When funding fails: Planetary exploration at NASA in an era of austerity, 1967–1976

We can learn most about how science funding works when it stops working. Like moments of breakdown surfacing the inner workings of infrastructure, periodic fiscal crises reveal the social life of science funds at the level of everyday practice. Through a case study of NASA-funded planetary science in an era of austerity, the article explores how scientists navigate uncertain funding environments and articulate financially defensible projects. Examining the development of the Mariner 10 mission to Venus and Mercury in the aftermath of a significant downturn in science support, the article offers a middle path between the macro-politics of government funding and the micro-politics of doing science. In shaping how the mission was conceived and later operated, Mariner 10’s cost-driven paradigm translated the austerity of the period into the projectized work of robotic spaceflight missions.

Governmental accounting reforms at a time of crisis: the Italian governmental accounting harmonization

PurposeAcknowledging fiscal crises as critical junctures for policy makers, this paper investigates how the recent fiscal crisis has affected the paradigmatic approach to the design of an ongoing governmental accounting (GA) reform.Design/methodology/approachThis paper analyses the Italian GA harmonization as a peculiar instance of an ongoing GA reform at the crisis outbreak. A longitudinal narrative analysis of official documents is complemented with semi-structured interviews with key policy makers and participant observations.FindingsThe fiscal crisis is found to play an indirect role in the Italian GA reform, which, promoting centralization of competencies in the fields of GA, determines the intensification of the approach adopted before the crisis outbreak.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper extends the knowledge on the nature of post-crisis reforms by highlighting how fiscal crises can work as catalysts for paradigmatic approaches to ongoing GA reforms. This paper analyses the designing of a GA reform, whereas the long-term adaptations and outcomes of the reform are not taken into consideration.Practical implicationsThe tight link between GA and financial management issues featuring the current paradigmatic approaches to reforms suggests the need to design GA reforms consistently with fiscal and financial management policies.Originality/valueWhereas the extant literature on the nature of post-crisis reforms analyses the latter as responses to the former, this paper enlarges the knowledge on the topic by focusing on a peculiar instance of a GA reform that was ongoing at the crisis outbreak.

Learning From Failure in an Organization Designed to Develop Success

In this article, I discuss events associated with leadership and fiscal crises that occurred at NTL during the late 1960s and early 1970s, after Warren Bennis declined to accept the Director position and until a group of NTL members led by Edith Seashore “rescued” NTL in 1975. In particular, I consider Warner Burke’s experience in the midst of these events. This episode in the history of NTL enables us to reflect on important questions about relationships between the theory and practice of Organization Development and learning from organizational failure.

On Leadership: Local unions need to catch up with the times

While firm in his support for the national teachers unions, PDK’s Joshua Starr argues that local unions often stand in the way of positive changes to the teaching profession. Of particular concern, right now, are chapter leaders who refuse to consider changes to rigid “last-in, first-out” rules, which — during fiscal crises — protect the jobs of veteran teachers at the expense of newer hires. In recent years, many districts have made it a priority to diversify the teaching force, Starr notes. If local unions remain inflexible, then pandemic-related layoffs will undo that progress, forcing superintendents to lay off many of the teachers of color they’ve recently hired.

Debt Is Not Free

With public debt soaring across the world, a growing concern is whether current debt levels are a harbinger of fiscal crises, thereby restricting the policy space in a downturn. The empirical evidence to date is however inconclusive, and the true cost of debt may be overstated if interest rates remain low. To shed light into this debate, this paper re-examines the importance of public debt as a leading indicator of fiscal crises using machine learning techniques to account for complex interactions previously ignored in the literature. We find that public debt is the most important predictor of crises, showing strong non-linearities. Moreover, beyond certain debt levels, the likelihood of crises increases sharply regardless of the interest-growth differential. Our analysis also reveals that the interactions of public debt with inflation and external imbalances can be as important as debt levels. These results, while not necessarily implying causality, show governments should be wary of high public debt even when borrowing costs seem low.

Predictive Analysis of Fiscal Crises with Deep Learning Time Series Model

Fiscal crisis can cause serious damage to the economy. Remarkably, there is limited study about when and how it occurs. With the social and economic data of more than 180 countries from 1970 to 2015, this paper constructs a fiscal crisis risk index system to explore the relationships between the crises and the indicators such as GDP growth rate, inflation rate, FDI, and foreign debt interests. Predictive analysis is performed based on the time series model of deep neural network to shed some light on policies and economic dynamics around the crises. We find that besides the inflation, fiscal crises in advanced economies are closely related to the net outflows of FDI and GDP p.c. while in developing countries the GDP growth rate and the net inflows of FDI are the key factors. Low-income developing countries are the heavy-hit targets with the net inflows of FDI, debt structure and interests as main contributors.

Selecting Ministers in Times of Crisis: A Historical Analysis of the Role of Intra-Party Politics and Union Background in Swedish Cabinet Appointments 1917–2014

In this article, we connect intra-party politics to macro events by asking what types of ministers are selected in times of fiscal crisis. Drawing on the previous literature we present two alternative hypotheses about the role of the union background in cabinet selection: (1) ministers with union background are less likely to be appointed during crises, since they are likely to oppose necessary spending cuts and (2) ministers with union background are more likely to be appointed during crises, since there is a need to appease union factions within the party. We evaluate these hypotheses using a unique historical dataset on the background of ministers in Sweden between 1917 and 2014. Overall, we find strong support for the hypothesis that fiscal crises increase the likelihood that ministers will have a union background, suggesting that ministers are appointed to appease the union faction within the party in times of fiscal crisis.