Abstract This chapter presents a case study of the United States’ federally led mission to eradicate homelessness, focusing on the early twenty-first century. We document the emergence of a federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness in the wake of the Great Recession, paying special attention to the role of “evidence-based” solutions and state leadership in this effort. We then review the disparities between the stated goals and realized results. Despite a doubling of federal funding, broad cross-sector collaboration, and a successful imposition of government-preferred practices in the homeless services industry, none of the four goals defined in 2010 were completed over the next decade. We assess these lackluster results and elicit new insights for other “moonshot” missions aimed at grand societal challenges.
We examine how economic institutions, measured by the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index, affect the relationship between capital — human, social, and financial — and opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship (OME). To do this, we develop a multi-level model that connects theories of human and social capital at the micro-level to institutional theories at the macro-level. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), we then test the predictions of our model and find evidence that economic institutions play a crucial role in the relationship between these three distinct types of capital and OME. Our results are somewhat counter-intuitive — as the quality of the institutional environment improves, human and financial capital become less important determinants of entrepreneurship while the relationship between social capital and entrepreneurship substantially strengthens.
I explore how pro-market institutions moderate the relationship between private or state ownership and innovation. Due to political and social connections, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have several advantages over private-owned enterprises (POEs) in China, but I hypothesise that these advantages wane when institutional environments prioritise market competition, rule of law, and the rewards to profitable enterprise. Using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Survey in China, the results suggest that POEs are more innovative than SOEs but only in market-oriented provinces. In provinces that are not market-oriented, SOEs are more innovative than POEs.
Populism is on the rise globally and is likely to remain a vital political force for the foreseeable future. Despite growing interest in this phenomenon, populism is still poorly understood and we know very little about its consequences for business. We develop a multi-disciplinary framework grounded in the ideation approach to populism, new institutional economic theory, and the judgment-based approach to entrepreneurship to theorize about how populist discourse by a nation’s political leader influences entrepreneurial action in a comparative international context. Specifically, we hypothesize that populist discourse creates regime uncertainty concerning the future stability of pro-market institutions, which can significantly impede entrepreneurial judgments and discourage new venture creation. Because populism almost always appears attached to other host ideologies (e.g., socialism, nationalism), we explore which sub-types of populism and under what institutional conditions populist discourse can have a negative or positive impact on entrepreneurial action. Specifically, we argue and find that the political ideology of the populist leader, as well as the strength of the pro-market and political institutional environments moderate the effect of populism on entrepreneurship. We test our hypotheses using a multi-level design and a dataset comprised of more than 564,000 individuals in 31 countries over the period 2002-2012.
This study examines how foreign aid and institutions affect entrepreneurship activity following natural disasters. We use insights from the entrepreneurship, development, and institutions literature to develop a model of entrepreneurship activity in the aftermath of natural disasters. First, we hypothesize the effect of natural disasters on entrepreneurship activity depends on the amount of foreign aid received. Second, we hypothesize that natural disasters and foreign aid either encourages or discourages entrepreneurship activity depending on two important institutional conditions: the quality of government and economic freedom. The findings from our panel of 85 countries from 2006 to 2016 indicate that natural disasters are negatively associated with entrepreneurship activity, but both foreign aid and economic freedom attenuate this effect. In addition, we observe that foreign aid is positively associated with entrepreneurship activity but only in countries with high quality government. Hence, we conclude that the effect of natural disasters on entrepreneurship depends crucially on the quality of government, economic freedom, and foreign aid. Our findings provide new insights into how natural disasters and foreign aid affect entrepreneurship and highlight the important role of the institutional context.
The Pythagorean Expected Wins Percentage Model was developed by Bill James to estimate a baseball team expected wins percentage over the course of a season. As such, the model can be used to assess how lucky or unfortunate a team was over the course of a season. From a sports analytics perspective, such information is valuable in that it is important to understand how reproducible a given result may be in the next time period. In contest theoretic (game theoretic) parlance, the original model represents a (restricted) Tullock contest success function (CSF). We transform, estimate, and compare the original model and two alternative models from contest theory, the serial and difference form CSFs, using MLB team win data (2003 to 2015) and perform a cross-validation exercise to test the accuracy of the alternative models. The serial CSF estimator dramatically improves wins estimation (reduces root mean squared error) compared to the original model, an optimized version of the model, or an optimized difference form model. We conclude that the serial CSF model of wins estimation substantially improves estimates of team quality, on average. The work provides a real world test of alternative contest forms.
