Labor relations at the shop floor level

The tenacious myth that a free economy and free society impoverish working people undergirds modern government interference in labor markets and legal privilege for adversarial labor unions. Managers are concerned about harmony and productivity at the shop floor level. The opposite characteristics of conflict, disco-ordination and inefficiency are anathema. Most of the union difficulties managers must cope with at the shop floor level stem from a fundamental source, namely the philosophy of collectivism. This paper analyzes the fable of labor's disadvantage, wage determination under personal and impersonal conditions, public policy toward labor contracts and the role of businessmen in making labor markets operate more efficiently.     

A look at productivity at the firm level in eight French service industries

In this paper, we take advantage of information collected by the French annual survey of market services to analyze productivity differences and changes among firms in eight major industries (restaurants, hotels, engineering, computer programming, computer processing, legal services, accounting and building cleaning), over the five-year period 1984–1988. We find a pattern of cross-sectional and time-series type estimates of the Cobb-Douglas production function, which is comparable to that typically found in studies of manufacturing industries, thus raising similar issues of interpretation and modeling. Using a capital stock measure corrected for rented equipment and building and taking into account the number of hours of work of work per employee improve these estimates to some extent. An interesting finding is that the output elasticity seems significantly smaller with respect to hours per employee than with respect to the number of employees.     

Contracting-out at local government level

Abstract

Contracting-out is a public sector reform tool, and it is used as a specific form of privatization. Because of its multi-dimensional character, it does not always lead to positive improvements, even in developed countries, and its impact in countries in Central and Eastern Europe may be limited. This issue is discussed in the theoretical part of this paper. Its analytical part investigates selected important dimensions of contracting-out for local public services in Slovakia and the Czech Republic, namely forms of delivery, decision-making processes concerning the selection of the form of delivery and of supplier, and costs comparisons. The final part provides a brief list of possible tools to improve the current negative situation.     

Idiosyncratic volatility puzzle exists at the country level

This paper reexamines the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle using 47 stock market indices from 1995 to 2016. We find that country-specific idiosyncratic volatility is significantly and negatively related to subsequent returns in the international markets, confirming the existence of the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle at the country level. Our results show that the positive relationship between idiosyncratic volatility and country-specific index returns documented by Bali and Cakici, 2010, Hueng and Yau, 2013 is not robust to sample selections and model misspecifications. We show that the country-level idiosyncratic volatility puzzle consistently exists after controlling for different model specifications and market segmentation in various subsamples.     

Project 1990: educational planning at the metropolitan level

The fragmentation of metropolitan areas into large numbers of relatively small school districts has rendered long range educational planning highly unreliable when conducted at the district level. This article discusses a cooperative planning venture which was undertaken by the forty school districts in the Buffalo, New York metropolitan area. The planning organization is described and the general procedures for making student population projections, expenditure projections and revenue projections are reported. Although the article focuses on methodology, findings of general interest are reported including organizational alternatives which were generated. The project was financed with funds appropriated under Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.     

Sectoral co-movements of employment growth at regional level

This paper presents a comprehensive study of sectoral co-movements of employment growth in the entire Dutch economy. We construct different macro typologies according to manufacturing versus services, innovativeness, labour skills and position in the value chain, thus expanding the list of potential logics of sectoral interrelations. Using a vector autoregression model, we assess whether and how growth in a macro-sector, and in a given region, can predict growth in the same or other macro-sectors, in the same or in other regions. Our findings bring to light the inter-regional nature of intersectoral linkages, as well as the existence of complementarities between sectors. Supporting the growth of innovative firms could have positive externality effects, especially in the Knowledge-Intensive Business Services sector which is associated with the growth of the entire economy.     

The mean residual of record values at the level of previous records

In the study of reliability of the technical systems, records model plays an important role. Suppose that a technical system is subject to shocks, e.g. peaks of voltages or stresses. The successive large shocks may be viewed as realizations of records from a sequence of identically independent voltages. Assume that the lower limit value of the mth record voltage (stress) is v > 0. Under these conditions, we propose a mean residual of records (MRR’s) for the future records. We study several properties of MRR. We show that the proposed MRR uniquely characterizes the distribution function that generated the sequence of records. It is proved that when the model under study has an increasing hazard rate the corresponding MRR is decreasing. We also compare between two record systems based on their MRR’s when these systems are ordered in terms of their hazard rates.     

Short term load forecasting and the effect of temperature at the low voltage level

Short term load forecasts will play a key role in the implementation of smart electricity grids. They are required for optimising a wide range of potential network solutions on the low voltage (LV) grid, including the integration of low carbon technologies (such as photovoltaics) and the utilisation of battery storage devices. Despite the need for accurate LV level load forecasts, much of the literature has focused on the individual household or building level using data from smart meters, or on aggregates of such data. This study provides a detailed analysis of several state-of-the-art methods for both point and probabilistic LV load forecasts. We evaluate the out-of-sample forecast accuracies of these methodologies on 100 real LV feeders, for horizons from one to four days ahead. In addition, we also test the effect of the temperature (both actual and forecast) on the accuracy of load forecasts. We present some important results on the drivers of forecasts accuracy as well as on the empirical comparison of point and probabilistic forecast measures.     

论中国联通县级分公司的发展战略问题

文章从有关战略理论引述开始,对中国联通县级分公司的战略分析、战略选择和战略实施等方面进行了初步探讨。     

Measuring entrepreneurship at the country level: A review and research agenda

The measurement of entrepreneurial activity across national contexts is a relatively recent and under-represented area of study. There was very little research carried out for comparable indicators of entrepreneurship until the end of the 1990s, when the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Consortium launched its annual surveys. In the last decade, other indexes and databases have been created, such as the EIM COMPENDIA database and the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey dataset. The first objective of this paper is to review and analyse the existing entrepreneurship indexes with respect to their conceptual and methodological dimensions. This review shows that the conceptual foundations of most of the indexes are insufficiently developed. The second objective is to integrate and compare the indexes on 21 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries for which complete data is available. Strong convergence was found between the indicators of venture creation, business ownership and growth, while noticeable divergences were observed between these indicators and those concerning innovation. This was further explored through cluster analysis, which indicated that the 21 sampled countries could be classified into three distinct entrepreneurial profiles. The paper concludes by offering research directions and debating the use of unitary or composite measures of entrepreneurship in comparison to the analysis of multiple dimensions as exemplified in this paper.     

Using DEA to estimate potential savings at GP units at medical specialty level

The aim of this paper is to identify benchmark cost-efficient General Practitioner (GP) units at delivering health care in the Geriatric and General Medicine (GMG) specialty and estimate potential cost savings. The use of a single medical specialty makes it possible to reflect more accurately the medical condition of the List population of the Practice so as to contextualize its expenditure on care for patients. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the potential for cost savings at GP units and to decompose these savings into those attributable to the reduction of resource use, to altering the mix of resources used and to those attributable to securing better resource ‘prices’. The results reveal a considerable potential for savings of varying composition across GP units.     

Sector variation and ecological modernization: towards an analysis at the level of the firm

This paper is the first of a series of two in which the authors consider ecological modernization of state environmental policy in the context of individual firms. This is explored through three themes: the influences of industrial sector, company size and type of environmental regulation. In this paper, the significance of industry sector is explored and the authors show how lead and laggard sectors react in quite different ways. In the second paper (Vol. 7 No. 5), the theme of variability to the challenge of ecological modernization through the study of the impact of firm size and response to regulation is pursued. Throughout, the authors emphasize the need to understand the context in which firms operate and perceive their environment if we are to make progress in our knowledge and refine appropriate policies, tools and mechanisms to help steer industry on a more sustainable path. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Italian economic dualism and convergence clubs at regional level

This paper gives a contribution to the debate on regional convergence by comparing the long run prediction of convergence clubs introduced by Quah (1996 and 1997) with the actual observed dynamics of the Italian regions during the period 1970–2004. To this end we analyze the evolution of per capita income levels for the Italian regions using a non-traditional (non-parametric) statistical model. In addition we segment the set of economies by the mean of hierarchical clustering methodologies and compare the trajectories of the regions by introducing different notions of distance. The general conclusion is that the average distance identifies a clear division between a high performance club consisting of regions from the Center North, and a low performance club composed by regions from the South and islands. The presence of a cluster composed by Center North regions is substantially confirmed by the distance correlation analysis, suggesting an homogeneous response to external shocks. By contrast Southern regions display the same dynamical evolution but difference in co-movements. Our analysis provides hints about the fundamentals that link the regions in their process of divergence. In fact the performance clubs pattern we discovered reflects the distribution of economic activities as well as the structural attributes of the regional economies.     

On statistics at level crossings by a stationary process

The main purpose of this paper is to indicate formal theorems and conditions for the extensions of Rice's Formula for intensities of crossings of a fixed level u by a stationary process X(t) in order to provide the conditional (Palm) distribution of an associated process Y(t) at the level crossing instants. Sections 1 and 2 provide brief background material on Rice's Formula and Palm distributions, while relevant historical comments and basic results are given in Section 3. These are stated with some indications of proof in Section 4 and calculation of the Palm distributions shown in Section 5. Two cases of importance in applications are considered: (a) where (roughly) X(t) , Y(t) and the derivative X'(t) have a joint density and (b) where Y(t) = X'(t) . The resulting Palm distributions are each absolutely continuous with readily calculable densities. These are evaluated for Gaussian processes in Section 6 and applications to motivating 2 structural safety questions indicated in Section 7.     

The China effect: Evidence from data at firm level in Thailand

This study investigates how competition with Chinese imports affects firms in Thailand. Using World Bank data on Thailand and United Nations trade data from 2003 to 2006, the empirical results show that there is no significant impact of Chinese import competition on employment, wages, or labor income share. However, further checks show that for firms with lower productivity, the impact on employment and labor income share is more likely to be negative. The impact of Chinese import competition on profit margins is significantly positive. Considering the impact on labor income share and profit margins, we conclude that because of Chinese import competition, income distribution possibly goes in disfavor of labor. Our study shows that the impact of Chinese import competition on the skilled labor ratio is positive and significant. This result suggests that Thai firms are on the path to skill upgrading as a result of Chinese import competition, which is helpful for Thailand’s long-run economic growth. As firms with low productivity are more likely to be negatively affected by Chinese import competition, improving productivity is still an efficient way to counter such competition.     

HRM and strategic climates in hospitals: does the message come across at the ward level?

This study examined how employees perceive intended strategic goals and HRM at the ward level, and if these perceptions generate the desired effects. The qualitative part of the research reveals that the hospital pursues two strategic goals (i.e. quality and safety). Analysis of the questionnaire data (N = 576 respondents; 59 wards) shows that both climate dimensions could be distinguished. Results showed that the perceived HR system does have a significant influence on both climate dimensions, suggesting that the overall message of the HR system is important for creating strategic climates. Furthermore, the climate for quality partially mediated the relationship between the perceived HR system and commitment.     

Appropriate index number formulae for productivity measurement at the plant/organizational level

Changes in productivity may be based on relating changes in physical (real) output to changes in physical input(s). Such a system of productivity measures requires the choice of an appropriate index number formula in order to convert changes in money aggregates into physical or real terms. Criteria for the choice between appropriate index number formulae are considered and developed, and an illustration provided.     

物流信息化水平折射国家信息化水平

2008年,是我国改革开放30周年,也是见证物流管理从理论到实践、从起步到发展的30年。从1978年物流概念引入中国以来,我国的物流事业一直发展迅速,30年里诞生了服务于各行各业的物流企业,同时伴随着市场经济体制建立和经济全球化的推进,我国物流业从跨国公司那里学来了先进的物流理念和运作方式。     

Drivers of entrepreneurial aspirations at the country level: the role of start-up motivations and social security

This paper investigates whether various start-up motivations and a country’s level of social security can explain the prevalence of entrepreneurial aspirations. For entrepreneurial aspirations and motivations we use country-level data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) for the year 2005. We distinguish between the necessity motive, independence motive and increase wealth motive and between aspirations in terms of innovativeness, job growth and export orientation. Our findings indicate that social security negatively affects a country’s supply of ambitious entrepreneurship. Our results also suggest that entrepreneurial aspirations in terms of job growth and export relate positively to the increase wealth motive.