This paper investigates the changing job characteristics of strategic planners in the face of long-run increases in environmental turbulence since the 1960s. We build on contingency theory to examine ...how growing turbulence may have impacted three aspects of strategic planner jobs: temporal range, processes, and organizational location. Drawing upon job advertisement data between 1960 and 2003, we compare strategic planner jobs over time and relative to a similar managerial function, marketing. We find that the secular increase in environmental turbulence is negatively associated with forecasting (temporal range), economics and analysis (processes) and centralization (organizational location), especially when compared with marketing. These findings broadly support contingency theory in a domain that has so far lacked empirical consensus. We contribute further by introducing a fine-grained methodology that allows a detailed approach to contingency theory studies of managerial roles, and opens a bridge to the Strategy as Practice tradition of research. Our findings also have implications for participation in strategic planning in firms, for the role of analysis in management education, and for research attention to strategic planning as an enduring strategy practice.
Purely forward-looking versions of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) generate too little inflation persistence. Some authors add ad hoc backward-looking terms to address this shortcoming. We ...hypotehsize that inflation persistence results mainly from variation in the long-run trend component of inflation, which we attribute to shifts in monetary policy. We derive a version of the NKPC that incorporates a time-varying inflation trend and examine whether it explains the dynamics of inflation. When drift in trend inflation is taken into account, a purely forward-looking version of the model fits the data well, and there is no need for backward-looking components.
We investigate the effect of growth opportunities in a firm's investment opportunity set on its joint choice of leverage, debt maturity, and covenants. Using a database that contains detailed debt ...covenant information, we provide large-sample evidence of the incidence of covenants in public debt and construct firm-level indices of bondholder covenant protection. We find that covenant protection is increasing in growth opportunities, debt maturity, and leverage. We also document that the negative relation between leverage and growth opportunities is significantly attenuated by covenant protection, suggesting that covenants can mitigate the agency costs of debt for high growth firms.
This paper attempts to estimate the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in the case of France by taking the role of nuclear energy in electricity production into account. We adopt the autoregressive ...distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration as the estimation method. Additionally, we examine the stability of the estimated models and investigate the Granger causality relationships between the variables in the system. The results from our estimation provide evidence supporting the EKC hypothesis, and the estimated models are shown to be stable over the sample period. The uni-direction running from other variables to CO2 emissions are confirmed from the casualty tests. Specifically, the uni-directional causality relationship running from nuclear energy to CO2 emissions statistically provides evidence on the important role of nuclear energy in reducing CO2 emissions.
We test whether good economic conditions and expansionary fiscal policy help incumbents get reelected in a large panel of democracies. We find no evidence that deficits help reelection in any group ...of countries independent of income level, level of democracy, or government or electoral system. In developed countries and old democracies, deficits in election years or over the term of office reduce reelection probabilities. Higher growth rates over the term raise reelection probabilities only in developing countries and new democracies. Low inflation is rewarded by voters only in developed countries. These effects are both statistically significant and quite substantial quantitatively. (JEL D72, E62, H62, O47)
We examine convergence in carbon dioxide emissions among 128 countries for the period 1960-2003 by means of a new methodology introduced by Phillips and Sul (Econometrica 75(6):1771-1855, 2007a). ...Contrary to previous studies, our approach allows us to examine for evidence of club convergence, i.e. identify groups of countries that converge to different equilibria. Our results suggest convergence in per capita CO₂ emissions among all the countries under scrutiny in the early years of our sample. However, there seem to be two separate convergence clubs in the recent era that converge to different steady states. Interestingly, we also find evidence of transitioning between the two convergence clubs suggesting either a slow convergence between the two clubs or a tendency for some countries to move from one convergence club to the other.
We study the cyclical behavior of fiscal policy to explain why some countries exhibit procyclical fiscal policy stances—being expansionary in good times and contractionary in bad times. We develop a ...model that links the polarization of preferences over fiscal spending to the procyclicality bias. We then present evidence that social polarization as measured by income inequality and educational inequality is consistently and positively associated with fiscal procyclicality, even after controlling for other determinants from existing theories. We also find a strong negative impact of fiscal procyclicality on economic growth.
We study the portfolio behavior of bank loans following a monetary tightening and find that real estate and consumer loans sharply decrease, while commercial and industrial (C&I) loans increase. ...These responses are compared with responses following non-monetary shocks, which also reduce output but keep interest rates roughly unchanged. During such a “non-monetary” downturn, C&I loans sharply decrease, while real estate and consumer loans show no substantial response. These responses, together with the responses of relevant lending rates, are hard to reconcile with a decline in the supply of C&I bank loans during a monetary downturn as stressed by the bank-lending channel. Several arguments are presented explaining why the supply of C&I loans may actually increase after a monetary contraction.
Productivity shocks and budget deficits are considered to be two key determinants of the current account. In order to assess formally the role of both factors in driving current account movements, ...the present paper extends the standard intertemporal model of the current account to allow for Non-Ricardian household behavior. Testable cross-equation restrictions for the current account and investment are derived by drawing on the distinction between country-specific and global innovations to productivity as well as to the government budget. We test the restrictions of the model against time series data for 21 OECD countries and find evidence in support of the model.
Characteristics of inflation play a key role in policy formulation and market analysis. Several studies have analyzed inflation persistence and reached diverging conclusions. In this paper, we ...investigate the dynamics of inflation persistence using fractionally integrated processes and find that there has been a clear decline in inflation persistence in the United States over the past two decades. We also show that the presence of fractional integration in inflation successfully explains previous diverging results. Lastly, we provide some international comparisons to examine the extent to which there has been a commensurate decline in inflation persistence in the other G7 economies.
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