MANUFACTURING FIRMS' VIEWS OF GOVERNMENT ACTIVITY AND COMMITMENT TO SITE: IMPLICATIONS FOR BUSINESS RETENTION POLICY

Relationships between a variety of firm characteristics and perceptions of government are investigated. Then views about government are considered in connection with firms' commitment to their present location. One finding that is well supported is that taxes and regulations (at least for this sample and within this region) are a source of considerable dissatisfaction. Satisfaction with government services does not come near "offsetting" the displeasure with taxes and regulations. Larger firms are more likely to have unfavorable perceptions of government constraints, but more likely to have favorable views about government services. There is no evidence from this data that high tech firms differ significantly from other firms in their views about government. In regards to implications for business retention, the findings support the notion that state governments seeking to market their state to businesses located elsewhere might turn a greater proportion of attention to businesses currently residing in the state.     

Perception of infant cries in adolescent and adult mothers

Deficits in parenting behavior in adolescent mothers could be due to the adolescent mother's perception of her infant's behavior. The aim of this study was to compare how adolescent and adult mothers perceive the crying behavior of their newborns. The 19 adolescent and 18 adult mothers listened to a tape recording of their infants' crying and rated the characteristics of the cry on 12 seven-point scales. The sample included newborns with normal growth and newborns with compromised growth. Acoustic characteristics of the cries were extracted by computer. Adult mothers rated the cries of their infants with compromised growth toward the negative end of the scales. By contrast, adolescent mothers rated the cries of their infants with compromised growth toward the positive end of the scales. Acoustic analysis showed that the cries of the infants with compromised growth were higher pitched and more variable than the cries of infants with normal growth. Correlations between the cry ratings and the acoustic analysis showed that for adult mothers, higher pitched and more variable cries were associated with negative ratings. For adolescent mothers, higher pitched and more variable cries were associated with more positive ratings. The findings suggest that adolescent mothers differ in the perception of their infant's behavior, which may have implications for later parenting behavior.This research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation.Received Ph.D. from Michigan State University. Main Research interests are infant crying, determinants of neontal and infant development, assessment of preterm and at-risk infants.Received Ph.D. from Harvard University. Main research interests are sociocultural aspects of development, teenage pregnancy, infant temperament, and psychophysiology.Main research interests have been in maternal and infant interactions of high risk infants.     

What Macroeconomic Measures Are Needed for Free Trade to Flourish in the Western Hemisphere?

Recent experience has made clear the importance of macroeconomic stability, and exchange rate stability in particular, in generating support for regional integration. The tensions created by exchange-rate and financial volatility are clearly evident in the recent history of Mercosur and may also hinder the development of a Free Trade Area of the Americas. This essay argues that ambitious schemes for a single regional currency are not a practical response to this problem. Nor would a system of currency pegs or bands be sufficiently durable to provide a lasting solution. Instead, countries must solve this problem at home. In practice, this means adopting sound and stable monetary policies backed by a clear and coherent operating strategy, such as inflation targeting. With such policies in place, exchange rate volatility can be reduced to levels compatible with regional integration.     

Reputation shifting

• The study of reputation has often focused on such relatively narrow areas as creation of good reputations rather than developed systematic theoretical approaches to understanding the means by which reputations are modified, or shifted, and the factors affecting such shifts. This paper introduces the concept of reputation shifting, with an explicit theory that relates reputational endowments, content characters, audience characters, and opportunity/change factors to reputational stickiness. It also identifies five reputational actions (discard, conceal, redefine, transfer, create), and the strategies that can be taken to manage reputations.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why Political Competition Can Increase Patronage

Patronage is important in developing countries, but its relationship to political competition has received little attention. Major literatures generate opposing predictions. In the good governance and democracy literatures, robust political competition is the antidote to patronage. But for scholars studying the process of democratization, competitive politics is associated with heightened social tensions and instability. Using data from an original survey covering 88% of local governments in Ghana, I show that political competition can increase patronage: where local elections are closely fought by the two main parties, local governments provide significantly more public sector jobs. I use qualitative data from 9 months of fieldwork to show the causal channel. I find a bottom-up phenomenon in which pressures for patronage come from parties’ own volunteers. Volunteers actively use their parties’ vulnerability in competitive elections to extract rewards. I locate the root of volunteers’ power in the nature of the party system, and I demonstrate that for 19 African countries, variation in party system strength is linked to certain forms of clientelism. These findings challenge assumptions that competitive politics will reduce patronage, as well as assumptions that a decline in one form of clientelism means a decline in all forms of clientelism.     

Citizens and Resource Allocation: Improving Decision Making with Interactive Web-Based Citizen Participation

Collective consumption and benefit characterize many government services. Moreover, government services are mostly paid for collectively through taxes—there is little or no relationship between the taxes paid by a household and its use of a particular service. Public sector decision makers face complex budget problems with difficult solutions. Involving citizens meaningfully in these decisions has long been a conundrum. The authors teamed up with the town of West Hartford, Connecticut, to develop a Web-based survey to overcome some of these participation problems and help decision makers better understand citizen preferences. The Web survey allowed for real-time interactivity and was tailored to present respondents with trade-offs between service levels and taxes.     

Reactions of potential jurors to a hypothetical malpractice suit: alleging failure to perform a prostate-specific antigen test

We conducted focus groups with 47 potential jurors who were presented with different scenarios in a hypothetical malpractice case involving failure to order a PSA test. Better documentation that a patient made an informed decision to decline a PSA test appeared to provide more medical-legal protection for physicians, especially with the use of a decision aid.     

“We Cannot Claim Any Particular Knowledge of the Ways of Homosexuals,Still Less of Iranian Homosexuals …”: The Particular Problems Facing Those Who Seek Asylum on the Basis of their Sexual Identity

Many lesbians and gay men apply for asylum in the U.K. each year on the basis that they fear persecution in their home country because of their sexual orientation. The legal basis for claiming asylum on the ground of sexual identity is now well established. Nevertheless, making these claims remains very difficult for applicants. Western cultural expectations around sexual identity often mix with homophobic assumptions about sexual behaviour to present applicants as “not sufficiently gay”. Furthermore, applicants may not initially disclose their sexual identity to legal advisors, leading to assumptions that they are not “telling the truth” to the Immigration Tribunal. In this article, Barry O’Leary, a solicitor and legal activist on behalf of lesbian and gay refugees, discusses these problems and how U.K.-based asylum lawyers have attempted to work round them.