Dynamic Agency Research Articles

‘Don’t call us vulnerable!’: Rethinking flood vulnerability and community-led governance

ABSTRACT Traditional views on flood vulnerability often present a simplistic government-community relationship, portraying communities as passive recipients of aid. This perspective overlooks the dynamic agency of urban residents in shaping their own governance structures. Recent research challenges this binary thinking by revealing how communities actively manage flood risks. However, the intricate interplay between government absence and community-led actions, and their role in everyday governance, remains underexplored. Drawing on scholarship in flood vulnerability and community-led governance, this paper examines the experiences and management strategies of flood-prone residents in Dansoman, Accra, using interviews, focus groups, and “follow-along participant observation.” Three key themes emerged: “anticipate and navigate,” “collaborate and compensate for,” and “rupture and replace.” These themes illustrate how residents acquiesce to, reconfigure, or challenge government roles in flood management, establishing self-governance through community-led initiatives. These efforts often legitimize and strengthen community resilience, sometimes even usurping and replacing state authority. The findings underscore the need to recognize community agency in managing flood risks and compensating for insufficient government support through solidarity and self-help. Policymakers can enhance flood management by incorporating these community-driven insights, fostering more effective, inclusive, and sustainable strategies that reflect the fluid, evolving relationships between government and communities.

In search of a unicorn: Dynamic agency with endogenous investment opportunities

We study the optimal dynamic contract that provides incentives for an agent (e.g., SPAC sponsor, VC general partner, CTO) to exploit investment opportunities/targets that arrive randomly over time via a costly search process. The agent is privy to the arrival as well as to the quality of the target and can take advantage of this for rent extraction during the search process and the ensuing production. The optimal contract provides the agent with incentives for timely and truthful reporting via a time-varying threshold for investment and an internal charge for the time spent on search. In the equilibrium, as time elapses, the charge becomes progressively higher while the investment threshold is progressively lower, resulting in overinvestment at a time-varying degree. Our model generates empirically testable predictions regarding investments (such as M&As, hedge fund activism, VC investing, SPACs, and internal innovations), linking the degree of overinvestment to observable firm and industry characteristics.

Material agency in art installations: exploring the interplay of art, space, and materials in Detroit

Abstract. Decades of decline, disinvestment, and racism have left Detroit with an abundance of abandoned buildings, ruins, vacant lots, and illicit trash dumps. Though these structures and materials might have forfeited their previous purposes, they can act as catalysts, substances, and co-creators of artworks. The paper is thus interested in examining the intricate interplay between art, space, and materiality in Detroit further. Drawing from the practices of local artists Olayami Dabls and Scott Hocking, the paper adopts a new materialist framework to investigate the dynamic agency of matter in the artistic process. By considering materials as active participants in the production of art and space, the paper seeks to add to the emerging interest in the emancipation and meaning making of material in art as well as cultural geography's engagements with new materialism.

‘I’d Like to See an Italian Film or TV Series in Which a Girl Moves Abroad’: Italian Girlhood and Nomadic Experiences

ABSTRACT This article explores the portrayal of contemporary Italian girlhood in the context of Italian media studies. It critically examines the emergence of a new media depiction of Italian high-school girls in the role of exchange students abroad. Given the widespread prevalence of this trend, which has received limited academic attention, the representations of these young travellers are examined across different media, offering insights into their dynamic agency as cultural intermediaries within Italian society. The inquiry draws from data from the AHRC research project A Girls’ Eye View. It analyses excerpts from project interviews and social media in order to shed light on the emergence of nomadic Italian girlhood as portrayed in TV series and on the TikTok platform. By exploring Italian girls’ nomadic aspirations, the study provides valuable insights into the dynamic relationship between travel, education, and the impact of social media on their lives.

Does Financial Performance in Firms Benefit from Sustainability Performance? The Mediating Effect of Governance on Firm Performance of Listed Firms in Canada

Relying on dynamic agency and stakeholder perspectives as theoretical underpinnings, this paper analyzes the mediating effect of board governance and operational governance in the relationship between sustainability and financial performance of firms. Using a sample of 224 large and actively traded Canadian firms listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the authors use the partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach to analyze the data. The results show that there is a good fit between the data for both the measurement and structural equation models, and they further reveal partial mediation effects of board governance and operational governance singly and jointly as full mediation in the relationship between sustainability and financial performance of firms. The results are robust to controlling for various factors that affect firms’ sustainability and financial performance, such as firm type, firm age, and other industry-specific characteristics. This study provides valuable insights for corporate governance and sustainability scholars and practitioners that may allow them to link governance structures with sustainability for better financial performance outcomes, as well as to include an integrated sustainability focus into their competitive strategies.

You should reject this paper: Dynamic agency, sequential evaluation, and learning in academic publishing

A variety of real-world situations take the form of repeated principal-agent problems with binary evaluation. I evaluate the principal's optimal evaluation effort and quality threshold for acceptance in the setting of dynamic agency with binary evaluation, focusing specifically on the evaluation by a top academic journal of papers submitted by economists. In the baseline model, the journal should statistically discriminate in favour of high-status economists, by setting an acceptance threshold that declines with their prior estimate of the economist's quality, while evaluation effort should likely increase with perceived author quality, as this provides incentives for authors to exert more effort, which is particularly valuable from the highest-quality authors. However, if a first good publication is more valuable than subsequent publications by the same economist, acceptance thresholds will tend to increase after publication success, relative to the threshold that would have followed a rejection.

Agency and investment with triggered time-inconsistent preferences

Individual’s time preferences may be influenced by a variety of factors such as economic conditions. In this paper, we consider the time inconsistent preferences triggered by the switches in firm’s profitability states and apply them to the model of dynamic agency and to the q theory of investment. And we investigate effects of triggered time-inconsistent preferences on the optimal contract between investors and manager, Tobin’s q and firm investment. We find that time-inconsistent preferences increase the value loss of investors in both states. Owning to the manager’s time-inconsistent preferences, the contract should make more adjustments for the manager’s continuation payoff conditional on a jump from one state to the alternative state. Meanwhile, the firm prefers paying the manager with cash in advance due to the triggered time-inconsistent preferences. It also shows that the manager’s time inconsistency induces underinvestment and reduces the sensitivity of investment, firm’s average q and marginal q in both states.

Dynamic Contracting with Intermediation: Operational, Governance, and Financial Engineering

ABSTRACTPrivate equity funds intermediate investment and affect portfolio firm performance by actively engaging in operational, governance, and financial engineering. We study this type of intermediation in a dynamic agency model in which an active intermediary raises funds from outside investors and invests in a firm run by an agent. Optimal contracting addresses moral hazard at the intermediary and firm levels. The intermediary's incentives to affect firm performance are strongest after poor performance, while the agent's incentives are strongest after good performance. We also show how financial engineering, that is, financial contracting with outside investors, interacts with operational and governance engineering.

Co-integrating relation between pay, board governance and performance: evidence from Indian banking

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to explore the long-run impact of board governance and bank performance on executive remuneration. More specifically, the study addresses two objectives. First, the authors investigate the long-run relationship between pay and performance hold for the Indian banking industry. Second, the authors explore the moderating role of the board in explaining the relationship between executive pay and performance. Design/methodology/approach The study uses multivariate panel co-integration approaches, i.e. fully modified and dynamic ordinary least square, to explain the co-integrating relationship between executive pay, governance and performance of Indian banks. The analysis is conducted for the period from 2005 to 2018. Findings The results of co-integration tests reveal a long-run relationship between executive pay, board governance and bank performance. The long-run estimates produce evidence in favour of the dynamic agency theory, suggesting that the implications of asymmetric information can be mitigated by associating the current executive pay with the bank performance in the previous periods. The finding of this study reveals that improvements in the board quality serve as a monitoring tool to constrain excessive pay and moderate the executives’ pay. Furthermore, the interaction of performance and board governance negatively impacts pay, supporting a substitution approach. It implies that setting optimal pay packages for executives necessitates enhanced and efficient board governance practices. Practical implications The study recommends significant policy implications for regulators and the board of directors that executive pay significantly responds to the bank’s performance and good board governance practices in the long run. Originality/value This paper provides novel evidence of long-run pay-performance-governance relation using a panel co-integration approach.

Towards gentle futures: co-developing axiological commitments and alliances among humans and the greater living world at school

ABSTRACT Maturing into ethical human beings is not just an important dimension of human development, it is central to the continued survival and thriving of our species. Viewed through experiences of Arm (student) and Noom (teacher) in an urban Indigenous school in Thailand, this article uplifts gentle ways of being and becoming as important pathways toward enacting more social and ecologically just worlds. I consider the ways the pair became gentle learning environments for the other and how homeland lessons designed and taught by Indigenous students to their teachers created conditions for the joint development of axiologies and alliances with the natural world, and ultimately Indigenous futures. I ask: How might we “unpack the signs” of relational becoming in interaction – the axiological and alliance-building work among humans and others in the natural world? I present three episodes between Arm and Noom as they co-develop ethical stances, specifically human-fish relations. I find the pair engaged in various gentle futurity gestures – poetic, dialogic, responsive practices that attune to the dynamic agency of living beings in everyday ways. I illustrate how political possibilities of re-designing schools emerge from these gentle gestures and carry with them renewed possibilities of cultivating more liveable worlds.

Workshop for potential architecture: Implications and opportunities for (re)constructing

This article presents fragments of an ongoing research enquiry into the opportunities for reconstructing practice as a workshop for potential architecture (Oulipo). The projects presented develop from a completed Ph.D. thesis and explore models for architecture when conceived as an unstable, diverse and fluctuating activity through the theoretical work of my businesses as a-project and a-plot. The work is a constant architectural enquiry that seeks to challenge the persistence of reductive models of the discipline producing singular objects and associated constructions of legitimacy. The research instead reflects on practising as an active and ongoing enquiry for collective reinterpretations, references and opportunities between disciplines and environments – operating as speculative and projective essays that acknowledge the instabilities, contradictions and uncertainties inherent in designing anything. I continue to explore the potential in shifting the emphasis of architectural practice away from a reductive and deterministic model of production (with associated crises of value) and towards a dynamic, flexible and irresolute agency for practice that is reflective and involving. Models for architecture that are continuously responsive and embedded in the fluctuating environment of potential production (a broad interpretation of site as an evolving situation for practice and an ecology of diverse branching opportunities, contradictions and potential resolutions). The research develops these ideas for practice with a constant questioning and reframing of enquiry – an involving essay for practice – that branches across and through divergent material and referential frames and recognizes the inherent transdisciplinarity of any activity. The projects in this article explore the implications of a multiple situation derived from archetypical architectural conditions, originating narratives of architecture and theoretical rules where the apparent confidence that architecture constructs is revealed as a dynamic, unstable and involving translation. Through this process the language of the discipline is exposed – not fixed or certain, but shifting, blending, branching and interacting with a fluctuating network of situations and contexts. Drawing through and within (as digital and analogue mixtures) the complex interrelationships within the discipline of an architectural ecology reveals potential projections for architecture. Projections that recognize the contingent instabilities, elisions, modulations and episodic cadences of practice as a constant unfolding essay for practising. This article therefore argues for a dynamic agency for practice as a diverse, multiple and unstable activity that is constantly reframed, reconstructed and projected within shifting environments and contingent situations. It develops models for practice that are enabling, irresolute and speculative situations rather than fixed products – inhabiting partial, incomplete, transitory and implicit strategies for practising. This might expose architecture, dismantle the artificial constructions of reductive production and project possibilities for a more integrated and multiple workshop for potential architecture?

Transforming the Urban Space: Catholic Survival Through Spatial Practices in Post-Reformation Utrecht

Abstract This article argues that historians have underestimated the agency which Catholics, a politico-religious minority within the Dutch Republic, wielded in surviving the Reformed regime in seventeenth-century Utrecht, the main theatre of the confessional struggle between Calvinists and Catholics on Dutch soil. The Reformed public authorities strategically attempted to deprive Catholics of their spaces where they could live as Catholics, claiming that they were being Catholic too publicly even inside their private homes. Catholics, for their part, persisted in practising their faith not only in their houses, but also in public facilities, tactically deploying diverse spatial practices; they continued to use the urban space as they had in medieval times, and newly appropriated that space as they sought to adjust to the early modern environment of confessional coexistence. Through their spatial practices, Catholics not only actively facilitated their Catholic way of life, but also played an indispensable role in transforming Utrecht from a mono-religious medieval city to a multi-confessional early modern city. The Utrecht case thus bears witness to a hitherto neglected, yet surprisingly dynamic agency exercised by politico-religious minorities in shaping an urban landscape of coexistence.

Firm size, corporate debt, R&D activity, and agency costs: Exploring dynamic and non-linear effects

This paper empirically investigates firm-specific determinants of agency costs, a relatively new and unexplored area in corporate finance. We estimate dynamic agency costs models, linking debt, firm size, and R&D activity to agency costs for a panel of U.S. information and communication technology (ICT) firms over 1990–2013. We adopt the Blundell and Bond (1998) two-step system GMM technique, which explicitly accounts for persistence, endogeneity, and unobservable firm heterogeneity. We provide the first evidence that our inverse proxy for agency costs, namely asset turnover (Ang et al., 2000), exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with debt and a U-shaped relationship with firm size and R&D activity. These findings imply that agency costs experience a minimum value (in case of debt) and a maximum value (in case of firm size and R&D activity) and, therefore, that agency costs are higher at both low and high levels of debt, and lower at both low and high levels of firm size and R&D activity. We find that the level of debt of the average firm in the sample falls below the level that minimizes agency costs. We also document that, consistent with the agency literature, short-term debt provides an additional effective monitoring mechanism to alleviate agency costs. Our findings reveal that agency costs are dynamic in nature, mean-reverting, and persistent over time. This notion confirms the Florackis and Ozkan (2009) conjecture that managers behave as though an optimal level of agency costs exist that they pursue. Finally, we find a positive association between firm profitability and agency costs and a negative association between agency costs and firm growth. Extensive additional analysis confirms the robustness of our results.

Beyond order, beyond the human

Beyond order, beyond the human

Dynamic multitasking and managerial investment incentives

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager’s short-term task determines current performance, which deteriorates with investment in the firm’s future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances incentives for short- and long-term performance. Investment is distorted upwards (downwards) relative to first-best in firms with high (low) returns to investment. These distortions decrease as good performance relaxes endogenous financial constraints, implying negative (positive) investment-cash flow sensitivities. Our results shed light on how corporate investment policies, liquidity management, and executive compensation structure differ across industries with different returns to intangible investment.

Reimagining and Reimaging Indigenous Dances and their Contexts of Practice in Postcolonial African Environments

ABSTRACT The contexts of Indigenous dance practices in postcolonial African environments have continued to evolve. The phenomena of dance bears on the meanings that individual dance practitioners construct as active agents in Indigenous dance knowledge production. This work draws on the following question to examine how contexts of practice impel the reimagining and reimaging of dances, dancing, and the dancing body in Indigenous dance practices: What meanings do Indigenous dance practitioners construct from partaking in Indigenous dance education practices in varied contexts? Using Indigenous knowledge systems theoretical frame and decoloniality as lenses of analyses, the article reveals how reimaging and reimagination of Indigenous dances transcends framing the body as an exotic, fetishized, and objectified artefact. The dance practitioners rationalize the dances and dance experiences as affective and conceptual-expressive epistemology and ontology that is grounded in community connection, self-guided creative imagination and innovation, intercorporeal embodiments, socio-economic positionalities, and intersubjective situatedness. The complex meanings are anchored in dynamic contexts, experience, agency, community, situations, and epistemological holism. The article provokes a radical rethink in how pedagogy, performance, research, and recreation of Indigenous African dances can be understood and engaged in ways that rise above the Anglo-European objectification, exoticization, and fetishization of the Black body.

Board Monitoring and Advising in Dynamic Agency

Intuition suggests that shareholders benefit from active boards. We present a model to show that if contract renegotiation is possible, then an active board might not always be desirable from the shareholders' perspective. This happens because low board activity may partially offset the distortion in the manager's incentives caused by the renegotiation option. While the value of low board activity stems from the board's weak monitoring, a strong measurement effect of the board's advising in the manager's performance measures is necessary to implement it. In this case, a sufficiently independent board motivates a low level of board activity.

Firm Size, Corporate Debt, R&D Activity, and Agency Costs: Exploring Dynamic and Non-Linear Effects

This paper empirically investigates firm-specific determinants of agency costs, a relatively new and unexplored area in corporate finance. We estimate dynamic agency costs models, linking debt, firm size, and R&D activity to agency costs for a panel of U.S. information and communication technology (ICT) firms over 1990-2013. We adopt the Blundell and Bond (1998) two-step system GMM technique, which explicitly accounts for persistence, endogeneity, and unobservable firm heterogeneity. We provide the first evidence that our inverse proxy for agency costs, namely asset turnover (Ang, et al., 2000), exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with debt and a U-shaped relationship with firm size and R&D activity. These findings imply that agency costs experience a minimum value (in case of debt) and a maximum value (in case of firm size and R&D activity) and, therefore, that agency costs are higher at both low and high levels of debt, and lower at both low and high levels of firm size and R&D activity. We find that the level of debt of the average firm in the sample falls below the level that minimizes agency costs. We also document that, consistent with the agency literature, short-term debt provides an additional effective monitoring mechanism to alleviate agency costs. Our findings reveal that agency costs are dynamic in nature, mean-reverting, and persistent over time. This notion confirms the Florackis and Ozkan (2009) conjecture that managers behave as though an optimal level of agency costs exist that they pursue. Finally, we find a positive association between firm profitability and agency costs and a negative association between agency costs and firm growth. Extensive additional analysis confirms the robustness of our results.

NOVEL, EDUCATIONAL AND LEGAL RESPONSES TO TECHNOLOGY-FACILITATED SEXUAL VIOLENCE

The three panel presenters and session chair are co-researchers in a seven-year research partnership—involving 28 educational institutions, 25 co-investigators,15 community partners, and 50+ students—that aims to address sexual violence in physical and virtual forms in university contexts across Canada and internationally. The project specifically seeks to address, dismantle and prevent sexual violence by means of multi-sector partnership solutions across the fields of education, law, policy, arts, popular culture, health care, management, news and social media. Using the methodological framework of Parallaxic Praxis (Sameshima et al., 2019), the team looks at a phenomenon from different perspectives by using varied methodological processes as well as a range of rigorous methods of encoding, decoding, and rendering data; and establishing post-qualitative possibilities for generating and mobilizing knowledge to broader audiences. The juxtaposition of renderings (constructions made from deep analysis of the phenomena such as papers, presentations, artworks, and other artefacts), when presented together, manufacture a dynamic agency between works capturing intertextualities, aporias, choruses, and a poesis that arise in the coalescence of the unassimilated, individual investigations. In this panel, an overview of the larger project and the significant milestones in the first four years specifically related to internet technologies will be provided. Drawing from multi-perspectives, the second presenter will address image-based sexual abuse and copyright in Canada, and the third will share data collected from this project in the form of excerpts from an epistolary novel. The session demonstrates how multi-modal investigations and dissemination offer possibilities for extending knowledge production.

Agency Mindset Theory

A culturally based socio-cognitive agency generic model is developed. The agency has a normative personality with an values/beliefs indicated by its formative traits. These can take bi-polar epistemic values (“enantiomers”). These may be combined together, giving 8 different cognitive types that are personality type mind-sets. These types are influenced by the culture and the social environment that the agency is bound to. The traits can be used to explain the what, why and how of dynamic agency behaviour in complex situations.