In April 2023, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a draft of revisions to Circular A-4, the first changes proposed since its publication in 2003. Following a public comment period, OMB published the final revised Circular A-4 in November 2023. In this article, we provide a section-by-section comparison describing the similarities and differences between the April draft and the November revision of Circular A-4. Among other observations, we note that the revised Circular A-4 changes the default social rate of time preference from 1.7 to 2.0%, retains recommendations for using distributional weighting in benefit–cost analysis, and retains recommendations to use a global point of view when determining the spatial scope of the analysis.

The Indonesian government has implemented the Pre-Employment Card Programme in response to current employment challenges, including high unemployment and underemployment rates among the youth in Indonesia. This research aims to analyse the Programme’s impact on the labour market outcomes, especially involving the youth. The research employs propensity score matching to examine the Programme’s impact on the probability of securing employment and the work hours among the youth. The study involved participants who were unemployed and employed when enrolling in the programme. The results show that the programme was statistically significant in increasing the probability of employment among the unemployed participants. However, it was not statistically significant to increase the work hours of those employed during the enrolment. These findings provide an initial assessment of the programme’s effectiveness in addressing employment challenges faced by the youth in Indonesia.

Ex ante, my primary concerns were about implementation across the wide expanse of federal applications, supporting the supplemental use of distributional weighting, trying to find a supportable middle ground on discounting using the expected value of bounds and a more consistent scope of analysis. Ex post, I felt heard if not followed, perhaps not uncommon for reviewers.

Is trade lobbying effective and does its effectiveness vary across firms? Using requests for relief from China trade war tariffs, we demonstrate that lobbying for specific trade policies contributed to securing those exact policies, an elusive target in the long-running trade lobbying literature. We further argue that lobbying should be most impactful for big companies because policymakers prioritize jobs and growth when allocating a limited number of policy favors. In line with this, we find that lobbying for tariff reductions by large firms was hugely more effective than for small firms, though with one major exception: requests from firms that owned foreign subsidiaries in China were overwhelmingly rejected. Large firms are powerful, especially when their interests align with policymakers’ economic policy objectives.

Overt political retribution, typically considered outside the bounds of American democracy, has recently risen to the surface of American political discourse. How do voters respond to elected officials wielding their powers of office for retributive purposes? In the current partisan political climate, do voters’ views of retribution depend on whether the official is a member of their party? Politicians in both parties have demonstrated willingness to threaten or pursue retaliation against corporations for using their political voice to publicly express opposition. Due to the American public’s ambivalence about the role of business in politics and the rights of corporations to political speech, the scenario of corporate political speech provides a useful case in which to test for partisan acceptance of the use of political retaliation. In an original and replication experiment, we find strong bipartisan rebuke of an elected official’s employment of “abusive legalism” in response to corporate political criticism. Strikingly, the negative consequences are greatest for an in-party official. The drop in support suffered by the official is equivalent to the effect of partisanship, such that an in-party official using their powers of office to “keep business out of politics” is viewed as unfavorably as a non-responsive out-party official.

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has made it increasingly difficult to protect and enforce intellectual property (IP) rights in a digital landscape where content can be easily accessed and utilized without clear authorization. First, we explain why LLMs make it uniquely difficult to protect and enforce IP, creating a ‘tragedy of the commons.’ Second, drawing on theories of polycentric governance, we argue that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) could be effective tools for addressing the complexities of digital IP rights. Third, we provide an illustrative case study that shows how NFTs can facilitate dispute resolution of IP on the blockchain.

Chinese bureaucracy – the organizational apparatus of Chinese governments – has played a significant role in China’s economic development and political control in the post-Mao era. In this paper, we draw on research on Chinese bureaucracy in both English and Chinese to highlight major findings in three areas: agency problems and incentive provision, the use of guanxi in policy implementation, and variable coupling among different parts of the bureaucracy. These three aspects are interrelated: agency problems induce the prevalence of informal institutions as an organizational response, which leads to variable coupling in Chinese bureaucracy. We discuss the issues and implications this literature presents for the further development of organization theory and the emerging research agenda.

This article seeks to challenge existing understandings of good work. It does so through a critical exploration of recognitive and craft conceptions of work, which are among the richest and most philosophically nuanced of extant accounts. The recognitive view emphasises work’s recognitive value through the social esteem derived from making a valuable social contribution. But by making recognition foundational, it is unable to appreciate the irreducible ethical significance of the objective quality of one’s work activity. The ‘craft ideal,’ by contrast, promises to provide a powerful basis for understanding the importance of rich, rewarding, and morally educative activities, but is undermined by a laudable but misdirected egalitarian impulse which prevents it from being able to properly distinguish good from bad work. One underlying aim of our discussion is to provoke deeper reflection from business ethicists regarding what we might want from an account of good work.

State capacity is critical for development. Yet, the question of how states learn – that is, how they acquire and incorporate information to improve performance over time – has received little attention. In this paper, we draw from organizational theory and the political economy of knowledge and innovation to study the components of effective learning in states as organizations. We focus on three functionally simple, but well-documented early states in ancient Greece: Sparta, Athens, and Macedon. We argue that Macedon’s superior performance relied on a learning model capable of integrating both experiential and experimental knowledge within existing structures. By directing our attention away from the early modern period, where much work in economic history and historical political economy is concentrated, our account challenges the focus of the existing literature on processes of centralization. Instead, we highlight organizational factors that may promote capacity-enhancing learning even in the context of weak centralization.

While from an instrumental perspective stakeholder relations can promote sustained competitive advantage, normative arguments underscore the importance of morally informed principles, especially when relational strategies have uncertain future outcomes and are prone to imitation. This study investigates how such instrumental and normative views can be complementary based on the case study of Natura, a cosmetics company procuring natural inputs from the Amazon rainforest via supplier relations that are open to multiple parties, including competitors. The research shows that Natura developed and reinforced a morally informed normative core specifying how the company and its managers should act. This resulted in a long-term commitment to the open relational strategy, especially when future outcomes were largely uncertain, which in turn promoted emergent instrumental gains via deepened relational attachments and substantive stakeholder engagement. Importantly, the company’s controlling shareholders strongly influenced the normative core, thus underscoring the importance of identifying key shareholders and their values.

This paper demonstrates tensions between national environmental policies and international free trade rules and traces business reactions to environmentalism through a study of the Can War, a controversy over a Danish ban on beverage cans from 1970 to 2002. At its core was a conflict between Denmark and the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union, EU) over free trade versus environmental objectives. This study of the Can War demonstrates how environmental concerns were entangled with national and economic interests, but also how brewers, retailers, and packaging producers used environmental and economic arguments in pragmatic ways and adapted to changing political and economic environments. Thus, the paper adds to the literature on the formative years of environmental politics, with a focus on business interests and a conflict between a nation-state and the EEC in a period when environmental concerns gained political momentum yet remained contested in a system based on free trade. This study also adds to the literature on waste-handling by demonstrating how the Danish return system changed from one based on reuse to one based on recycling; it further shows how beverage cans went from banned to uncontested, everyday objects. Through a comparison with Sweden, the case shows how national businesses influenced the design of new deposit and return systems for single-use packaging, wherein refillable glass bottles became marginalized. Overall, the study offers an understanding of the intricate relationships between environmental policies, business interests, consumer habits, and competing container materials, with aluminum as the winner.

This study investigates the impact of communication delays and recruitment selection stages on candidates’ perceptions of fairness and recruitment selection outcomes and explores the moderating role of employability. Employing a mixed-method approach across two independent studies involving 264 and 259 mid-level position candidates, two variables – communication timeliness and recruitment stages – are manipulated, while employability is investigated as a moderating variable. Our results indicate that timely communication of rejection, especially during the initial selection stages, significantly enhances candidates’ satisfaction, fairness perceptions, intentions to reapply, and intentions to recommend the organisation to others. Employability moderates the relationship between perceived fairness and recruitment outcomes, strongly influencing the likelihood of peer referrals and reapplication intentions. These findings underscore the importance of strategic communication management in recruitment selection processes to enhance employer branding and the job candidate experience.

The evaluation of services has become a common strategy in service management, and there is a wide variety of tools available. The objective was to evaluate user satisfaction at a sports center using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) techniques, comparing the information provided by each. To this end, this study involved 1,433 users of a sports center, analyzing the responses to the NPS® tool and subsequently to the IPA tool developed ad hoc with 11 attributes. The NPS® tool revealed 29.58% detractors, 30.36% passives, and 40.06% promoters, highlighting a negative impact on the overall score. The IPA tool offered detailed insights into attributes varying across the three NPS groups, identifying four critical attributes requiring strategic attention, enabling segmented marketing strategies. This research demonstrates the complementary value of combining NPS and IPA tools for strategic service management, providing actionable insights to enhance customer satisfaction and competitive positioning.

Firms adopt different strategies to achieve sustained profitable growth. We argue that the success of sustained profitable growth relies on the alignment between a firm's prior and subsequent strategy. This study views a firm's prior strategy, i.e., growth-oriented vs profit-oriented, as a primary driver of future sustained profitable growth. We adopt the resource-based view to understand the types of resources required for these two strategies. We argue that to achieve sustained profitable growth, growth-oriented firms need to enhance their firm-specific advantages by developing valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources such as technology and brand. In comparison, profit-oriented firms must identify versatile resources to capture growth opportunities and manage growth by successfully replicating their profitable operations. Low turnover in senior management could help profit-oriented firms achieve this goal. We find support for the arguments in a sample of 3,802 listed firms worldwide from 1992 to 2019.

This article has two primary aims: first, to provide a non-sectorial history of business interest associations in Italy from 1861 to 1914, and second, to introduce a novel interpretation of the logic behind their collective actions. The study identifies three distinct periods in the evolution of these associations in liberal Italy, each defined by a unique collective action logic: the homogeneity phase (1861-1881), the fragmentation phase (1881-1898), and the conflict phase (1898-1914). In the homogeneity phase, there was a general unity among Italy’s political and economic elites, particularly among landowners who favored an antiprotectionist stance to support Italy’s agricultural export economy. This period was characterized by a relative uniformity of interests despite some conflicts. The fragmentation phase began in 1881, driven by the agricultural crises and the rise of new economic elites in the agrarian and industrial sectors. These new players challenged the traditional landowners and existing policies, leading to a diversification of economic interests and the splintering of their organizational representations. The final conflict phase occurred during the Giolittian Era, marked by the rapid development of organizations amid growing class struggles in both the industrial and agricultural sectors. This period saw significant adaptation within capitalist structures to counter the rising labor movement. The article ultimately examines the changing nature, scale, and scope of business interest organizations in response to the evolving phases of Italian capitalism from 1861 to 1914. It highlights how the transformation of these organizations reflects broader shifts in the relationships between the economy, state, and society.

Especially in the context of climate adaptation policy, creating support for hard policy instruments and convincing people that their individual contributions do matter are two significant challenges. In this study, we test the effect of an individually versus collectively framed gain-appeal infographic on the acceptance of hard policy instruments and this in the context of strictly private climate change adaptation behaviour. We used a mixed methods approach focussing on reducing private paving in domestic gardens in Belgium. Evidence from an online survey experiment (n = 3,389) showed that policy makers implementing a collectively framed infographic can increase the acceptance of a more strict permit policy and a yearly financial contribution, while simultaneously enhancing personal and collective self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs. Complementary insights from qualitative data learned that perceived (in)equity is a crucial point of attention when designing climate policies addressing private paving. A collectively framed infographic may convey the message ‘yes, we ánd I can’. With these “findings, we want to trigger new opportunities in climate policies beyond the current policy scopes.