The Law of Population and the Austrian School

There has been considerable debate within the social sciences about the consequences of rapid population growth. The law of population, as described by Thomas Robert Malthus, asserts that population growth is ultimately limited by the means of subsistence, and therefore preventive checks on population growth (e.g., voluntarily limiting the number of births) are necessary to avoid the grim prospect of inevitable human suffering when the means of subsistence cannot support the population. Economists, demographers, and other social scientists have produced volumes of exegesis on Malthus's work. This article assesses how representative economists of the Austrian School have interacted with Malthus's law of population.     

Survival and the art of profit maximization

We study the relationship between rationality and economic survival in a simple dynamic model, where agents from different populations interact repeatedly through random matching. An explicit criterion (“bankruptcy”) determines whether agents survive each interaction; all agents are presumed to be aware of this criterion. Survival in each interaction depends on two factors: the strategies agents adopt when they interact, and the wealth levels they bring to the game. The model is completely symmetric with the only difference between the agents of different populations being their objectives. We consider the case where there are two populations of agents in which all agents from one group have as their objective, maximizing the expected profits from each interaction, while all agents from the other attempt simply to maximize the probability of surviving (i.e., not going bankrupt in) the interaction. We show that under the equilibrium dynamics, the proportions of each group in the total population must be bounded away from zero, but the balance is in favor of the survival-probability maximizers in that their numbers as a fraction of total population must always exceed 1/2, and can be arbitrarily close to unity. On the other hand, the fraction of total wealth controlled by the expected profit maximizers must also be at least 1/2, and can asymptotically tend to unity.     

Information systems project manager soft competencies: A project‐phase investigation

This article investigates the soft competencies by project phase that information systems (IS) project managers require for project success. The authors conducted 33 qualitative interviews to collect data from a sample of 22 IS project managers and business leaders located in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The authors identified the key competencies for each of the IS project phases (initiation, planning, implementation, and closeout). The competencies were sorted into competency categories: personal attributes (e.g., eye for details), communication (e.g., effective questioning), leadership (e.g., create an effective project environment), negotiations (e.g., consensus building), professionalism (e.g., lifelong learning), social skills (e.g., charisma), and project management competencies (e.g., manage expectations). Each of the most important competencies is discussed and interconnections among competencies identified. How this research can be used by the practitioner and academic communities and the broader implications of this research are examined.     

Irreversible Investment in Stochastically Cyclical Markets

This paper studies entry and exit decisions in markets whose demand alternates between growth and decline phases at uncertain times. We introduce a stochastic process that captures these features of random market evolution, and we provide key mathematical results related to first passage times which make the characterization of entry and exit behavior quite simple and straightforward (even when the process is subject to an endogenously determined upper or lower barrier). We characterize entry and exit patterns in a dynamic competitive equilibrium, and we show why our results differ from those obtained if demand follows a diffusion process (e.g., a Geometric Brownian Motion). Despite the stochastic process of the underlying variable has a continuous sample path in both cases, we demonstrate in our setting that positive rates of entry and exit discontinuously fall to zero owing to informational overshooting. Another advantage of our framework is that it can explain discontinuities in firm values even if sample paths are continuous. Our framework is also amenable to empirical implementations (as we show using Corts’ 2008 offshore oil drilling application), and to an intuitive interpretation of optimal (dis) investment rules based on Bernanke’s (1983) “bad news principle of irreversible investment.”     

Community college supervisors and their subordinates: A quantitative investigation of personality temperament and leader‐member exchange

Community college leadership is facing a crisis fueled by leaders retiring and student enrollment that outpaces budget growth. The purpose of this study was to better understand the leadership dynamics of community college supervisors and direct subordinates by examining the relationship bgetween leader‐member exchange (LMX) and personality temperament. Data from the Supervisor Leader‐Member Exchange Multidimensional Model (SLMX‐MDM) survey was used to determine LMX total within four subscales: affect, loyalty, contribution, and professional respect. Participants' temperaments were determined by the Keirsey Temperament Sorter II (KTS‐II). Research questions focused on whether differences in LMX existed among groups of supervisor–subordinate dyads that were categorized according to temperament similarity: 1) identical temperament (e.g., both supervisor and subordinate are SJ), 2) one letter (e.g., SP and SJ), or 3) no letters in common (e.g., NF and SP). The 50 participating dyads were selected through proportionate stratified sampling. Results from one‐way ANOVAs showed significant differences among groups with respect to total LMX, contribution, and professional respect.     

Editorial

This paper reports the results of 16 market experiments designed to produce measures of the effects of nonresidential land uses on the prices of nearby dwellings. Each experiment consists of a sample of home sales in a homogeneous neighborhood located near a single nonresidential land use, e.g., industry, commercial, high-density dwellings, and highways. The data consist of price, physical characteristics of the dwelling, distance from the nonresidential use, and the date of sale for each transaction. Hedonic price indices are estimated and the significance of the distance effects assessed. No systematic relationship between nonresidential land use per se and housing prices is found.     

Robustness of statistical inferences using linear models with meta-analytic correlation matrices

To examine complex relationships among variables, researchers in human resource management, industrial-organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and related fields have increasingly used meta-analytic procedures to aggregate effect sizes across primary studies to form meta-analytic correlation matrices, which are then subjected to further analyses using linear models (e.g., multiple linear regression). Because missing effect sizes (i.e., correlation coefficients) and different sample sizes across primary studies can occur when constructing meta-analytic correlation matrices, the present study examined the effects of missingness under realistic conditions and various methods for estimating sample size (e.g., minimum sample size, arithmetic mean, harmonic mean, and geometric mean) on the estimated squared multiple correlation coefficient (R²) and the power of the significance test on the overall R² in linear regression. Simulation results suggest that missing data had a more detrimental effect as the number of primary studies decreased and the number of predictor variables increased. It appears that using second-order sample sizes of at least 10 (i.e., independent effect sizes) can improve both statistical power and estimation of the overall R² considerably. Results also suggest that although the minimum sample size should not be used to estimate sample size, the other sample size estimates appear to perform similarly.     

Innovating Beyond the Horizon: CEO Career Horizon,Top Management Composition,and R&D Intensity

Decreasing research and development (R&D) can impair the ability of firms to remain innovative in the long run. CEOs have been accused of curtailing R&D investments as they approach expected retirement, yet received findings on R&D investment behaviors of late‐career CEOs are mixed. We argue that one reason for these inconsistent findings could be that traditional approaches overlook the fact that CEOs are not isolated agents in making R&D decisions. We build on the premise that CEOs interact with their top management team (TMT) when shaping R&D strategy and advance a contextualized view of CEO dispositions in their late career stages as being constrained or enabled by their TMT. We hypothesize that some TMT attributes (e.g., tenure and age) may amplify, whereas others (e.g., functional experience and education) may mitigate inclinations to reduce R&D. Our findings, based on a longitudinal sample of 100 US manufacturing firms from 1998 to 2008, provide nuanced insights into how different TMT characteristics influence CEO‐TMT dynamics, with TMT age and TMT tenure playing particularly pronounced roles. We discuss implications of our CEO‐TMT interface approach for theory and practice. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Selection of the best population: an information theoretic approach

This paper is devoted to the statistical problem of ranking and selection populations by using the subset selection formulation. The interest is focused (i) on the selection of the best population among k independent populations and (ii) on the selection of the best population, which is closest to an additional standard or control population. With respect to the first problem the populations are ranked in terms of entropies of their distributions and the population whose distribution has maximum entropy is selected. For the second problem the populations are ranked in terms of divergences between their distributions and the distribution of the standard or control population and the population with the minimum divergence is selected. In each case the populations are assumed to have general parametric densities satisfying the classical regularity conditions of asymptotic statistic. Large sample properties of the estimators of entropies and divergences of the populations will be studied and used in order to determine the probabilities of correct selection of the proposed asymptotic selection rules. Illustrative examples, including a numerical example using real medical data appeared in the literature, will be given for multivariate homoscedastic normal populations and populations described by the regular exponential family of distributions. Received December 2001     

Predicting Retirement Upon Eligibility: An Embeddedness Perspective

Concern over the impact of baby‐boomers' retirement on needed skills and proprietary knowledge has stimulated an interest in identifying workplace factors associated with retirement upon eligibility. Drawing from embeddedness theory, the authors identify work‐based antecedents potentially underlying a related, but distinct, form of withdrawal—retirement upon eligibility. The authors generate and test hypotheses regarding the impact of fit‐, sacrifice‐, and links‐related antecedents using a prospective study design and a national probability sample of some 500 older individuals who, at the time of the initial interview, were within months of becoming—for the first time—eligible to receive such benefits. The findings indicate that, beyond the effects of person‐based antecedents (e.g., age, health, assets, expected retirement income), a combination of fit‐ (i.e., job challenge), sacrifice‐ (i.e., perceived organizational support), and links‐related factors (i.e., stability of close workplace peer relations) have a substantial influence on the decision to retire upon eligibility. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Too much of a good thing: The interactive effects of cultural values and core job characteristics on hindrance stressors and employee performance outcomes

This study contributes to research on core job characteristics by examining when employees may perceive enriched jobs as a hindrance stressor and in turn may experience lower performance at work. Utilizing time-lagged data collected from a sample of 386 employee–coworker dyads and drawing on cognitive appraisal theory of stress and coping, we explore the mediating role of hindrance stressors on the relationship between core job characteristics and key employee performance outcomes (i.e., creativity, counterproductive work behaviors, in-role performance, and organizational citizenship behaviors) and the moderating roles of cultural values (i.e., power distance and uncertainty avoidance) in influencing this mediation. The results supported the hypotheses, providing evidence that the experience of hindrance stressors mediates the relationship between core job characteristics and job performance outcomes when employees score high on power distance and uncertainty avoidance cultural values, and not when their scores on these cultural values were low. Practical implications and future research are discussed.     

EMPLOYMENT GROWTH AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE IN URBAN CANADA, 1971–1991

This paper presents an analysis of recent patterns of employment growth and structural transformation within urban Canada and, more specifically, seeks to determine which economic activities are becoming spatially more concentrated or more dispersed across the urban system. In addition, the paper seeks to identify the urban area attributes (e.g., size, region, economic diversity) that are most strongly correlated with employment growth. The data employed in the empirical analysis are based upon employment in 159 economic sectors across a set of 152 urban units with populations greater than 10 thousand inhabitants. The results indicate three major trends: tertiarization; spatial polarization; and declining rates of employment growth.     

The effect of population growth,the pattern of demand and of technology on the process of urbanization

A nonlinear, three-sector, two-region wage and price endogenous dynamic general equilibrium model is used to study the effects of population growth, the pattern of demand, and technological change on urbanization in the context of a low-income developing country starting at a low level of urbanization. The model represents a closed economy and is therefore more suited to a large country. It is validated on Indian data and traces its development path well from 1950 to the present. The sectors modeled are agriculture, industry, and services with the latter two being located exclusively in urban areas. The three sectors are linked with an input-output matrix which subsumes transportation costs incurred between urban and rural areas. The model is designed to investigate long-term changes, e.g., over a 30-year period, and factor mobility is therefore assumed to be “almost perfect.” The model demonstrates that rapid agricultural productivity growth, high rates of investment, and Engel demand effects combine to produce a continuing increase of urbanization as development occurs in an economy. The rate of urbanization is not necessarily dependent on high overall population growth: indeed, under certain conditions, a lowering of overall population growth might speed up the rate of urbanization. The pattern of demand and changes in the pattern can affect the rate of urbanization significantly: in particular, Engel-type demand changes serve to make the process of urbanization logistic. Technological bias effects are not very strong but effective appropriate technology policies might speed up urbanization.     

Robustness issues in multilevel regression analysis

A multilevel problem concerns a population with a hierarchical structure. A sample from such a population can be described as a multistage sample. First, a sample of higher level units is drawn (e.g. schools or organizations), and next a sample of the sub‐units from the available units (e.g. pupils in schools or employees in organizations). In such samples, the individual observations are in general not completely independent. Multilevel analysis software accounts for this dependence and in recent years these programs have been widely accepted. Two problems that occur in the practice of multilevel modeling will be discussed. The first problem is the choice of the sample sizes at the different levels. What are sufficient sample sizes for accurate estimation? The second problem is the normality assumption of the level‐2 error distribution. When one wants to conduct tests of significance, the errors need to be normally distributed. What happens when this is not the case? In this paper, simulation studies are used to answer both questions. With respect to the first question, the results show that a small sample size at level two (meaning a sample of 50 or less) leads to biased estimates of the second‐level standard errors. The answer to the second question is that only the standard errors for the random effects at the second level are highly inaccurate if the distributional assumptions concerning the level‐2 errors are not fulfilled. Robust standard errors turn out to be more reliable than the asymptotic standard errors based on maximum likelihood.     

Methodological problems associated with research on unfair discrimination against racial minorities

Despite the passage of civil rights legislation, racial and ethnic minorities continue to experience unfair discrimination in the workplace. Therefore, considerable research in human resource management and social psychology has examined the factors thought to affect unfair discrimination in organizations [Cox, T. (1993). Cultural diversity in organizations: Theory, research, and practice. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler]. Although research has focused on unfair discrimination, researchers have argued that the construct and external validity of the results have been adversely affected by methodological problems [e.g., Stone, E.F., Stone, D.L., & Dipboye, R.L. (1992). Stigmas in organizations: Race, handicaps, and physical unattractiveness. In Kelly, K. (Ed.). Issues, theory, and research in industrial and organizational psychology (pp. 385–457). Amsterdam: Elsevier]. Given this critique, the present paper (a) examines the degree to which recent research suffered from a number of methodological problems (e.g., obtrusive measures, non-representative samples, and demand characteristics), (b) identifies strategies for overcoming these problems, and (c) offers recommendations for advancing our understanding of unfair discrimination in organizational contexts.     

Luck or insight? The Simon–Ehrlich bet re-examined

After a long argument about the effect of population growth on the availability of resources, Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich undertook a $1,000 bet in October1980. The wager concerned the inflation-adjusted prices of five metals. If, over ten years, prices rose, Simon would pay Ehrlich. If they fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon. In October 1990 Ehrlich mailed Simon a cheque, as the real price of the five-metal basket of commodities had fallen by 36 per cent. Since then, some researchers have argued that Simon ‘got lucky’; over other periods the result would have been different. We review data from 1900–2019 and find that, if war years are excluded, Simon would have won the bet 69.9 per cent of the time. During this 119-year period, the time price of the five-metal basket fell by 87.2 per cent despite both US and world populations having grown substantially.     

MULTIPLE TESTING AND HETEROGENEOUS TREATMENT EFFECTS: RE‐EVALUATING THE EFFECT OF PROGRESA ON SCHOOL ENROLLMENT

The effect of a program or treatment may vary according to observed characteristics. In such a setting, it may not only be of interest to determine whether the program or treatment has an effect on some sub‐population defined by these observed characteristics, but also to determine for which sub‐populations, if any, there is an effect. This paper treats this problem as a multiple testing problem in which each null hypothesis in the family of null hypotheses specifies whether the program has an effect on the outcome of interest for a particular sub‐population. We develop our methodology in the context of PROGRESA, a large‐scale poverty‐reduction program in Mexico. In our application, the outcome of interest is the school enrollment rate and the sub‐populations are defined by gender and highest grade completed. Under weak assumptions, the testing procedure we construct controls the familywise error rate—the probability of even one false rejection—in finite samples. Similar to earlier studies, we find that the program has a significant effect on the school enrollment rate, but only for a much smaller number of sub‐populations when compared to results that do not adjust for multiple testing. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An Empirical Assessment of Alternative Conceptualizations of the Psychological Contract Construct: Meaningful Differences or “Much to do about Nothing”?

The reported study helps move the literature beyond conceptual arguments that have been made and repeated in the literature by investigating the equivalence of three psychological contract (PC) measures that were based on alternative conceptualizations of the PC construct. Employees from a wide range of organizations (n = 1054) were randomly assigned to complete either an expectation, obligation, or promise based measure of their PCs. The equivalence of the PC measures was assessed by comparing factor structures across the three forms, and examining the observed pattern of correlations between the PC measures and external criteria (e.g., trust, equity sensitivity, work centrality, education level). The results indicate that while the three PC measures evoke the same general mental framework in the minds of respondents, and behave similarly for some purposes, depending on the specific relationships being investigated, the measures may yield significantly different results (i.e., they are not fully interchangeable). Implications for theorizing and future research regarding the PC construct are discussed. Also reported is new evidence linking individual differences (e.g., work centrality, equity sensitivity) to perceived responsibilities and rights in the employment relationship.     

Interrelationships between human capital,HRM and innovation in Belgian start-ups aiming at an innovation strategy

Research on the impact of human resource management (HRM) on firm performance has increased since the end of the nineties. Despite the pile of studies and results, critical assessments of this literature stream point to several empirical and theoretical gaps. We focus on two empirical gaps. First, there is a lack of attention to innovation as a measure of firm performance outcome. Most articles use financial (e.g., return on assets (ROA)), organisational (e.g., productivity) and employee related (e.g., commitment) performance measures. Yet, Western knowledge economies consider innovation to be a driving force of economic growth, and international competitive advantage. Moreover, innovation is a function of a firm's ability to create, manage and maintain knowledge. Because knowledge is created by and stored within individuals, human resources as well as HRM may play an important role as drivers of innovation. Second, HRM is considered to be a large company phenomenon. Yet, small businesses provide a great environment to study the HRM-performance relationship because of their transparent nature and the small distance between an individual's and a company's performance. Next, human resources and HRM are crucial to small businesses because they have less tolerance for inefficiency. We examine a sample of small start-ups that aim for an innovation strategy, but are not necessarily successful in terms of innovative output. We expect start-ups with superior human resources and HRM to produce more innovative output. The results show that both human capital (of owners/managers and employees) and HRM are important determinants of innovation in start-ups.     

Cumulative culture and explosive demographic transitions

A demographic transition is a change in the pattern of growth of a population. Human history records several kinds of such transitions, e.g., from stability to growth or between different kinds of growth. Culture is often implied as the main fuel of demographic transitions, but theorizing is so far limited to verbal arguments. Here we study two simple formal models in which population size and the amount of culture in a population influence each other’s dynamics. The first model has two regimes: an equilibrium regime in which both population size and amount of culture reach stable values, and an explosive regime in which both variables increase exponentially without bound. A transition between these regimes is caused by changes in parameters that describe the accuracy of cultural transmission and the interaction between demography and culture. The second model suggests that a transition from extensive to intensive accumulation of culture may derive from a qualitative change in how individuals cooperate to create culture.