Food Safety and Social Capital: A Double Side Connection

The globalisation of the agri-food system and the growing variety of food products and technologies have made it increasingly difficult for nation-states to regulate food safety and quality practices, giving rise to a shift from public to private governance, essentially in the form of private standards and TPC. The paper suggests that the current shift from public to private intervention calls for a different approach to the analysis of food safety policy, on both descriptive and normative ground. Two different concepts of social capital, one of trust and the other of power, are used in order to assess the welfare effects of the newest trends in food safety policy. Through the lens of social capital it is clear that private standards and TPC are not merely an impartial technical tool able to foster food markets efficiency and safety. Rather they are the means by which powerful actors in the chain discipline people and things in order to accomplish their own objectives

Understanding Public-Private Partnerships: Strategic Alliances, Risk Aversion, and Policy Diffusion

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have experienced tremendous growth worldwide since governments in the UK utilized private financing for public infrastructure in the 1990s. Throughout the past few decades, scholars have researched the concept, development, drivers, and performance of PPPs. However, the extant research stems predominately from the lens of governments and focuses on how governments screen and select private partners. A neglect of the private sector’s preference toward and selection of governmental partners would hinder scholarly understandings of PPP formation. Such overlook may also hinder the utilization and development of PPPs in public service delivery. This dissertation uses three essays to theoretically and empirically explore the factors that influence the formation of PPPs, from three distinct perspectives, namely, network, organizational, and spatial views. The first essay innovatively develops a network of PPPs and depicts preferences among public and private entities. The second essay, from an organizational angle, centers on private partners’ risk aversion toward fiscally constrained governments. The third essay, at a macro level, explains how PPP formation diffuses and expands over time and across space. All analyses use data from China, where PPPs have seen a rapid and exponential rise since 2014. The first essay draws on the resource-based theory and uses social network analysis to investigate government preferences for private partners. The data show that private entities with greater access to and control over unique resources are the most influential and powerful partners. The second essay utilizes a causal mediation analysis and finds that a higher level of government fiscal stress may signal higher fiscal risk and thus trigger a higher degree of risk aversion of the private sector. The third essay, based on theories of policy diffusion and advances in spatial econometrics modeling, suggests that the spread of PPPs is a result of policy emulation among geographically, economically, and administratively proximate governments. By utilizing different methods, this dissertation advances scholarly understandings of drivers and barriers to PPP formation from public and private sides. It provides policymakers with practical insights on PPP adoption and how to properly address both public and private actors’ preferences and priorities in the partnerships

Risk in regulation: a US piblic firm ownership perspective

"The study examines different approaches to the regulation of the capital markets with a focus on explaining why certain assumptions about markets, actors, and systems came to be embedded in the regulatory practice in the American capital markets. More specifically, I examine regulatory assumptions about the nature of public firm ownership, the distortions that these assumptions introduced into the regulatory framework governing the securities markets, and the epistemological and risk-based implications of these distortions to actors, markets, and the regulatory system. The analysis draws on a number of theoretical approaches and methodologies including legal history, law and economics, comparative law, complexity/systems analysis, socio-legal analysis, and political economy. This study analyzes the performance of the US Securities and Exchange Commission as the principal regulator of the American capital markets. The regulatory framework arguably reflects the Commission's perceptions (of market realities) and preferences (in response to these ""market realities""). The federal proxy rules found in s. 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, used as a case study in this volume, exemplify this claim. As one of the original responsibilities assigned to the Commission by Congress, s. 14(a) of the 1934 Act gave the agency near-complete authority to regulate the federal proxy process. Thus, the functioning of the federal proxy regime hints at the Commission's performance as a regulator. Since s. 14(a) deals with proxy solicitation of shareholder votes, one essential policy consideration is the nature of corporate ownership. To evaluate the Commission's knowledge in relation to ownership, we need to appreciate how the agency evaluated underlying assumptions vis-à-vis ownership; displayed awareness of changing socio-economic realities in the securities markets; and developed responsive regulatory measures accordingly. The analysis highlights how the Commission missed learning opportunities (to varying degrees) over the years vis-à-vis (i) distortions introduced into the regulatory framework in the 1930s, (ii) implications of these distortions to the stability of the regulatory framework, (iii) demographic changes in the nature of public firm ownership leading to the formation of an ownership structure not previously discussed in the literature, which I call the ""market oriented blockholder model,"" (iv) new forms of endogenous risks relating to the regulatory framework, which I call ""regulatory systemic risk."" The cumulative impact of these factors have negative implications to the agency's reputation and legitimacy. These findings suggest that the Commission needs to optimize its process to become what I call a ""learning regulator""-an organization displaying adaptability to the evolving environment subject to its oversight through the acquisition, generation, and translation of knowledge and the modification of its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights. To facilitate such optimization, I develop an organizational learning model tailored to administrative agencies-the ""learning regulator framework."" Measures adopted pursuant to the model encourage organizational learning, risk reduction, and enhanced efficiency in the regulated environment. These measures, in turn, enhance the regulator's reputation and shield its legitimacy from criticism.

Management consulting.

Including a lengthy, comprehensive introduction, this important collection brings together some of the most influential papers that have contributed to our understanding of management consultancy work. The two-volume set encompasses the breadth of conceptual and empirical perspectives and explores those key ideas that have helped to advance our knowledge of this intriguing area. The volumes are divided into a series of thematic sections, affording the reader easy access to a great resource of information. Professors Clark and Avakian have written an original introduction which provides a comprehensive overview of the literature

Ex ante and ex post institutional convergence: Case of the post-Soviet space

Abstract: The paper discusses the interaction of ex ante and ex post institutional convergence in the post-Soviet world, i.e. 12 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It starts with analysing empirical evidence for institutional convergence in the CIS, and then considers two channels of convergence: institutional competition for mobile capital and ex ante harmonization via interaction in political sphere. In both cases the paper points out potential positive and negative features of the processes from the point of view of institutional transformation. The influence of institutional competition is ambiguous, as both factors of “demand for good institutions” and “demand for bad institutions” influence corporate behaviour. The ex ante harmonization is much less influential and seems to be most successful in preserving semi-authoritarian regimes from potential competitors and therefore supports inefficient equilibrium. Finally, the paper focuses on interaction between ex ante and ex post harmonization, i.e. demand for harmonization from businesses and support of institutional competition environment from the governments. For the governments ex post harmonization could be an attractive way to avoid long and costly bargaining: this factor is probably relevant for the current support of business expansion of Russian corporations by Russian government. For the businesses the situation is more difficult: since historically post- Soviet business did not express significant interest in formal integration (associated with ex ante harmonization), the paper discusses three variables (lobbying, changes in market structure and preferences of the demand side) able to influence their decisions.Institutional convergence, institutional competition, regionalization

Interactions among Inter-organizational Measures for Green Supply Chain Management

Collaboration among supply chain partners is essential to enhance environmental performance during the life cycle of a product. Inter-organizational measures for green supply chain management tend to show diverse patterns because of various requirements that emerge in a complex supply chain. However, this diversity hampers the comprehensive understanding and systematic adoption of these measures. Therefore, this paper classifies various inter-organizational measures for green supply chain management into several collaboration patterns and analyzes their structural relations through an interpretive structural modeling. The results reveal the collaboration patterns that have higher driving power and dependency than other patterns and, thus, require further attentions

Sophisticated security verification on routing repaired balanced cell-based dual-rail logic against side channel analysis

Conventional dual-rail precharge logic suffers from difficult implementations of dual-rail structure for obtaining strict compensation between the counterpart rails. As a light-weight and high-speed dual-rail style, balanced cell-based dual-rail logic (BCDL) uses synchronised compound gates with global precharge signal to provide high resistance against differential power or electromagnetic analyses. BCDL can be realised from generic field programmable gate array (FPGA) design flows with constraints. However, routings still exist as concerns because of the deficient flexibility on routing control, which unfavourably results in bias between complementary nets in security-sensitive parts. In this article, based on a routing repair technique, novel verifications towards routing effect are presented. An 8 bit simplified advanced encryption processing (AES)-co-processor is executed that is constructed on block random access memory (RAM)-based BCDL in Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs. Since imbalanced routing are major defects in BCDL, the authors can rule out other influences and fairly quantify the security variants. A series of asymptotic correlation electromagnetic (EM) analyses are launched towards a group of circuits with consecutive routing schemes to be able to verify routing impact on side channel analyses. After repairing the non-identical routings, Mutual information analyses are executed to further validate the concrete security increase obtained from identical routing pairs in BCDL

Knowledge Based Inter-Firm Collaborations: A Theoretical Review

This paper seeks to study the theoretical and empirical theories of knowledge based strategic inter-firm collaboration between firms.  Strategic alliances are innovative and interesting forms of relationships between organizations and organizations create alliances in their quest to compete against fast and nimble competitors. This paper provided some evidence to suggest that companies relying on strategic alliances are more profitable than their vertically integrated counterparts. In effect, strategic alliances provide an effective means to improve both the economies of scale and scope offered by traditional modes of organization. Consequently, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of strategic alliances. In the last two decades, alliances have become a central part of most companies’ competitive and growth strategies. Alliances help firms strengthen their competitive position by enhancing market power, increasing efficiencies, accessing new or critical resources or capabilities and entering new markets. By the turn of this century many of the world’s largest companies had over 20% of their assets, and over 30% of their annual research expenditures, tied up in such relationships. The review of related literature brought out some theories and concepts which were related to my study