested by measuring compliance with suggested water extraction caps. In total 62 farmers representing 10 communities participated in the field experiments, took part in 668 experimental rounds, based upon 2,670 observations used for empirical data analysis. The qualitative analyses included 40 semi-structured interviews with selected participants. Both quantitative analyses of data obtained through the field experiments, and qualitative data resulting from semi-structured interviews, provided the evidence for answering the research questions<br/

Water scarcity and user behavior:Economics of Cooperation under extraction caps

Fresh water is a scarce and depletable resource that has been studied by analyzing declinations of groundwater tables in various regions throughout the world. Climate change effects on water resources are pressing all types of water users to implement adaptation measures. So far, the management of groundwater has been mainly studied from the supply-side and engineering perspectives. This is necessary, but not sufficient to solve the problem of overexploitation of groundwater resource. There has been less research on the demand side of the problem, on how to induce cooperation among users to conserve water resources. Water scarcity in a location results when extraction rates of users, exceed the available water stock and the recharge capacity of the aquifer. Therefore, adaptation to water scarcity depends on how the water users adjust their water extraction - over time - to the recharge capacity of the aquifer. This requires water users to have knowledge on water extraction volumes of all water users of the aquifer, and the recharging capacity of the aquifer. Based on this information, water users might consider the connection between water inflows, outflows and stock determinants of the water balance, as a key concept for sustainability of ground water resource management. This research was focused upon the demand side of water scarcity in three Colombian municipalities Corozal (Sucre), Guamal (Magdalena), and Riohacha (La Guajira) with the objective to better understand the nature of cooperation among water users. This researcher analyzed drivers of cooperation, behavior and institutional mechanisms, using complementary lenses of common pool resource theory, behavioral economics and institutional economics. This general research question used for structuring this research was: 1. How does information on water scarcity affects the extraction behavior of water users, and how can current information provision strategies be improved? Subquestions involve: 2. What are the main drivers and inhibitors of cooperation among water users in water management systems in dry regions?3. How do social rules coexist with legal rules in the overexploitation of aquifers in dry regions?4. How does egoistic behavior and free riding from neighbor users affect collective action in the adaptation to climate variability?The research strategy to collect empirical data involved field experiments, review of historical documents on institutional developments in water management in Sucre and la Guajira, and interviews of water users. Experimental sessions were designed to understand the decision-making processes of farmers, by providing them information on competing extraction sources and information on well capacity. The effect of information on decision-making was measured as part of the experiments. For each type of information, two experimental groups, were organized: (i) information on water extraction quantity was provided to all participants and free communication was allowed, and (ii) information on time remaining before aquifer exhaustion. In the two control groups, as part of the experiment, communication among participants was limited and also, allowed to test the effects of the possibility to design agreed upon decisions on extractions.The field experiments were implemented as games in which players were asked to allocate water caps under diverse scenarios of depletion including suggestions to extract a balanced volume of water or take into account the remaining time for sustainable aquifer management. Participants were asked to allocate water resources for their current and future use, for themselves and their neighbors. Collaborative behavior of participants was tested by measuring compliance with suggested water extraction caps. In total 62 farmers representing 10 communities participated in the field experiments, took part in 668 experimental rounds, based upon 2,670 observations used for empirical data analysis. The qualitative analyses included 40 semi-structured interviews with selected participants. Both quantitative analyses of data obtained through the field experiments, and qualitative data resulting from semi-structured interviews, provided the evidence for answering the research questions<br/

Troxel and the Limits of Community

The Troxel grandparent-visitation case that frames this symposium, the Washington statute included in Troxel, the mercifully completed odyssey of Cuban-born Elian Gonzalez, and the right to die case of Hugh Finn all illustrate both the fervor with which the broader community justifies its involvement with families and the extremes to which this involvement can spread. Using constitutional language, advocates point out the rights of extended family members to continue or strengthen ties to children, whether adult or minor. On the other side, parents and spouses claim their own rights not to have outsiders second-guess or interfere with their decisions. Though many writings about marriage and parenting extol the family\u27s virtues as a building block of community and society, very few, especially in the legal context, look at the relationships from inside out. My thesis here is that good family relationships very much need larger communities to begin them right, support them, and keep them strong. I will argue, however, that there are limits to the usefulness of outsider involvement-that empowering outsiders has its own costs. In legal terms, we reach these limits when multiple third party claimants assert rights to access spouses and children in ways that substantially conflict with the autonomy families need to function well, not primarily because of the substantive rights of parents or spouses, but because of their effect upon the ability to parent and to live within a functioning marriage