A Cultural Nod to‘Sparing the Rod'

<正>Everyone is probably familiar with stock cultural figures of the Tiger Mom,or the obnoxiously loud,pushy sports-obsessed dad.If you are a Westerner and have participated in Little League Baseball as player,fan,or coach,you will know the scene only too well:a parent publicly berating his or her youngster for a lackluster performance.Sympathetic onlookers know better than to intervene,preferring     

Multilevel public funding for small business innovation: a review of US state SBIR match programs

US State governments invest in early-stage innovative activity as an economic development strategy. Nevertheless, attention directed at the public sector’s role in this capacity has been placed on federal policy actions overlooking the growing role of states. The primary aims of this paper are two-fold: (1) to articulate the motivations for multilevel public support for small business innovative activity, placing emphasis on state level incentives directed towards entrepreneurial activity; and (2) to empirically evaluate the State Match Phase I (SMP-I) program. The SMP-I program is a diffuse state level policy designed to complement the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program by offering noncompetitive matching funds to the state’s successful SBIR Phase I recipients. This offers an opportunity to examine the marginal impact of public R&D given the state intervention. This paper employs a state and year fixed effects model and considers two outcome variables—SBIR Phase II success rates and SBIR Phase I application activity. To account for industrial heterogeneity, the data are stratified by the federal mission agencies. Results from the empirical analysis indicate that the state match increases the Phase II success rates for firms participating in the National Science Foundation SBIR program.     

Revisiting the Feminist Debates on International Labor Standards in the Aftermath of Rana Plaza

This paper revisits the turn of the millennium feminist debates on international labor standards in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza factory collapse of 2013 that killed over 1100 garment workers in Bangladesh. Feminists were divided over the benefits of establishing internationally enforced labor standards and, more generally, on the usefulness of transnational activism and union organizing for garment workers. The arguments of some feminist opponents during and in the aftermath of the debate emphasized the relative advantages of garment jobs, dismissed the importance of union rights, and criticized the labor transnationalism. These arguments have left unchallenged the current regulatory regime in Bangladesh by allaying concerns about poor working conditions. Drawing upon new empirical evidence, the paper shows that export growth under the market regulatory regime has failed to improve labor conditions in the sector. The paper makes the case for the continuing relevance of feminist arguments that favor a more proactive stance to make job growth compatible with wage gains and improved labor conditions. As they argued, the scope of the response has to be international, including solidaristic activism supporting local worker organizations, and the use of wage increases to move Bangladesh on a development path toward a higher-productivity, higher-wage economy.     

End note: Reflections and limitations

Abstract

It may seem curious to some readers to match the outstanding athlete biographical sketches of the main scholar-researchers of this volume with their fierce message regarding the threat to sport, and its practitioners, from sexual harassment. In an absolutist, three second sound bite, mass consumption stereotype-driven developed world, one might expect here a “weakest link” debate about the value(s) of sport. This debate would feature effete, intellectual critics and very muscular, tradition-bound advocates. Not so; for these writers not only demonstrate well-reasoned and literature-informed arguments, and thorough, data-driven analyses but also courageous research programmes extending back to times when the work they did was completely marginalised and misunderstood. Their work, then as now, was fuelled in great part by a deep awareness and regard for the experience of sport as a healthy and joyful human right and by a wish to preserve it as such, for all.