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This chapter reports the results of a 20-year longitudinal study of how American unions have adapted their internal administrative practices to meet the significant external challenges they face. In previous scholarly work, researchers have reported that the administrative practices of American unions were far more informal, ad hoc, and political than those of business, government, and other nonprofit organizations. The authors’ 2010 survey asked US-based national and international unions to provide data concerning their internal administrative practices. The results were compared with findings from similar surveys conducted in 1990 and 2000. The results of these surveys indicate a steady increase in unions’ adoption of more formal personnel policies, budget practices, strategic planning processes, and efforts to evaluate planned activities over the 20-year period studied. They also indicate that unions increasingly recruit individuals meeting college, technical, and professional qualifications. Taken together, the results suggest a recognition on the part of many unions that adapting their internal administrative practices to the new realities they face is a fundamental and a necessary part of any effort at organizational renewal.

A number of multidimensional poverty measures that respect the ordinal nature of dimensions have recently been proposed within the counting approach framework. Besides ensuring a reduction in poverty, however, it is important to monitor distributional changes to ensure that poverty reduction has been inclusive in reaching the poorest. Distributional issues are typically captured by adjusting a poverty measure to be sensitive to inequality among the poor. This approach, however, has certain practical and conceptual limitations. It conflicts, for example, with some policy-relevant measurement features, such as the ability to decompose a measure into dimensions post-identification and does not create an appropriate framework for assessing disparity in poverty across population subgroups. In this chapter, we propose and justify the use of a separate decomposable inequality measure – a positive multiple of “variance” – to capture the distribution of deprivations among the poor and to assess disparity in poverty across population subgroups. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach through two contrasting inter-temporal illustrations using Demographic Health Survey data sets for Haiti and India.

The post industrial revolution era, driven by an expansion of the global energy system (Jaccard, 2006), has witnessed an exponential increase in the consumption of finite and non-renewable resources, coupled with substantial destruction of the natural environment. Weizsacker and Jesinghaus (1992) observed that the consequence of further growth in a conventional sense would not be worldwide prosperity, but rather lead to destruction, putting in jeopardy prosperity and indeed the very basis of life. It follows that the continuance of such economic growth, measured by traditional means is unsustainable and illogical in the long run.

In healthcare, overuse and underuse of medical treatments represent equally dangerous deviations from an optimal use equilibrium and arouse concerns about possible implications for patients’ health, and for the healthcare system in terms of both costs and access to medical care. Medical liability plays a dominant role among the elements that can affect these deviations. Therefore, a remarkable economic literature studies how medical decisions are influenced by different levels of liability. In particular, identifying the relation between liability and treatments selection, as well as disentangling the effect of liability from other incentives that might be in place, is a task for sound empirical research. Several studies have already tried to tackle this issue, but much more needs to be done. In this chapter, we offer an overview of the state of the art in the study of the relation between liability and treatments selection. First, we reason on the theoretical mechanisms underpinning the relationship under investigation by presenting the main empirical predictions of the related literature. Second, we provide a comprehensive summary of the existing empirical evidence and its main weaknesses. Finally, we conclude by offering guidelines for further research.

Seligman is an important and ironically somewhat neglected figure today in the history of American economic thought. However, an examination of his scholarly achievements reveals that he had a considerable impact on the development of professional economics in America and could count the most influential economists in Europe as personal friends and collaborators (Moss, 2003; Rutherford, 2004; Mehrotra, 2005). Asso and Fiorito (2006), in their introduction to Seligman's autobiography (1929) argue that ‘his personal influence as an academic economist, as a teacher and as a central figure in the dissemination of economic knowledge was second to none and perhaps more meaningful than any single work he wrote’ (p. 1). They also record (quoting his student, Alvin Johnson) that ‘with Seligman…American economics began to acquire a distinctive professional reputation, some very high scholarly standards and a sort of “moral magnificence”’ (p. 2). What this means is that through Seligman's work and guidance economics came to encompass a moral dimension that fed through into social policies, many of which were adopted by American legislatures. The major influences on his method included the German Historical School and a number of heterodox Continental writers that informed Seligman's in great Whig interpretation of the development of economics. He also engaged critically with the more abstract methods of contemporary economic analysis of the early twentieth century.

Residents in under-resourced/high-Medicaid (85% or higher) nursing homes on average receive care from relatively lower quality providers and have worse health outcomes, which may increase the risk of higher COVID-19 incidence. This study aims to evaluate if having a culture that encourages employee empowerment results in better quality (lower COVID-19 deaths) in times of crisis, such as the current pandemic. The study combined primary survey data from 391 Directors of Nursing (response rate of 37%), with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Nursing Home COVID-19 Public File, LTCFocus, Area Health Resource File, and Nursing Home Compare. The dependent variable consisted of the number of COVID-19 death as of November 25, 2021. The independent variables consisted of Likert scale for employee empowerment (Cronbach alpha= 0.82). Control variables consisted of organizational factors (e.g., size, location, and ownership), as well as community factors (e.g., poverty, unemployment, and competition). The results indicated that one unit increase in employee empowerment was associated with 6% lower likelihood of having COVID-19 deaths. Nursing homes, particularly those under-resourced, face difficulty improving the quality of care due to financial constraints. However, the results suggest that adopting a culture that fosters employee empowerment may give nursing homes an edge in improving quality outcomes in crises.

The chapter focuses on the personal characteristics of top executives in companies involved in corporate financial crime as well as the introduction of human governance as one of the mechanisms in preventing corporate misbehaviour. This chapter discusses directors’ and top management teams’ personal characteristics – in the context of corporate governance – that may influence the occurrence of corporate financial crime. The study further proposes the human governance factor as a possible mechanism to improve corporate governance in preventing such misbehaviour. This chapter highlights the personal characteristics of top executives, which may become the indicators of corporate financial crime, as well as human governance, which is shown to be one of the most important mechanisms of corporate governance for corporate financial crime prevention.