High‐involvement HRM,job satisfaction and productivity: A two wave longitudinal study of a Spanish retail company

The strategic human resource management literature lacks longitudinal studies, and the causal associations between human resource management (HRM) and organisational performance (OP) remain underexplored. We tested cross‐lagged relationships between high‐involvement work systems (HIWS), job satisfaction, and store productivity based on a large longitudinal dataset from the retail sector comprising two waves of data. The first wave (2011) included 6,016 employee responses from 104 stores, and the second wave (2015) included 5,842 employee responses from 94 stores. The quantitative study suggested counterintuitive negative associations. A subsequent qualitative study indicated that the association may have been conditioned by the recessionary action taken by the company in response to financial difficulties. The longitudinal research design, the compilation of data during difficult economic situations, and in a relatively unexplored sector such as the retail industry help to shed some light on the universalism of the HRM‐OP relationship and its boundary conditions.     

贸易政策不确定性与中国产品出口的数量、质量效应——基于自由贸易协定的政策背景

基于中国缔结自由贸易协定的政策背景,试图从贸易政策不确定性的新视角来解释中国的出口扩张以及出口升级。通过将贸易政策不确定性引入到质量异质性模型,推理出贸易政策不确定性对出口扩张及出口升级的关系等式,运用2002—2014年高度精细化的微观企业数据进行实证检验。研究发现,贸易政策不确定性下降有利于促进出口扩张和出口升级,OFDI是发挥贸易政策不确定性效应的重要作用机制。自由贸易战略是我国应对当前“逆全球化”国际局势的重要对策,贸易政策不确定性为我国维持出口扩张和实现出口升级提供了新思路。     

Wealth dynamics: reducing noise in panel data

Although the asset data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is of very high quality, there is sufficient noise to frustrate attempts to study saving behaviour by examining wave‐to‐wave change in wealth. In this research, we attempt to reduce noise by means of reactive‐dependent interviewing in which respondents with large inexplicable changes in assets between 1998 and 2000 are called back by HRS interviewers, presented with their prior reports and asked to reconcile the data. We achieved reconciliation for 1255 households (2479 net‐worth components) and, as a result, the variance in measured change for the entire sample of 11,583 households with the same financial respondents in both waves was cut in half. The empirical validity of the data also appears to have been improved. The correlation of gross change in net worth and income, for instance, increased from an insignificant negative to a highly significant positive value. Although reconciliation of large asset changes marginally improves the goodness of fit of multivariate models, there remains sufficient noise in the asset‐change data to require analysts to employ additional methods to reduce the influence of outliers. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE ROOTS OF MODERN ‘SOCIAL COST OF GAMBLING’ ESTIMATES

We discuss some critical issues in social cost of gambling methodologies which suggest that many social cost estimates are arbitrary. Rather than using monetary estimates of costs and benefits, we argue policy‐makers should focus on fundamental issues: consumer sovereignty, property rights and the role of government in free societies.     

Comparing probabilistic forecasts of the daily minimum and maximum temperature

Understanding changes in the frequency, severity, and seasonality of daily temperature extremes is important for public policy decisions regarding heat waves and cold snaps. A heat wave is sometimes defined in terms of both the daily minimum and maximum temperature, which necessitates the generation of forecasts of their joint distribution. In this paper, we develop time series models with the aim of providing insight and producing forecasts of the joint distribution that can challenge the accuracy of forecasts based on ensemble predictions from a numerical weather prediction model. We use ensemble model output statistics to recalibrate the raw ensemble predictions for the marginal distributions, with ensemble copula coupling used to capture the dependency between the marginal distributions. In terms of time series modelling, we consider a bivariate VARMA-MGARCH model. We use daily Spanish data recorded over a 65-year period, and find that, for the 5-year out-of-sample period, the recalibrated ensemble predictions outperform the time series models in terms of forecast accuracy.     

Evaluation recommendations for nonprofit social marketing campaigns: An example from the Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco‐Free Living

Nonprofit organizations with limited capacity and resources must be strategic when designing, implementing, and evaluating social marketing campaigns. The Louisiana Campaign for Tobacco‐Free Living, a nonprofit public health program, implemented a mass media campaign in 2012, with the goal of increasing advocacy for policy change around the smoke‐free movement. The campaign was accompanied by a mixed–quantitative evaluation that was grounded in the diffusion of innovations theory. The evaluation consisted of unique, yet complementary, analytical components, employing traditional survey methods to measure population exposure to the campaign and Google Analytics to segment campaign website visitors into actionable categories for future programmatic efforts. Results from this study demonstrate that the 2012 Tobacco‐Free Living mass media campaign was moderately effective in reaching its target audience and highly effective in using Google Analytics to identify a group of activists (i.e., innovators) in support of the smoke‐free policy change. This study offers several recommendations for nonprofit organizations to consider when implementing and evaluating similar social marketing campaigns.     

Industry Shock Expectations,Interindustry Linkages,and Merger Waves: Evidence from the Hospital Industry

It is well known that mergers often occur in waves, and this paper develops a new mechanism for merger waves: expectations over industry shocks. We develop a simple test of this explanation and use it to explore the role of expectations in the context of the 1990s hospital merger wave. Managed care such as Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) started to become popular in the late 1980s and ultimately became an important player in the health insurance market. Our empirical analysis shows that the expected increase in the popularity of HMOs was partly responsible for the hospital merger wave of the 1990s: hospitals feared that the “innovation” of managed care in the downstream insurance market would penetrate the upstream hospital market and responded to this belief by merging. Our results show the importance of incorporating expectations and interindustry linkages into the understanding of merger waves.     

Anticipation,learning and welfare: the case of distortionary taxation

We study the impact of anticipated fiscal policy changes in a Ramsey economy where agents form long-horizon expectations using adaptive learning. We extend the existing framework by introducing distortionary taxes as well as elastic labor supply, which makes agents’ decisions non-predetermined but more realistic. We detect that the dynamic responses to anticipated tax changes under learning have oscillatory behavior that can be interpreted as self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism emerging from systematic forecast errors. Moreover, we demonstrate that these waves can have important implications for the welfare consequences of fiscal reforms.     

Privatization,Financialization and State Restructuring in Eastern Germany: The case of Am südpark

Using a mix of survey data, results from a study on local planning politics and fieldwork, this article discusses the interplay of planning and welfare policies with global financial markets in the ‘making’ of social segregation in Halle‐Neustadt, a borough in the German city of Halle (Saale). Here, different developments come together. First, Halle‐Neustadt has experienced two waves of privatization, leading to a complete change of ownership structures, marked by the rise of financial investors. Second, welfare cuts have put increasing pressure on welfare recipients to live in the cheapest housing available. This has led to the emergence of a ‘Hartz IV business model’ based on low, but state‐subsidized, rents. Third, new planning policies have led to a massive drop in house prices, thus facilitating the use of ‘leverage’ strategies for financial investors. We expand on an already developed debate, providing new insights about relations between planning, state restructuring and financialization in a German context. We demonstrate that a broad array of changes in national regulatory settings, policy change in different sectors and local particularities can all be crucial in enabling financialization. We conclude that research should place greater emphasis on the state in providing explanations and take differences in context more seriously.     

一种组合式衰减地震资料中多次波的方法

在海上地震勘探中我们最常见的干扰波就是多次波。多次波的存在,严重地干扰了地震记录,妨碍我们对有效波的辨认。在剖面上存在较强的多次波时,如果在解释中不能正确地把多次波识别出来,就会造成错误的地质解释。所以,在海洋地震资料的处理中,多次波的衰减是极为重要的一个环节,对于中、深层海洋地震资料,本文采用如下方法压制多次波,先进行SRME方法去除长周期多次波能量,再应用tau-p域内预测反褶积去除占大部分的短周期多次波,最后用高精度Rado变换去除剩余的多次波,实际资料结果表明,该方法有不错的效果。     

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION: A CASE AGAINST BUILDING EVER‐HIGHER FENCES

International migration, seen as a powerful force of truly global character that is shaping today's socio‐economic reality, is a highly controversial and politicised issue. This paper explores its ramifications in the context of a growing backlash against immigration across the rich world. Specifically, it argues that the free flow of people – like the free movement of goods and capital – is beneficial to developed and developing economies alike and, in doing so, shows how migration produces win–win outcomes. Thus the study, while admitting that inflows of foreign‐born workers pose challenges and entail trade‐offs, makes a case for the liberalisation of immigration policies. The paper deepens our understanding of the issues at hand and constitutes a voice in favour of liberal‐policy choices.     

The Gods can help: exploring the effect of religiosity on youth risk‐taking behavior in Indonesia

• This study explores the impact of intrinsic versus extrinsic religiosity on youth risk‐taking behaviors in Indonesia. Our analysis on Indonesians aged 18–24 shows that intrinsic religiosity has a significant impact on individual's perception of risk‐taking. Understanding the significant role that intrinsic religiosity plays in the lives of youth and their risk‐taking behaviors offers new ways to promote responsibility and risk‐free behavior. We argue that, rather than distancing from religiosity, spirituality and faith, social marketers and public policy makers should be working closely with religious institutions to enact social change among the youth. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

     

THE TRUTHINESS HURTS

This essay applies some of the key insights in Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter. We discuss the relevance of cheap signals in political systems as well as the relevance of ideas in public policy with ‘rationally irrational’ voters. We add a fifth bias, ‘stick‐it‐to‐the‐man bias’, to Caplan's proposed anti‐market, anti‐foreign, make‐work and pessimistic biases, and we apply them all to environmental policy.     

Monetary policy transmission in a model with animal spirits and house price booms and busts

Can monetary policy trigger pronounced boom-bust cycles in house prices and create persistent business cycles? We address this question by building heuristics into an otherwise standard DSGE model. As a result, monetary policy sets off waves of optimism and pessimism (“animal spirits”) that drive house prices, that, in turn, have strong repercussions on the business cycle. We compare our findings to a standard model with rational expectations by means of impulse responses. We suggest that a standard Taylor rule is not well-suited to maintain macroeconomic stability. Instead, an augmented rule that incorporates house prices is shown to be superior.     

Testing the Structural Interpretation of the Price Puzzle with a Cost‐Channel Model*

We estimate a variety of small‐scale new‐Keynesian DSGE models with the cost channel to assess their ability to replicate the ‘price puzzle’, i.e. the inflationary impact of a monetary policy shock typically arising in vector autoregression (VAR) analysis. To correctly identify the monetary policy shock, we distinguish between a standard policy rate shifter and a shock to ‘trend inflation’, i.e. the time‐varying inflation target set by the Fed. Our estimated models predict a negative inflation reaction to a monetary policy tightening. We offer a discussion of the possible sources of mismatch between the VAR evidence and our own.     

British Economic Decline

UK economic activity is expanding faster than in Europe, but its recovery begins from a very low ebb. Since the war the UK economy has lagged far behind the West as a whole. Why? Professor Olson offers an explanation - pressure-group power, a new mercantilism encouraged or tolertated by Conservative and Labour Governments. The urgency of economic liberation is indicated by other economists in following articles.     

San Francisco Through Bogotá’s Eyes: Leveraging Urban Policy Change through the Circulation of Media Objects

This article connects two emerging debates in urban studies—the need to pay more attention to the role of nonhuman actors in urban planning and the ways in which media objects affect urban politics and planning—by examining how a video on Bogotá’s car‐free Ciclovía program facilitated the adoption and implementation of a similar program in San Francisco. The analysis shows that media objects have the capacity to act as fulcrums in processes of leveraging urban policy change owing to their potential to alter urban governance structures. The article analyzes the digital storytelling and ‘eye‐opening’ practices through which the video enabled policy changes to be implemented in San Francisco, while also tracing the local and transnational actors, networks and agendas that were involved in the production and circulation of the video through digital archival research and multi‐sited fieldwork. In doing so, it shows the active role that media objects play in shaping urban policymaking processes and provides an example of a relational methodology for studying the digital materialities through which urban policy ideas increasingly circulate.     

What are the effects of fiscal policy shocks?

We propose and apply a new approach for analyzing the effects of fiscal policy using vector autoregressions. Specifically, we use sign restrictions to identify a government revenue shock as well as a government spending shock, while controlling for a generic business cycle shock and a monetary policy shock. We explicitly allow for the possibility of announcement effects, i.e., that a current fiscal policy shock changes fiscal policy variables in the future, but not at present. We construct the impulse responses to three linear combinations of these fiscal shocks, corresponding to the three scenarios of deficit‐spending, deficit‐financed tax cuts and a balanced budget spending expansion. We apply the method to US quarterly data from 1955 to 2000. We find that deficit‐financed tax cuts work best among these three scenarios to improve GDP, with a maximal present value multiplier of five dollars of total additional GDP per each dollar of the total cut in government revenue 5 years after the shock. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inferring Policy Objectives from Economic Outcomes*

Estimated policy rules are reduced‐form equations that are silent on many important policy questions. However, a structural understanding of monetary policy can be obtained by estimating a policymaker's objective function. The paper derives conditions under which the parameters in a policymaker's policy objective function can be identified and estimated. We apply these conditions to a New Keynesian sticky‐price model of the US economy. The results show that the implicit inflation target and the relative weight placed on interest rate smoothing both declined when Paul Volcker was appointed Federal Reserve chairman.     

台风浪对浙江舟山的影响

利用MIKE21 SW谱波浪模型建立浙江省台风浪模型,对0515和0509号强台风"卡努"和"麦莎"引起的台风浪过程进行数值模拟。分析得到舟山本岛E向波浪最大,N向波浪最小。舟山本岛的阻隔使得台风浪削弱了35%左右。