Cheol Liu

Local Government Strategies for Financing Energy Efficiency Initiatives

Sustainable development has quickly become an important theme in local governments facing environmental challenges. Energy efficiency can be part of local efforts to sustain economic development while protecting the environment and natural resources. Based on a national database, this study examines U.S. city governments’ strategies to finance energy efficiency. The result suggests that energy efficiency financing (EEF) has become part of local sustainability strategies. In the study, we offer an explanation for energy efficiency funding that emphasizes political behaviors of institutional players in budgetary decision making. We examine factors influencing adoption and progression of EEF. The results highlight the importance of explaining results of EEF to citizens. Technical expertise from professional organizations helps start EEF programs. A Democrat-leaning consistency is important to adopt EEF, but only in cities without substantial strategies promoting EEF. Cities with revenue declines are less likely to implement EEF.

Public Corruption in the U.S. States and Its Impact on Public Debt Pricing

Summary This study evaluates the levels of public corruption in the American states and their impact on the prices of public debt sold by underwriting banks to retail investors. Results suggest that the markups paid by retail investors to underwriters decrease significantly with the incidence of public corruption. The relationship remains significant even when existing anti-corruption enforcement efforts are taken into consideration. Extant literature shows that the issuers of public debt from relatively more corrupt jurisdictions receive lower prices from underwriting banks in wholesale transactions. We develop and empirically show the mechanism through which this can occur. We offer the first evidence that the public debt market exerts disciplining pressures on the American states with greater levels of public corruption. When purchasing state-issued public debt, retail buyers appear to demand narrower markups by factoring in public corruption. This, we argue, is an important reason why underwriting banks offer lower prices when dealing with less disciplined fiscal sovereigns.

Integrating ICT adoption issues into (e-)leadership theory

While e-government and e-administration have been much researched, e-leadership has not.Traditionally, e-leadership has been defined as ICT-mediated communication only.E-leadership should include ICT adoption competence for both personal and enterprise use.Technology adoption models can be usefully adapted for leadership theory building. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having a profound effect in society and organizations. However, the literature on ICT adoptionfrom selection to implementationhas not been well integrated into leadership theory. This is particularly true in terms of adoption. Leaders must adopt ICTs not only for their own competencean antecedent condition for what is considered e-leadership, but choose, recommend, and support implementation of ICTs for their organizations/units to use. Leaders are also expected to become effective in dealing and navigating the challenges of leading within the digital space. At this moment, there are two pertinent literatures: the technology adoption literature and the enterprise resource planning literaturewhich can be considered an important special case of leadership change management literatureand which could provide the theoretical basis for developing a unified theoretical perspective on e-leadership. This article provides a framework and propositions to connect these literatures by focusing on the effects of individual leader characteristics on the ICT adoption process from both a personal and enterprise-wide perspective. Study limitations and future research opportunities are outlined.

Corruption and Tax Structure in American States

We examine the extent to which public corruption influences the tax structure of American states. After controlling for other tax structure influences, we find that states with greater measured public corruption have more complex tax systems, have higher tax burdens, rely more heavily on regressive indirect taxes, and have smaller shares of their tax burdens with initial impact on business. These are significant structural impacts on the tax systems.

E-leadership: an empirical study of organizational leaders’ virtual communication adoption

Even though e-leadership was broadly defined in 2001 (Avolio et al.), there has been surprisingly little progress (Avolio et al., 2014). In order to make a better progress, the authors recommend dividing the field into four quadrants to facilitate the research focus. It can be divided by e-leadership phases (the adoption of technology phase vs the quality of use of technology phase), as well as the purposes (e-leadership as virtual communication vs e-leadership as management of organizational structures). The paper aims to discuss these issues.,This study provides a model of e-leadership as communication adoption at the individual level (ECAMi). Structural equation modeling was used to test a previously published model by Van Wart et al. (2017a). The model included select traits and skills (as antecedent conditions), awareness of ICTs, evaluation of ICTs, willingness to expend effort in learning about ICTs, intention to use ICTs, and facilitating conditions.,The overall model demonstrates a good fit. It can be concluded that the ECAMi represents a valid model for understanding e-leaders’ technological adoption. It is also found that while all select skills and traits are significant – energy, responsibility and analytical skills stand above the others.,To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this represents the first effort to operationalize e-leadership.

Operationalizing the definition of e-leadership: identifying the elements of e-leadership

The effects of the ongoing digital revolution have been profound and have been studied in many contexts such as government interaction with the public (e-participation) and administrative structures (e-administration). However, the study of how the digital revolution has changed leaders’ interactions with followers via information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been modest, and the theory building in organizational studies and public administration has been, for the most part, nonexistent. A major reason for this lack of progress is the inability to produce an operational definition of e-leadership that spans telework, team, and enterprise settings. The article examines an exploratory case study to propose an operational definition based on six factors (or broad e-competencies) for e-leadership. Research limitations and future research opportunities are discussed. Points for practitioners E-leadership, technology-mediated leadership, has become critically important for leaders at all levels, both inside and outside of the organization. E-leadership is as much about blending technologies and traditional communication as it is about simply using more ICT-mediated communication. While there is a lot of consistency in the types of leadership skills needed in traditional and virtual environments, they are not the same and the differences are critical to success and failure. The areas in which competence in e-skills were most important included: e-communication, e-social skills, e-team building, e-change management, e-technology skills, and e-trustworthiness.