Countervailing Effects Research Articles

Two tiers, not one: Different sources of extrinsic mortality have opposing effects on life history traits.

Guided by concepts from life history (LH) theory, a large human research literature has tested the hypothesis that exposures to extrinsic mortality (EM) promote the development of faster LH strategies (e.g., earlier/faster reproduction, higher offspring number). A competing model proposes that, because EM in the past was intimately linked to energetic constraints, such exposures specifically led to the development of slower LH strategies. We empirically address this debate by examining (1) LH variation among small-scale societies under different environmental conditions; (2) country-, regional- and community-level correlations between ecological conditions, mortality, maturational timing, and fertility; (3) individual-level correlations between this same set of factors; and (4) natural experiments leveraging the impact of externally-caused changes in mortality on LH traits. Partially supporting each model, we found that harsh conditions encompassing energetic stress and ambient cues to EM (external cues received through sensory systems) have countervailing effects on the development of LH strategies, both delaying pubertal maturation and promoting an accelerated pace of reproduction and higher offspring number. We conclude that, although energetics are fundamental to many developmental processes, providing a first tier of environmental influence, this first tier alone cannot explain these countervailing effects. An important second tier of environmental influence is afforded by ambient cues to EM. We advance a 2-tiered model that delineates this second tier and its central role in regulating development of LH strategies. Consideration of the first and second tier together is necessary to account for the observed countervailing shifts toward both slower and faster LH traits.

Does voice endorsement by supervisors enhance or constrain voicer's personal initiative? Countervailing effects via feeling pride and feeling envied.

While the previous research has examined antecedents of supervisors' voice endorsement, it has generally overlooked its effects on voicers' affective and behavioral reactions, probably because of the underlying assumption that supervisors' voice endorsement is inherently beneficial and likely to encourage more proactive behaviors in the future. In this research, we offer a theoretical model of the double-edged effects of supervisors' voice endorsement on voicers' subsequent personal initiative. Drawing on cognitive appraisal theory and related research, we proposed that supervisors' voice endorsement prompts two different cognitive appraisal processes in voicers that evoke two distinct emotional experiences-feeling pride and feeling envied-with countervailing effects on voicers' subsequent personal initiative. Specifically, voice endorsement results in voicers not only feeling pride, which enhances their subsequent personal initiative, but also in their feeling envied, which reduces their later personal initiative. Moreover, we extend the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion from a social constructionist approach by incorporating coworker support-an important relational context-as a contingent factor shaping the effects of voice endorsement on feeling pride and feeling envied and on voicers' subsequent personal initiative. The results from two field studies-a weekly experience sampling study with 574 observations from 119 employees and an event-based daily experience sampling study with 787 observations from 180 employees-largely support our theoretical model. This research suggests the importance of considering the perspectives of all the stakeholders in the proactivity triad (i.e., the focal employee, the supervisor, and coworkers) in order to sustain employee proactivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Is more care recipient time at home also a family caregiver-centered quality of life measure?

Time in healthcare facilities is associated with worse patient quality of life (QoL); however, impact on family caregiver QoL is unknown. We evaluate care recipient days not at home-days in the emergency department (ED), inpatient (IP) care, and post-acute care (PAC)-to understand how care recipient days not at home correspond to family caregiver QoL. Secondary data were linked to care recipient utilization data. Elastic net machine learning models were used to evaluate the impact of a single day of utilization in each setting on binary QoL outcomes. We also compared composite weighted and unweighted "days not at home" variables. Two time periods, 6 and 18 months, were used to predict three caregiver QoL measures (self-rated health, depressive symptoms, and subjective burden). In the 6-month timeframe, a single day of ED utilization was associated with increased likelihood of poor QoL for all three assessed outcomes (range: 1.4%-3.2%). A day of PAC was associated to a modest degree with increased likelihood of caregiver burden (0.2%) and depressive symptoms (0.1%), with a slight protective effect for self-rated health (-0.1%). An IP day had a slight protective effect (-0.2 to -0.1%). At 18 months, ED and IP had similar, albeit more muted, relationships with caregiver burden and depressive symptoms. PAC had a slight protective effect for caregiver burden (-0.1%). Cumulative days in all settings combined generally was not associated with caregiver QoL. Whereas total care recipient time away from home had some negative spillovers to family caregivers, the countervailing effects of unique settings on caregiver QoL may mask net QoL effects. This finding limits the utility of a single care recipient home time measure as a valid caregiver-centered measure. Considering cumulative care recipient time in individual settings separately may be needed to reveal the true net effects on caregiver QoL.

Research on the Impact of Geopolitical Instability on Russian Trade

This study examines how global and country- specific geopolitical instability affects Russian trade using data from 1996 to 2021. A panel regression model analyzes trade between Russia and its 15 top trading partners, exploring both direct and indirect effects. The analysis focuses on how accumulated foreign direct investment (FDI) and exchange rate fluctuations mediate these relationships. The findings reveal that global geopolitical instability decrease Russian trade by 0.0558. Interestingly, this negative impact is partially mediated by a decrease in FDI (-0.0805). This aligns with the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) results, which show a significant negative effect of global geopolitical instability on FDI (-1.209). This suggests that FDI acts as a key transmitter of the negative effects of global instability on Russian trade. The role of exchange rate fluctuations, however, is more complex. While the Sobel Test indicated a negative indirect effect, the SEM analysis shows a positive indirect effect through exchange rate fluctuations on trade. This suggests potentially countervailing effects of currency fluctuations, with depreciation potentially incentivizing exports while appreciation might make imports cheaper. The impact of country-specific geopolitical instability varies depending on the context. Industries like food products and textiles are significantly affected by geopolitical instability increase, while sectors such as fuels, metals and raw materials show resilience. Close trading partners are less affected by global instability but suffer from partner- specific instability. Geographically, Western Europe benefits from global instability but faces challenges from partner-specific instability, contrasting with Eastern Europe and Asia. Overall, this research contributes to the understanding of how geopolitical instability, mediated by FDI and exchange rates, shapes Russia's trade performance.

Sense of Power and Job Search Incivility: The Countervailing Effects of Workload and Moral Identity

Sense of Power and Job Search Incivility: The Countervailing Effects of Workload and Moral Identity

“Hireability” prospects for known bystander reporters of sexual harassment: Moral character, agreeableness, and gender effects

SummaryBystander intervention has been promoted across organizations to combat sexual harassment and its deleterious effects. However, the career consequences of bystander reporters (e.g., their hireability prospects inside and outside the organization)—those who report sexual harassment on behalf of coworkers—are not well understood. Based on the social identity and person perception literatures, which suggest that recruiters are motivated to hire candidates with attributes helpful to the organization (perceived moral character and agreeableness), we proposed that candidates' history of reporting sexual harassment on behalf of a victim leads to perceived high moral character but low agreeableness, which subsequently have countervailing effects on hireability of these known reporters. We found support across three experimental studies using realistic hiring decision‐making tasks and various employee samples. Based on the social identity literature, we further argued that perceptions and hireability of the known reporters depend on recruiter and candidate genders. In Study 2 and Study 3, we consistently found that the positive effect of reporting on perceptions of candidate moral character was weaker when the recruiter was male (vs. female) but we found mixed results for candidate gender effects. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

The countervailing effects of spatial competition in the performing arts: examining local versus traded market performance

The countervailing effects of spatial competition in the performing arts: examining local versus traded market performance

Competition, quality and integrated health care

Integration of health care services has been promoted in several countries to improve the quality and coordination of care. We investigate the effects of such integration in a model where providers compete on quality to attract patients under regulated prices. We identify countervailing effects of integration on quality of care. While integration makes coordination of care more profitable for providers due to bundled payments, it also softens competition as patient choice is restricted. We also identify circumstances due to asymmetries across providers and/or services under which integration either increases or reduces the quality of services provided. In the absence of synergies, integration generally leads to increases in quality for some services and reductions for others. The corresponding effect on health benefits depends largely on whether integration leads to quality dispersion or convergence across services. If the softening of competition effect is weak, integration is likely to improve quality and patient outcomes.

Impact Analysis of Robotization and Automation on Jobs: A Systematic Literature Review

The pandemic, coupled with Industry 4.O, augments the claim that new technologies like automation and robotization can potentially substitute human work with machines. The available literature was distinguished across three potential outcomes of adopting robots and automation: Displacement, countervailing, and polarisation effects. The displacement effect on jobs due to the adoption of robots and automation was majorly witnessed in the USA, UK, China, and some European countries. No empirical studies specific to India were available that discuss displacement and countervailing effects of automation and robotization. Countervailing effects will only work across economies with a more skilled workforce and enough endowment for upskilling and reskilling workers as per industry standards available. The polarization effect was witnessed across countries as jobs get more skill-biased. The findings from available literature on this subject vary from country to country and sector to sector. Hence, as the available literature provides varied views on this subject, there is ample scope for new research.

The Effect of Gamification on Employee Boredom and Performance†

ABSTRACTThis study investigates the effect of gamification on employee boredom and performance in a repetitive work process. In video games, loot is unpredictable, intermittent rewards used to motivate players to repeat boring actions. In a 2 × 1 laboratory experiment, I examine how gamification, featuring nonmonetary loot point rewards, may impact boredom and performance. I find that individuals have mixed opinions. On the one hand, they recognize the emotional value of gamification and find the repetitive work process more attractive. On the other hand, they experience a violation of fairness even though the point rewards do not impact their monetary payoff. My findings help reconcile the seemingly contradictory predictions from two sets of motivation theories. While some conventional theories (e.g., equity theory, expectancy theory, and agency theory) suggest that unpredictable rewards negatively affect motivation, both the reinforcement theory of motivation and findings from neuroscience research indicate a bright side to those rewards. Due to the countervailing effects, I do not find a significant difference in either boredom or performance between conditions. My results show that when gamifying repetitive work processes with unpredictable rewards such as loot points, managers need to address fairness concerns while maintaining the motivational properties of gamification.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Common Subcontracting and Airline Prices

Abstract In the US airline industry, independent regional airlines fly passengers on behalf of several national airlines across different markets, giving rise to common subcontracting. On the one hand, we find that subcontracting is associated with lower prices, consistent with the notion that regional airlines tend to fly passengers at lower costs than major airlines. On the other hand, we find that common subcontracting is associated with higher prices. These two countervailing effects suggest that the growth of regional airlines can have anticompetitive implications for the industry.

The impact of conventional and unconventional monetary policies on loan default risk—Evidence from UK peer‐to‐peer lending platforms

AbstractThis study investigates the effect of both conventional and unconventional monetary policies on loan default of UK personal and business peer‐to‐peer (P2P) loans. I employ loan book data of Zopa, Lending Works, and MarketFinance, which are three of the most popular UK P2P lending platforms. Survival analysis reveals consistent evidence for the existence of the risk‐taking channel of monetary policy. Monetary easing, be it conventional or unconventional, reduces loan survival in the P2P lending market. This finding delivers useful information for policymakers to rebalance the countervailing effects of expansionary monetary policies on financial stability during the era of alternative financing.

Code-Mixing in Promotional Materials for Tourism: Effects of Format on Processing Fluency and Interest in Cultural Activities

We examined the effects of English-Hawaiian code-mixing in promotional materials for tourist activities on audiences’ message processing and interest in the activities promoted, and whether these outcomes depended on the format of translations for code-mixed terms. We found that code-mixing both disrupted fluency for potential tourists—which indirectly diminished interest—and boosted their interest in advertised cultural activities. These countervailing effects largely offset each other, although materials that included narrative translations of Hawaiian terms ultimately promoted greater interest than English-only texts.

Equity implications of net-zero emissions: A multi-model analysis of energy expenditures across income classes under economy-wide deep decarbonization policies

With companies, states, and countries targeting net-zero emissions around midcentury, there are questions about how these targets alter household welfare and finances, including distributional effects across income groups. This paper examines the distributional dimensions of technology transitions and net-zero policies with a focus on welfare impacts across household incomes. The analysis uses a model intercomparison with a range of energy-economy models using harmonized policy scenarios reaching economy-wide, net-zero CO2 emissions across the United States in 2050. We employ a novel linking approach that connects output from detailed energy system models with survey microdata on energy expenditures across income classes to provide distributional analysis of net-zero policies. Although there are differences in model structure and input assumptions, we find broad agreement in qualitative trends in policy incidence and energy burdens across income groups. Models generally agree that direct energy expenditures for many households will likely decline over time with reference and net-zero policies. However, there is variation in the extent of changes relative to current levels, energy burdens relative to reference levels, and electricity expenditures. Policy design, primarily how climate policy revenues are used, has first-order impacts on distributional outcomes. Net-zero policy costs, in both absolute and relative terms, are unevenly distributed across households, and relative increases in energy expenditures are higher for lowest-income households. However, we also find that recycled revenues from climate policies have countervailing effects when rebated on a per-capita basis, offsetting higher energy burdens and potentially even leading to net progressive outcomes. Model results also show carbon Laffer curves, where revenues from net-zero policies increase but then decline with higher stringencies, which can diminish the progressive effects of climate policies. We also illustrate how using annual income deciles for distributional analysis instead of expenditure deciles can overstate the progressivity of emissions policies by overweighting revenue impacts on the lowest-income deciles.

Lovable fools and creativity in teams

Although employees with low task performance are typically perceived as outcasts in organizations, one group of such employees has the potential to generate positive outcomes. We seek to understand how lovable fools (i.e., individuals with low task performance and high contextual performance) influence creativity within teams. Specifically, we study the countervailing effects of increased psychological safety and decreased useful feedback as mediators of the relationship between the perceived existence of lovable fools in a team and individual and team creativity. We conduct two studies using individual and team‐level analyses to examine the hypothesized direct and indirect effects. Our findings support a positive relationship between perceived existence of lovable fools and individual/team creativity through increased psychological safety, even after accounting for the effects of reduced useful feedback provided by lovable fools. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Environmental taxation and profit-shifting activities

We analyse environmental taxation in an international setting, where a multinational company produces a good whose consumption causes a negative externality. We study the joint effects of imperfect competition, corporate tax and profit-shifting activities on the optimal level of environmental taxation. In a two-country framework, we show that in both countries the environmental tax that is set lower than the level allowing to fully internalise environmental costs. Profit shifting causes a further decrease in the low-business-tax country. Finally, we show that policies aimed at reducing profit shifting may have countervailing effects on environmental tax setting.

Economic effects of litigation risk on corporate disclosure and innovation

AbstractEmpirical studies on the relationship between shareholder litigation and corporate disclosure obtain mixed results. We develop an economic model to capture the endogeneity between disclosure and litigation. Equilibrium disclosure is determined by two countervailing effects of litigation, a deterrence effect and an insurance effect. We derive four key results. (i) Decreasing litigation risk leads to less disclosure of very bad news, due to a weakening of the deterrence effect, but to more disclosure of weakly bad news, due to a weakening of the insurance effect. (ii) Given a sufficiently large information asymmetry, litigation risk dampens (boosts) overall disclosure of bad news for low (high) litigation risk firms. (iii) Capital markets respond more to the disclosure of bad news than of good news if the deterrence effect is strong, which arises if both insiders’ penalties and litigation risk are high. (iv) In an extension, we highlight real effects of litigation on corporate innovation and establish that innovation first decreases and then increases (strictly decreases) with litigation risk if insiders’ penalties are small (large). We reconcile our findings with results from a large set of U.S.-based empirical studies and make several novel predictions.

A Theory of Heterogeneous City Evolution with Heterogenous Agents

This paper develops a new unified theoretical general equilibrium model in which the interactions between heterogeneous workers and firms influence heterogeneous city evolutions. Given the heterogeneous worker–firm–city framework, I study in depth the possible heterogenous city evolutions and the resulting implications on the labor market, as well as on overall productivity. In particular, it is shown that the same exogenous shocks may lead to completely different results depending on the relative dominance of the two countervailing effects of congestion and agglomeration. In an open economy setting, it is also shown that such relative dominance may affect the trading partner and generate the comovement of city evolution in each country.

When sales leaders induce competition among sales employees: a source of motivation or exhaustion?

Many sales leaders support competition among their employees. However, inducing competition among peers may exhibit beneficial, motivating as well as harmful, exhausting effects, and which of the two countervailing effects prevails remains an open question. Drawing on the job-demand resources model and 20 interviews with sales professionals, this study proposes that competition-inducing leadership (CIL) exhibits ambivalent effects on sales employees’ positive stimulation and emotional exhaustion, which depend on the specific combination of employees’ extrinsic motivational orientation and role overload. A cross-national, multilevel dataset from 503 business-to-business sales employees reporting to 131 supervisors of a multinational industrial supplier firm supports these propositions. Thus, this study contributes to sales leadership and interpersonal competition research by empirically clarifying that CIL is a double-edged sword that cannot be one-sidedly categorized as beneficial or harmful.

Tempering and enabling ambition: how equity is considered in domestic processes preparing NDCs

The considerations of how Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to global climate action under the Paris Agreement are ambitious and fair, or equitable, is expected to guide countries’ decisions with regards to the ambition and priorities of those contributions. This article investigates the equity aspect of the NDCs of four cases (Canada, the EU, Kenya, and South Africa) utilizing a combination of document analysis and expert interviews. It interrogates both the NDC documents themselves and, uniquely, the role of international and domestic equity considerations within the domestic policy processes that led to the formulation of the NDCs. For this, 30 participants and close observers of these processes were interviewed. We find countervailing effects of equity on ambition, with an enabling, or ambition-enhancing, effect resulting from international equity, in that these four Parties show willingness to do more if others do, too. In contrast, tempering effect appears to result from domestic equity concerns, for example with regards to real, perceived, or anticipated adverse distributional impacts of climate action across regions, sectors, and/or societal strata. Political cultures differ across the four case studies, as do the key actors that influence domestic policies and the preparations of NDCs. This paper also demonstrates that research on equity in NDCs can benefit from expanding its scope from the contents of NDC submissions to also examine the underlying decision-making processes, to generate insights that can contribute to future NDCs being both equitable and ambitious.