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Following a recent trend towards disaggregation in studies of foreign aid and political violence, we evaluate the determinants of foreign aid sub-nationally. We focus our attention upon political violence as a key subnational dete...
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Following a recent trend towards disaggregation in studies of foreign aid and political violence, we evaluate the determinants of foreign aid sub-nationally. We focus our attention upon political violence as a key subnational determinant of aid commitments and argue that donors commit aid to areas with recent political violence in the hope of ameliorating need and bolstering stability. This being the case, however, we contend not all areas experiencing violence are equally likely to receive aid commitments. This is because potential donors are faced with a dilemma-balancing risk and reward-that leads them to question whether they can effectively deliver aid to areas under conditions of extreme violence. We test these two hypotheses and provide confirmation for them in the context of bilateral aid commitments to local areas within Sub-Saharan African states experiencing civil war between 1990 and 2007.
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Developing countries are projected to experience the greatest increases in per capita energy use, motivating enormous investment in government-led energy projects. As energy fuel choices have large implications for pollution, a cr...
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Developing countries are projected to experience the greatest increases in per capita energy use, motivating enormous investment in government-led energy projects. As energy fuel choices have large implications for pollution, a critical question surrounds citizens' preferences for renewable energy versus coal. While a robust literature suggests that citizens are willing to pay for renewables, the applicability of these findings to developing countries remains limited as many studies do not benchmark findings against preferences for increased capacity with dirtier fuels. We estimate citizens' willingness to pay for improved electricity reliability from coal versus renewable technologies using a contingent valuation experiment embedded in a nationally-representative survey of 14,000 respondents across Vietnam, the country with the greatest recent increase in coal consumption. We find that while households are willing to pay 95% more in their monthly electricity bill for renewables (USD 7.5 billion per year in aggregate), they are also willing to pay 62% more for coal plants (USD 4 billion per year). Additionally, income and satisfaction with governance drive support both for renewables and coal, suggesting that agenda setting by policymakers is critical. If citizens are not offered alternatives, a majority will support coal even as governance improves or citizens become wealthier.
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The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental impacts of proposed actions that could impact the human environment, as well as consult the public before determining whet...
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The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental impacts of proposed actions that could impact the human environment, as well as consult the public before determining whether to proceed. Despite many thousands of environmental reviews over a 50-year history, there remains limited understanding of what NEPA has achieved and the factors that contribute to effective environmental review. While NEPA has been the subject of many empirical studies, this scholarship only rarely makes use of theories that would help scholars predict whether and why environmental impact assessment processes are effective. To aid scholars in the ongoing effort to assess NEPA's effectiveness, we connect the literature on environmental impact assessment with social science concepts and theories that can improve scholars' ability to explain whether and why environmental impact assessment practices are effective.
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Over the past several decades, prominent public management and policy scholars have repeatedly identified institutional analysis as a promising tool for empirical research, particularly for the study of 'new governance' phenomena ...
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Over the past several decades, prominent public management and policy scholars have repeatedly identified institutional analysis as a promising tool for empirical research, particularly for the study of 'new governance' phenomena where policy is enacted and implemented by actors that span organizations, sectors, jurisdictions, and governance levels. Yet, relatively few empirical studies directly measure and model institutions in management and policy settings. In a systematic review of the literature, we identify challenges and barriers that may prevent management and policy scholars from engaging with institutional analysis, along with examples of studies that illustrate how to overcome these challenges in practice.
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State governments are frequently said to manipulate the discount rate assumption to make pension funding look better, reduce employers' and employees' pension contributions, or relieve fiscal stress. Building a model from the poli...
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State governments are frequently said to manipulate the discount rate assumption to make pension funding look better, reduce employers' and employees' pension contributions, or relieve fiscal stress. Building a model from the political embeddedness perspective and applying an event history analysis to the 81 largest state-administered pension plans in the United States, the authors found that more politically embedded pension boards were actually more likely to reduce their plan's discount rate. Public union coverage and government political ideology, however, had no significant impact on discount rate changes. These findings reveal the effect of political embeddedness on pension planning decisions and provide useful insights into the intricate process of setting pension discount rates in a new era of more muted investment return expectations. This article points to both political and financial pressures facing pension boards and state governments for many years to come.
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This article examines the effects of board turnover on nonprofit financial performance: resource acquisition and utilization. Governing board members play key roles in connecting organizations with external environments and ensuri...
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This article examines the effects of board turnover on nonprofit financial performance: resource acquisition and utilization. Governing board members play key roles in connecting organizations with external environments and ensuring that executives properly manage the organizations to achieve organizational missions. They also help in effectively attracting and appropriately utilizing financial resources. Given the importance of governing board members, any turnover occurring in the board should affect nonprofit financial performance. Using insights from organizational theories, we argue that the relationship between board turnover and the ability of UW organizations to acquire and utilize funds is nonlinear (first positive and then negative). We find general support for the hypothesis, which yields implications for both research and practice of board governance and human resources management in the nonprofit sector.
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How do individuals' experiences with political violence affect their perceptions regarding the risk associated with hosting refugees? This is an important question given that many communities are beginning to resent and oppose hos...
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How do individuals' experiences with political violence affect their perceptions regarding the risk associated with hosting refugees? This is an important question given that many communities are beginning to resent and oppose hosting refugees. To explore answers to the question, we study recent exposure to violence within Lebanon, which is a meaningful context since Lebanon serves as host to more than one million refugees from the Syrian Civil War. We adopt a novel empirical strategy to isolate the effect of exposure to violence upon perceptions of risk associated with hosting refugees. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of violent events linked to refugee populations in Lebanon relative to the timing of responses to our nationally representative survey deployed between June and August 2017. Our empirical strategy compares individuals interviewed before and after violent attacks in Lebanon. The results suggest that recent exposure to violence by Syrian militants increases individuals' perceptions of risk associated with hosting refugees from conflict zones, while exposure to violence carried out by Lebanese forces reduces perceptions of risk.
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Integrated water management (IWM) is widely regarded as a key strategy in achieving a variety of urban sustainability goals. Despite the promise of this strategy, however, uptake of IWM practices has generally been slow. A central...
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Integrated water management (IWM) is widely regarded as a key strategy in achieving a variety of urban sustainability goals. Despite the promise of this strategy, however, uptake of IWM practices has generally been slow. A central reason for this lies in the divergence of action recommendations in the literature and actual water management praxis. In this paper, we explore how action taken by governments relate (or not) to IWM dimensions found in the literature. We do this by combining a corpus of actions taken by local governments in Arizona with a systematic review of the IWM literature. More precisely, we identify a confined set of IWM action dimensions particularly relevant to current praxis and apply these to water management practices reported by local governments in Arizona. We find that governments in the state systematically use IWM strategies to complement or enhance traditional water management approaches. Uptake differs across management spheres in terms of magnitude and form and is informed by contextual characteristics. Overall, our study indicates that transition may be guided by bottom-up experimentation, context-sensitive selection, and incremental change. This is in contrast to how IWM is often understood in the literature - as sharp shift and break with old traditions.
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International dispute systems are often designed so that dispute body rulings do not set precedent. Yet governments have incentives to learn from prior decisions. Past rulings convey important information about how the law is appl...
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International dispute systems are often designed so that dispute body rulings do not set precedent. Yet governments have incentives to learn from prior decisions. Past rulings convey important information about how the law is applied. This is especially true in the World Trade Organization (WTO), where disputes frequently occur between the same members and over the same issues. I argue that case law increases the likelihood of early settlement. This helps explain why fifty percent of WTO cases end prior to a formal ruling. I use new data on the direction of ruling on each legal claim made in the first 450 WTO disputes. The results show that litigants are significantly more likely to settle early given the presence of previous legal decisions.
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