The contributions of productivity, price changes and firm size to profitability

Sources of profit change for Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications firm, are examined. A new method allows for changes, in a firm’s profits to be broken down into separate effects due to productivity change, price changes, and growth in the firm’s size. This in turn allows us to calculate the distribution of the benefits of productivity improvements between consumers, labor, and shareholders. The results show that around half the benefits from Telstra’s productivity improvements from 1984 to 1994 were passed on to consumers in the form of real price reductions.

Explaining productivity differences in North Carolina factories

Using detailed survey data collected from 95 large factories in North Carolina, this article examines the reasons why some factories are more productive than others. Six distinct measures of productivity are used as independent variables in the regression analyses reported. The results suggest five major themes that are shared by the most productive plants: simpler flow of materials through the process, valuing people, attending to quality, investing in hardware, and accounting for the industry's productivity growth. Several factors such as size and unionization are of no apparent importance to an explanation of cross-factory productivity differences.     

人文资本特征、居民支付意愿与住宅价格

在构建人文资本与住宅意愿支付价格关系模型的基础上,运用2006年天津市有关数据,研究了人文资本特征对住宅价格的影响,并对人文资本特征溢价值进行了测算。对天津市的实证分析表明,人文资本密度指标中,只有居民素质、物业服务质量、小区周边体育场的距离对住宅总价有一定的影响,但并不显著。这说明人们对人文资本特征的偏好非常弱,天津市居民的住宅需求还处于基本需求阶段,尚未大规模进入改善需求阶段。以上结论对正确认识消费者偏好、公共投资效应、城市规划状况及住宅价格的合理性,具有重要的参考价值。     

Bridging the barriers: knowledge connections,productivity and capital accumulation

The paper contributes to the explanation of the large differences in cross-country productivity performance by modelling and testing the effects of social barriers to communication on productivity and capital accumulation. In an optimal growth model, social barriers to communication, which impede the formation of knowledge connections, are shown to reduce both transitory and steady-state levels of total factor productivity (TFP), per capita consumption and reproducible capital. Empirical testing yields a robust and theoretically consistent result: linguistic barriers to communication reduce productivity and capital accumulation. The findings provide an explanation for cross-country differences in TFP, and fresh insights into how productivity ‘catch up’ may be initiated.

人力资本激励机制的探讨

人力资本是企业制度安排的重要因素,作为知识经济时代创新与发展的力量之源,在今天有着不可替代的特殊作用.文章着重从人力资本的激励机制的界定及其内容和发展趋势,对新时期人力资本的激励机制进行了广泛而深入的探讨.     

The determinants of capital inflows: Does opacity of recipient country explain the flows?

This paper examines the relationship between international capital flows and the opacity of recipient countries. We use the Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) [Price Waterhouse Coopers, 2001. The Opacity Index: A Project of the Price Waterhouse Coopers Endowment for the Study of Transparency and Sustainability] opacity index for the year 2000 and investigate its influence on three types of net international capital flows: foreign direct investment, portfolio capital and international bank lending. We find support for higher opacity leading to a reduction in capital inflows, in general. More interestingly, however, in some cases we find counterintuitive results of more capital flows when opacity relating to specific business climate increases—accounting and regulations for foreign direct investment flows, corruption and regulation for portfolio flows, and corruption and economic opacities for international lending flows. This may be because of potentially higher profit opportunities that may be present due to the greater role unofficial channels of investment practices play as these opacity indices rise. Also, we find international bank lending, in general, responded very differently from foreign direct investment and portfolio flows.     

Human resource management in Botswana: approaches to enhancing productivity in the public sector

Public-sector productivity is an issue that is now squarely on the agenda in the global arena. In recent times it has also emerged in the research and literature on human resource management and development as a significant aspect of the advocacy for re-engineering or re-inventing government, entrepreneurial government, quality management in the public sector, public sector efficiency and so on. This paper discusses and analyses productivity in the public sector in Botswana, the current approaches being employed to enhance it, and advocates, from a human resource management perspective, policy areas which can be beneficial for the sustainable enhancement of that productivity in the country.     

中美证券公司资本配置差异分析

中国证券行业发展速度很快,但是效益普遍不好,亏损面很大,除外部环境制约外,内部资本运营水平不高仍是关键因素.本文选择有代表性的美国若干证券公司,解析其资产负债结构、收入结构等资本配置和运营形式,从而为我国证券公司找到差距和提供可借鉴之处,以改善中国证券行业经营状况,增强其抵抗与日俱增的各种风险之能力.     

One-stage structural models to explain city size

Several papers have estimated the parameters of Pareto distributions for city sizes in different countries, but only one has attempted to explain the differing magnitudes of these parameters with a set of country-specific explanatory variables. While it is reassuring that there has been some research which advances beyond simple “curve-fitting” to explore the determinants of city size distributions, the existing research uses a two-stage OLS method which yields invalid second-stage standard errors (and, consequently, questionable hypothesis tests). In this paper, we develop candidate one-stage structural models with normal and non-normal errors which accommodate truncated size distributions, potentially Pareto-like shapes, and city-level variables. In general, these new models are nonlinear in parameters. We illustrate with data on U.S. urban areas.     

Infrastructure and productivity: An extension to private infrastructure and it productivity

This paper incorporates both public and private infrastructure within the framework of a nonlinear production function. The theoretical model specifies a technological growth rate as a nonlinear function of government infrastructure and private infrastructure generated by the information sector of the economy—cable, wireless stations, satellites, internet facilities, broadcasting, etc. The time trend is included to capture the effect of all other variables. The empirical estimates generated by the model imply increasing returns to scale for the US economy in the last few years. The evaluation of the growth accounting equation implies that information technology was the largest contributing component to growth during the expansion of the 1990s.     

Recent contributions to censored regression models

A brief survey of estimation of parameters in a censored regression model (known as the Tobit model) and some details of the properties of LAD (least absolute deviation) estimates and tests of significance of linear hypotheses are given.     

Human capital determinants of the survival of entrepreneurial service firms in Spain

The claim of this paper is that an entrepreneur’s human capital constitutes a key determinant of the survival time of new service industry companies created in Spain. To confirm this claim, a series of survival models has been specified and estimated for a sample of 237 Spanish service industry companies founded by one or more entrepreneurs between the years 2000 and 2004. We found that (1) both general and specific human capital have a positive impact on the survival time of a new firm and (2) human capital is accumulative, in the sense that the larger the number of entrepreneurs founding the company, the longer its survival time. We find that the specific aspects of human capital that are determinants of a company’s survival time are gender, previous work experience in the same activity or as the owner of a firm, and the number of partners. However, educational and training characteristics do not play a relevant role as regards a firm’s survival time. These facts suggest the presence of a gap between the objectives and results of current entrepreneurial-oriented training in Spain.     

房地产的资本通路

2007年7月，广东碧桂园集团（2007．HK）对外宣布，该公司已经在湖北省武汉市、湖南省张家界市及安徽省巢湖市投得4幅土地，总建筑面积224万平方米，投资金额4．05亿元人民币。8月，该公司又宣布斥资10．9亿元在天津等地投得四幅土地。     

A goal-seeking approach to capital budgeting

This paper articulates how a goal-seeking model addresses a variation of the capital-budgeting problem. Focused toward technology modernization in the public sector, this multi-criteria optimization model explicitly considers the diverse functions of the organization. In particular, the synergism amongst the functions is modeled as a multiplicative value function. The model is solved by the “constraint reduced feasible-region method”, resulting in a non-convex mathematical program that produces numerical intricacies. Linearization of the criterion (objective) functions reduces such intricacy. An Army-modernization acquisition-study was used to illustrate the proposed model, showing that its non-inferior solutions are remarkably stable. Comparison is also made with other approaches, typically formulated as goal-setting programs. The model highlights how technology acquisitions are affected as the priorities of each organizational function changes.     

University spin-offs vs. other NTBFs: Total factor productivity differences at outset and evolution

Previous empirical research suggests that university spin-offs under-perform in economic terms compared to other new technology-based firms (NTBFs) in their early years. The usual explanations suggest a lower capabilities endowment of university spin-offs compared to other NTBFs. Using a longitudinal Spanish dataset we compare the evolution of firms′ total factor productivity (capabilities endowment) in both kinds of firm. Productivity grew faster in university spin-offs and their initial underperformance disappeared after 2 or 3 years of operation. The evidence therefore suggests that university spin-offs have lower initial substantive capabilities but greater dynamic capabilities than independent NTBFs. Possible explanations are discussed.     

Human capital,investment and growth: Some results from an endogenous growth model

Recent theoretical literature on the sources of economic growth has emphasized the role of human capital as an internal contributing force in the growth process. Empirical results reported in this paper provide support for this theoretical proposition. Cross-country data from 32 developing countries indicate that human capital (as alternatively measured by the primary school enrollment rate or the adult literacy rate) exerts a significant positive impact upon output growth.     

大力发展民本经济

江总书记最近强调指出,贯彻"三个代表"要求,最根本的是要不断实现好、发展好、维护好最广大人民的根本利益.这是我们党一切工作的出发点和落脚点,也是正确处理改革、发展、稳定关系的结合点.各级领导干部必须从巩固党的执政地位的高度出发,从促进经济和社会发展、维护社会稳定的大局出发,深怀爱民之心,恪守为民之责,善谋富民之策,多办利民之事,更好地为广大人民群众服务.     

Returns to scale effect in labour productivity growth

Economists acknowledge that technical progress and growth in capital inputs increase labour productivity (LP). However, less focus is given to the realization that changes in labour input alone could also affect LP. Because this effect disappears when the short-run technology exhibits constant returns to scale, we call it the returns to scale effect. We decompose growth in LP into three contributing factors: (1) technical progress, (2) capital input growth and the (3) returns to scale effect. We propose theoretical measures for these three components and show that they coincide with the index number formulae consisting of prices and quantities of inputs and outputs. Subsequently, we apply the results of our decomposition to US industry data for 1987–2009. LP in the services sector is shown to grow much slower than that in the goods sector during the 1987–1995 productivity slowdown period. We conclude that the returns to scale effect can considerably explain the gap in LP growth between the two industry groups.