Improving Labor Inspections Systems: Design Options

[Excerpt] The following paper identifies experimental designs for the evaluation of labor inspection systems in Latin America. It includes six principal sections. Section 1 discusses the main differences between the “Latin model” (Piore and Schrank 2008) of labor inspection and the more familiar approach adopted by enforcement agencies like OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division in the US. Section 2 discusses theories of regulatory noncompliance and develops a logic model that links enforcement strategies to compliance outcomes in the region. Section 3 discusses some of the strategies that are available to Latin American labor inspectors and sets the stage for a discussion of their assignment to experimental subjects. Section 4 identifies five possible subjects of experimentation (e.g., inspectors, firms, jurisdictions) and discusses their respective receptivity to both random assignment and counterfactual analysis (e.g., data needs, estimation procedures, etc.). Section 5 addresses practical considerations involved in the design and conduct of experiments on inspection systems—including their utility, ethics, and viability—and introduces a checklist designed to facilitate their assessment. And Section 6 describes three potential experiments—labeled “professionals v. partisans,” “risk-based targeting v. randomized inspection,” and “carrots v. sticks” respectively—and discusses their principal goals and limitations in light of the checklist

A framework for thinking about enterprise formalization policies in developing countries

What policies encourage firms to become formal? The standard approach emphasizes reducing the costs of compliance with government regulation. This is unlikely to be sufficient. Instead we need to understand compliance as a function not only of firm-level costs and benefits but also in terms of the interaction between the firm and its competitors and between the firm and the state. This paper emphasizes the coordination and credibility issues involved in promoting formalization and discusses possible institutional solutions, among them business associations that make the benefits of membership dependent on compliance, information sharing arrangements among government agencies and improvements in the quality of public management.Microfinance,Small Scale Enterprise,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Public Sector Regulation

Engineering Bureaucracy: The Genesis of Formal Policies, Positions, and Structures in High-Technology Firms

[Excerpt] This article examines the impact of organizational founding conditions on several facets of bureaucratization—managerial intensity, the proliferation of specialized managerial and administrative roles, and formalization of employment relations. Analyzing information on a sample of technology start-ups in California\u27s Silicon Valley, we characterize the organizational models or blueprints espoused by founders in creating new enterprises. We find that those models and the social composition of the labor force at the time of founding had enduring effects on growth in managerial intensity (i.e., reliance on managerial and administrative specialists) over time. Our analyses thus provide compelling evidence of path dependence in the evolution of bureaucracy—even in a context in which firms face intense selection pressures—and underscore the importance of the logics of organizing that founders bring to new enterprises. We find less evidence that founding models exert persistent effects on the formalization of employment relations or on the proliferation of specialized senior management titles. Rather, consistent with neo-institutional perspectives on organizations, those superficial facets of bureaucracy appear to be shaped by the need to satisfy external gatekeepers (venture capitalists and the constituents of public corporations), as well as by exigencies of organizational scale, growth, and aging. We discuss some implications of these results for efforts to understand the varieties, determinants, and consequences of bureaucracy

Custom, Contract, and Kidney Exchange

In this Essay, we examine a case in which the organizational and logistical demands of a novel form of organ exchange (the nonsimultaneous, extended, altruistic donor (NEAD) chain) do not map cleanly onto standard cultural schemas for either market or gift exchange, resulting in sociological ambiguity and legal uncertainty. In some ways, a NEAD chain resembles a form of generalized exchange, an ancient and widespread instance of the norm of reciprocity that can be thought of simply as the obligation to pay it forward rather than the obligation to reciprocate directly with the original giver. At the same time, a NEAD chain resembles a string of promises and commitments to deliver something in exchange for some valuable consideration—that is, a series of contracts. Neither of these salient social imaginaries of exchange—gift giving or formal contract—perfectly meets the practical demands of the NEAD system. As a result, neither contract nor generalized exchange drives the practice of NEAD chains. Rather, the majority of actual exchanges still resemble a simpler form of exchange: direct, simultaneous exchange between parties with no time delay or opportunity to back out. If NEAD chains are to reach their full promise for large-scale, nonsimultaneous organ transfer, legal uncertainties and sociological ambiguities must be finessed, both in the practices of the coordinating agencies and in the minds of NEAD-chain participants. This might happen either through the further elaboration of gift-like language and practices, or through a creative use of the cultural form and motivational vocabulary, but not necessarily the legal and institutional machinery, of contract

Learning Process and Contract Adaptation with Quality Uncertainty: Some Paradoxes in Retailer-Producer Relationships

The optimal level of formalisation of contracts and their dynamic is at stake in the economic literature on the optimum design of ex post renegotiation with third party enforcement. Another theoretical interpretation is that contract adaptations may also reflect mutual learning process between contractors. Why transactors write explicit contract that they know cannot be court enforced? The central idea is that explicit contract terms makes it clearer to the transactors what has been agreed upon, thus are decreasing the cost of private enforcement sanctions (Klein, 1996). Empirical evidences are provided by the diachronic analysis of the full set of tri-partite contracts between one of the top-ten french large retailer and its beef suppliers before and after the BSE crisis (period 1993-1999). The analysis emphasizes also the role of this increased codification of supply contracts with a progressive change in the internal retailer's organization, i.e. increased centralization of decision and supervision mechanisms. Contract design and organizational choices are then strongly interrelated.Contract design, Hold-up problems, beef sector, Self-Enforcement, Agribusiness,

Enforcement and Compliance in Lima's Street Markets: The Origins and Consequences of Policy Incoherence toward Informal Traders

informal economy, taxation, law, government policy

Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction in WASH: Experience in DRR Mainstreaming in Nicaragua

Nicaragua is near the top of all international lists of countries with high disaster risk. Multiple global, national, and local factors augment the hazards faced by WASH services and increase their vulnerability. This publication discusses how disaster risk reduction (DRR) started in Nicaragua and the lessons learned from it

Ontology as Product-Service System: Lessons Learned from GO, BFO and DOLCE

This paper defends a view of the Gene Ontology (GO) and of Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as examples of what the manufacturing industry calls product-service systems. This means that they are products (the ontologies) bundled with a range of ontology services such as updates, training, help desk, and permanent identifiers. The paper argues that GO and BFO are contrasted in this respect with DOLCE, which approximates more closely to a scientific theory or a scientific publication. The paper provides a detailed overview of ontology services and concludes with a discussion of some implications of the product-service system approach for the understanding of the nature of applied ontology. Ontology developer communities are compared in this respect with developers of scientific theories and of standards (such as W3C). For each of these we can ask: what kinds of products do they develop and what kinds of services do they provide for the users of these products