On the social cost of individuals’ extra effort

Most methodological work on project appraisal in developing countries have so far been primarily concerned with industrial projects and distortions in the foreign trade sector.¹ In this paper interest is focused on projects in the rural sector and in particular on a neglected aspect of labour cost valuation, viz. valuation of individuals’ work effort expended.     

Getting Rich and Staying Connected: the organizational medium of Chinese capitalists

This article answers the following question: ‘What is the organizational medium that has allowed a few Chinese businesspeople in East and Southeast Asia to accumulate considerable wealth and economic power?’ In the course of giving an answer, we show the organizational differences between traditional business networks in the late Qing and early Republican periods and the Chinese business networks in modern capitalist Asia. We argue that, throughout the twentieth century, Chinese business people outside of China proper began to adapt Western corporate structures for their own purposes and that this organizational innovation allowed Chinese to develop and sustain personal networks through which wealth and power could be concentrated.     

Operationalizing Strategy Content: An Example from the Transit Industry

While models of organizational strategy saturate private sector research, public sector research lags behind. The model created by Boyne and Walker (2004) is an exception. The main objective of this study is to operationalize this model using a unique data set from the US transit industry. Through a survey of 103 local transit agencies, we developed separate strategy profiles for each agency that help us answer important questions about organizational strategy. We find that not only do the organizations adopt a mix of strategic stances through the action areas; they also have distinct profiles, which vary greatly between agencies.     

How costly is “clean”? An analysis of the benefits and costs of Superfund site remediations

The cleanup of hazardous waste sites under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program is governed by a number of legislative and regulatory constraints. Congress passed legislation in 1986 directing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to pursue permanent remedies that embodied stringent cleanup standards. The agency has chosen to use conservative assumptions in risk assessments at hazardous waste sites, including a presumption that on‐site risks for hypothetical future residents should be calculated in the site remediation process. This article offers the first comprehensive assessment of the cost‐effectiveness of these Superfund cleanups. Our results reveal that many EPA Superfund remediations fail a partial benefit‐cost test. For a sample of the 150 Superfund sites, we find that at the majority of sites the expected number of cancers averted by remediation is less than 0.1 cases per site and that the cost per cancer case averted is over $100 million. The analysis demonstrates the importance of explicitly calculating the trade‐offs embodied in environmental cleanup decisions. © 1998 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Effects of prefrontal cortical stimulation on aggressive and antisocial behavior: A double-blind,stratified, randomized,sham-controlled,parallel-group trial

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This study examines the influence of high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) on aggressive behavior...