Search results

This paper aims to measure the trade price impact of a recent regulatory disclosure intervention in municipal securities secondary markets, which required broker-dealers to disclose securities trading information on a near-real-time and continuing basis.

The author analyzes trade price outcomes in the preintervention and postintervention regimes using a suite of time series estimations that give heteroskedasticity-robust standard errors (Prais–Winsten and Cochrain–Orcutt), accommodate higher-order lag structure in the error term (autoregressive integrated moving average) and account for volatility clustering in the time series (generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity).

Results show that regulatory disclosure intervention significantly improved trade price efficiency in municipal securities secondary markets as daily trade price differential and volatility both declined market-wide after the disclosure intervention.

The sample consists of trades in State of California general obligation bonds; therefore, empirical findings may not be generalizable to other states, local governments and different types of bonds.

The findings highlight voluntary information disclosure as a practical and effective mechanism in disclosure regulation of municipal securities secondary markets.

Only a small body of work exists that examines information disclosure regulation in municipal securities secondary markets; therefore, this paper expands knowledge on the topic and should provide renewed impetus for regulatory efforts aimed at improving the efficiency of municipal capital markets.

The institutional conditions of primary care provision remain understudied in low- and middle-income countries. This study analyzes how primary care doctors cope with medical uncertainty in municipal clinics in urban India. As street-level bureaucrats, the municipal doctors occupy two roles simultaneously: medical professional and state agent. They operate under conditions that characterize health systems in low-resource contexts globally: inadequate state investment, weak regulation and low societal trust. The study investigates how, in these conditions, the doctors respond to clinical risk, specifically related to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs).

The analysis draws on year-long ethnographic fieldwork in Pune (2013–14), a city of three million, including 30 semi-structured interviews with municipal doctors.

Interpreting their municipal mandate to exclude NCDs and reasoning their medical expertise as insufficient to treat NCDs, the doctors routinely referred NCD cases. They expressed concerns about violence from patients, negative media attention and unsupportive municipal authorities should anything go wrong clinically.

The study contextualizes street-level service-delivery in weak institutional conditions. Whereas street-level workers may commonly standardize practices to reduce workload, here the doctors routinized NCD care to avoid the sociopolitical consequences of clinical uncertainty. Modalities of the welfare state and medical care in India – manifest in weak municipal capacity and healthcare regulation – appear to compel restraint in service-delivery. The analysis highlights how norms and social relations may shape primary care provision and quality.

Public food procurement (PFP) plays an important role in establishing agri-food systems. The study explores local food system stakeholders' response to PFP interventions by addressing the question of how PFP transforms agri-food systems and how this new agri-food ecosystem is governed.

This article presents and discusses a unique case study of Jeonbuk, a rural province in South Korea, which successfully transformed its agri-food system into an ecosystem through its sustainability-oriented innovations (SOIs) among born ecopreneur farmers. This case not only offers insights into a novel way to create value chains through legislative, executive and judicial governance but also extends the body of knowledge on agri-food systems by introducing the concept of an agri-food ecosystem.

The findings indicate the importance of the ecosystem governance and knowledge exchange among internal and external ecosystem stakeholders. In particular, PFP institutions play a crucial role in facilitating the operation of public meal centers and cooperation among actors.

Taking an ecosystem lens to agri-food systems may offer agricultural cooperatives a wider perspective and better understanding of the governance structures necessary to successfully execute public interventions. Lastly, the Korean case differs from other developing countries, but its role model qualities could help to implement successful school meal programs elsewhere.

This paper reviewed and applied a conceptual framework aimed at identifying the role of PFP institutions in the value chain governance by studying a case study of a South Korean local school meal program. The study further extends the agricultural cooperatives research and contributes to a better understanding of the role of a municipality and an agri-food intermediary in the governance process involving producers and kitchens.

To date, there are no studies in the literature that provide a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between the slenderness ratio and the main design criteria in supertall towers (=300 m). In this paper, this important issue was explored using detailed data collected from 75 cases.

This paper was carried out with a comprehensive literature review including the database of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat(CTBUH) (CTBUH, 2022), peer-reviewed journals, MSc theses and PhD dissertations, conference proceedings, fact sheets, architectural and structural magazines and other Internet sources. In this study, the case study method was also used to gather and consolidate information about supertall towers to analyze the interrelationships. Cases were 75 supertall buildings in various countries [44 from Asia (37 from China), 16 from the Middle East (6 from Dubai, the United Arab Emirates), 11 from the United States of America and 3 from Russia, 1 from the UK].

The paper's findings highlighted as follows: (1) for buildings in the height range of 300–399 m, the slenderness ratio was usually between 7 and 7.9 and megatall towers were frequently built at a slenderness ratio of 10–15; (2) the median slenderness ratio of buildings in the 400–599 m height ranges was around 8.6; (3) a trend towards supertall slender buildings (=8) was observed in Asia, the Middle East and North America; (4) residential, office and mixed-use towers had a median slenderness ratio of over 7.5; (5) all building forms were utilized in the construction of slender towers (>8); (6) the medium slenderness ratio was around 8 for supertall buildings constructed with outriggered frame and tube systems; (7) especially concrete towers reached values pushing the limits of slenderness (>10) and (8) since the number of some supertall building groups (e.g. steel towers) was not sufficient, establishing a scientific relationship between aspect ratio and related design criteria was not possible.

To date, there are no studies in the literature that provide a comprehensive understanding of the interrelationships between the slenderness ratio and the main design criteria in supertall towers (=300 m). This important issue was explored using detailed data collected from 75 cases.

With the increasing complexity of public–private partnership (PPP) projects, the amount of data generated during the construction process is massive. This paper aims to develop a new information management method to cope with the risk problems involved in dealing with such data, based on domain ontologies of the construction industry, to help manage PPP risks, share and reuse risk knowledge.

Risk knowledge concepts are acquired and summarized through PPP failure cases and an extensive literature review to establish a domain framework for risk knowledge using ontology technology to help manage PPP risks.

The results indicate that the risk ontology is capable of capturing key concepts and relationships involved in managing PPP risks and can be used to facilitate knowledge reuse and storage beneficial to risk management.

The classes in the risk knowledge ontology model constructed in this research do not yet cover all the information in PPP project risks and need to be further extended. Moreover, only the framework and basic methods needed are developed, while the construction of a working ontology model and the relationship between implicit and explicit knowledge is a complicated process that requires repeated modifications and evaluations before it can be implemented.

The ontology provides a basis for turning PPP risk information into risk knowledge to allow the effective sharing and communication of project risks between different project stakeholders. It can also have the potential to help reduce the dependence on subjectivity by mining, using and storing tacit knowledge in the risk management process.

The apparent suitability of the nine classes of PPP risk knowledge (project model, risk type, risk occurrence stage, risk source, risk consequence, risk likelihood, risk carrier, risk management measures and risk case) is identified, and the proposed construction method and steps for a complete domain ontology for PPP risk management are unique. A combination of criteria- and task-based evaluations is also developed for assessing the PPP risk ontology for the first time.

This study aims to explore the formation of municipal risk management (RM) and the reasons for the differences of RM practices between the seven biggest cities in Finland.

The empirical data of this comparative qualitative case study comprises 33 interviews conducted with municipal managers. Supplementary material includes documentary material on municipal rules governing RM as well as annual reports and risk tools used in the municipalities.

This study found differences in cities with respect to when, how and why RM practices had evolved. The results indicate that differences in RM practices and development paths between cities are largely explained by the differences in the original reason to initiate RM, time span since its introduction, professional and educational backgrounds of risk managers, local risk events and accounting infrastructure such as RM tools developed in a city. These findings also suggest that even within the same municipality, different functions can be at different phases regarding RM.

This study reports on RM as a new form of accounting in the field of Finnish municipalities. This highlights how fairly uniform considerations at the field level lead to variation in the elaboration of RM practices at the municipal level. The study finds that different paths in the development of local RM involve iterative evolution between the phases of emergence, largely explained by contextual differences. This study contributes to understanding the emergence of new accounting forms in a municipal RM context.

This paper aims to determine whether local governments (LGs) use non-consolidated municipally owned companies (MOCs), excluded from public sector entities and, consequently, from sub-national debt to avoid fiscal debt limits. This paper contributes to the literature by analysing the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units.

This paper uses difference-in-differences and the system general method of moments model with the Blundell–Bond estimator for dynamic panel data analysis of MOCs owned by 866 Polish municipalities in 2010–2018.

This paper shows that the MOCs’ revenues support limited local public debt capacity by indebtedness restrictions imposed on municipalities in 2014. As a result, less indebted municipalities have higher off-budget revenues. The tightening of fiscal rules related to sub-sovereign indebtedness increased off-budget activities, but that effect is much stronger in rural and rural–urban municipalities than in urban municipalities and big cities.

This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the fiscal debt rule’s impact on the off-budget municipal activities in total and separate in different types of local government units. In this paper, the authors combine theories relating to private and public finance; this is a novel approach and one that is also necessary – as, in fact, the worlds of public and private actors intersect – as exemplified by the existence of MOC.

This study attempts to reveal the contemporary tools of spatial design – policy, planning, urban design and architecture – for social mix (SMX) and social mixing (SMXG) by focusing on the recent undertakings in Denmark, the case in point being Copenhagen.

The study applies a combined research methodology consisting of qualitative strategies. By making use of regulatory document reviews and interviews with key respondents, the study puts together the tools for SMX which are, otherwise, disorganised. Dwelling on reviews of municipal local plans, site visits and semi-structured interviews with municipal agents in charge, it provides a comparative urban morphology analysis of three recently developed neighbourhoods on the basis of SMX and SMXG.

This study presents the untitled “toolbox” of Danish authorities to regulate the SMX policies and spatial efforts within a variety of planning/design scales to facilitate SMXG among the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods. The examination of successive cases manifests that SMX strategies have been integrated with those of SMXG, with a gradual upwards inclination, since mixing different tenures, types, sizes and prices have not been successful in guaranteeing social interaction. In doing so, the “in-between” zones have become the primary realm of control with an observable differentiation in the studied cases.

Studies are scant concerning the spatial design efforts regarding social mix and mixing. The present work contributes to filling this gap by examining a cutting-edge practice in a mature milieu and describing it in a thorough and comparative manner.

This study explores municipal leaders' perceptions on strategic human resource management in their local government organization. Previous studies on companies demonstrate that the top manager's perceptions of the importance of human resource management (HRM) for the organization are reflected in the quality of human resource management and its strategic role. The authors are interested in how leaders in municipalities perceive HRM.

The authors interviewed 30 leaders of Finnish municipalities for this qualitative study focused on municipal leaders' perceptions of HRM. The authors applied a discourse analytical approach in the analysis.

The authors recognized four discourses that frame perceptions of HRM: HRM as a strategic weapon, HRM as an underperformer, HRM as a matter of formality and HRM as a cost generator. In addition, the authors recognized that the discourses reflected leaders' self-positioning in relation to the power to impact issues related to HRM. Shifting between distinct roles demonstrated that municipal leaders' emphasis on HRM and its strategic alignment reflects the power relations in the municipality and the attitudes to the importance of HRM.

This study contributes to the academic discussions on HRM in municipalities and provides views on the municipal leader's role and impact on valuing and investing in HRM. From a practical point of view, the study will increase municipal leaders' knowledge of HRM's impact on the performance of the organization and also of the possible means of HRM.

This paper aims to draw lessons for telecommunications (telecom) network deployment in India, from a study of policy and regulatory approaches taken by other federal administrations in streamlining processes for site clearances, grant of rights of way (RoW) and approvals for local infrastructure deployment and sharing. With the urgent need for setting up small cells and rapid fiberisation of networks in the 5G era, the importance of such processes has gained prominence.

The authors adopt qualitative thematic content analysis with three-tier coding and classification to identify themes in archival and current documentary data and information obtained from subject-matter experts in the countries studied.

Formulation and implementation of telecom policy is led by national governments. However, national telecom administrations, in recognition of new needs, have co-opted states and local authorities as partners in development of telecom networks, providing the overall framework, guidance and appropriate incentives where required.

This cooperative model could work well in India, where telecom policy making and regulation is the prerogative of the central government, but administration of RoW and local clearances for cable laying, tower siting and associated infrastructure activities for expanding telecom networks are left to decentralised decision-making in the states and local bodies.

This research attempts to sytematise, thematise and draw cross-country comparisons to inform regulatory and administrative policy for 5G infrastructure rollout in India.