Balanced Scorecards: A Relational Contract Approach

Reward systems based on balanced scorecards often connect pay to an index, that is, a weighted sum of multiple performance measures. We show that such an index contract may indeed be optimal if performance measures are nonverifiable so that the contracting parties must rely on self-enforcement. Under commonly invoked assumptions (including normally distributed measurements), we show that the weights in the index reflect a tradeoff between distortion and precision for the measures. The efficiency of the contract improves with higher precision of the index measure, because this strengthens incentives, and correlations between measurements may for this reason be beneficial. There is a caveat, however, because the index contract is not necessarily optimal for very precise measurements, although it is shown to be asymptotically optimal. We also consider hybrid measurements, and show that the principal may want to include verifiable performance measures in the relational index contract in order to improve incentives, and that this has noteworthy implications for the formal contract.     

IMAGINING A DECOLONIZED CITY IN AND FROM AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND

Imagining decolonized cities creates space to explore how urban places could strip away colonial dominance and restore the ability of Indigenous people to live, know and be. In this essay, we describe one attempt to create such space. While working in Porirua in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ran an urban design competition, hosted workshops with young people and held a symposium. Through all three phases we drew on utopian thinking to imagine beyond the current constraints of urban form in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how cities might reflect the diverse realities of Māori. While this approach is an attempt at generating hopeful geographies, it also sat in tension with (post)colonial realities, such as racist attempts by white people to claim Indigeneity, and the ongoing need for land to be returned to Indigenous people. We argue that envisioning how cities might be decolonized is useful and needs to be rooted in the particular politics of place, but this imagining needs to be paired with action to confront persistent colonialism.     

Less Livestock in North-western Europe? Discourses and Drivers Behind Livestock Buyout Policies

Direct intervention in the size of livestock numbers is not considered a main option in European agri-environmental policies nor in policy studies. Nevertheless, the governments of the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium) have announced livestock buyout schemes. This article contributes to the scarce literature on this policy instrument by sketching the characteristics of different types of buyout schemes. We analyse how the issue of reducing livestock numbers is being framed in four EU Member States with high livestock dense regions: the Netherlands, Belgium (Flanders), Denmark and Germany. While the debate on ‘technology versus volume’ can be observed in all four countries, the ‘nitrogen crises’ in the first two has led to a reframing of concerns over livestock numbers in relation to place-based deterioration of habitats and the possibility of granting permits for new economic activities, rather than as a global issue of mitigating climate change. Pre-existing institutional frameworks influence the introduction and design of new buyout policies. In the context of high political pressure, existing policies to close down farms were reinforced and nutrient emission rights systems offered the opportunity to take production rights out of the market. Notwithstanding the policies and available budgets, the issue of direct intervention to reduce livestock numbers remains controversial.     

Monetary Policy and Inequality

We analyze the distributional effects of monetary policy on income, wealth, and consumption. We use administrative household-level data covering the entire population in Denmark over the period 1987 to 2014 and exploit a long-standing currency peg as a source of exogenous variation in monetary policy. We find that gains from softer monetary policy in terms of income, wealth, and consumption are monotonically increasing in ex ante income. The distributional effects reflect systematic differences in exposure to the various channels of monetary policy, especially nonlabor channels (e.g., leverage and risky assets). Our estimates imply that softer monetary policy increases income inequality.     

Accounting for employee flows

This paper examines employee flows and the association with firm earnings and interest rates. We use administrative employer–employee matched panel data from Denmark spanning 17 years and hence exploit actual data on employee arrivals (labor inflows) and departures (labor outflows). Three main findings emerge. First, we condition by firms’ economic conditions. Departures predict earnings increases for prior-year loss firms, while they predict earnings decreases for prior-year profit firms, suggesting that this conditioning can help explain the mixed results in the literature. Arrivals predict earnings increases, though only for prior-year profit firms. These effects are stronger for high-paid employees than for low-paid ones. Second, the effects of departures are generally larger than the effects of arrivals, consistent with departures disrupting operations. Third, we find that lenders price employee flow information but only for departures of high-paid employees, despite the predictive ability of the flow of other employees for future earnings. Overall our results suggest that employee flows predict firm financial performance but are only partially priced by lenders.     

Are born global firms really a “new breed” of exporters? Empirical evidence from an emerging market

Journal of International Entrepreneurship - This study investigates and compares born global (BG) firms and non-BG firms in Malaysia. We employed the multigroup analysis technique with structural...     

Bovine meat,authoritarian populism,and state contradictions in Modi's India

While authoritarian populism and its relationship to the rural world have gained analytical prominence recently, few have attempted a systematic exploration of how various authoritarian populisms emerge from, and are embedded within, dynamics of capital accumulation, state, and class struggle. Drawing on Poulantzas' approach to “state contradictions,” we focus on the ways by which bovine meat figures in Narendra Modi's authoritarian populist project in contemporary India. On the one hand, violent authoritarianism in the country uses beef eating as a powerful tool for subjugating subaltern groups to Hindutva rule. On the other hand, the country houses a rapidly expanding beef meat agro-industry, accounting for as much as 20% of global exports and based on corporate concentration around dominant class interests. We argue that this points to state contradictions in Modi's India witnessing strained accumulation patterns. These contradictions, we emphasize, have distinct ramifications for India's classes of labour in the countryside, as certain groups experience what we describe as a process of “double victimization.”