Policy rules . . . anticipate that key causal connections observed in the past will remain fixed over time. . . . But we have found that very often historical regularities have been disrupted by unanticipated change. . . . The evolving patterns mean that the performance of the economy under any rule, were it to be rigorously followed, would deviate from expectations. . . . In an ever changing w...

We describe a simple mechanism that generates inflation persistence in a standard sticky-price model of optimal fiscal and monetary policy. Key to this mechanism is that policies are implemented under discretion. The government’s discretionary incentive to erode the real value of nominal public debt by means of surprise inflation renders inflation expectations and, in further consequence, equil...

Psychiatrists and psychologists provide consultation to the Catholic Church's marriage courts. Operating under the Church's legal code, these tribunals assess the validity of weddings that have ended in divorce. This report describes one of the standards used for this purpose, the lack of due discretion of judgment, which is concerned with the maturity, understanding, and appreciation that the ...

In a welfare state, the necessity for certain level of discretion is widely acknowledged. Discretion plays crucial role in law enforcement practices and essential effective administration justice. Within international Criminal Justice Systems, prosecutors have pivotal responsibility upholding rule law. Given their position within executive branch, prosecutorial becomes imperative. It vital to o...

Inconsistent evidence of the hypothesized favorable effects of high job control on health may have resulted from a failure to treat job control as a multifactor concept. The authors studied whether the 2 components of job control, decision authority and skill discretion, were differentially associated with cause-specific mortality in 13,510 Finnish forest company employees with no history of se...

OBJECTIVES To examine the factor structure and to evaluate the longitudinal measurement invariance of the demand-control-support questionnaire (DCSQ), using the Swedish Longitudinal Occupational Survey of Health (SLOSH). METHODS A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) models within the framework of structural equation modeling (SEM) have been ...

The effects of working hours on health were examined taking psychological job strain into account. White-collar workers employed at the main office of a Japanese manufacturing company provided data for analysis done in 1997. The eligible subjects were 286 workers aged 20-39. Causal relationships between working hours, health, and psychological job strain were examined by covariance structure an...

A diverse sample of 295 employees drawn from a variety of organizations was surveyed to investigate (a) whether the relationship between the favorableness of job conditions and perceived organizational support (POS) depends on employee perceptions concerning the organization's freedom of action and (b) whether POS and overall job satisfaction are distinct constructs. The favorableness of high-d...

Credible delegation of discretion obtains when it is a rational strategy for managers not to overrule employee decisions that are based on delegated decision rights or renege on the level of delegated discretion (and this is common knowledge). Making delegation of discretion credible becomes a crucial issue when organizations want to sustain the advantages that may flow from delegation: Such ad...

This paper finds that footnote transparency is effective at disciplining managerial discretion and that the market will use information provided in footnotes to assess firm value. After the introduction of FAS132R, firms used less discretion in setting pension assumptions, and the distribution of discretion across firms was reduced. The primary driver of changes in pension expense resulting fro...