Supply side inflation persistence

We explore the role of the cost channel in accounting for inflation persistence in the New Keynesian model with Calvo pricing. Hump-shaped responses of inflation to monetary shocks are obtained under purely nominal rigidities.     

Academic entrepreneurship

This paper proposes a model of the choice to commercialize research, of the amount and type of pre‐commercial research to perform, and of the timing of commercialization by an academic scientist, and analyzes the returns and costs of these choices. The behavior and performance of the academic scientist is compared with that of an industrial researcher. Unlike the industrial researcher, the academic scientist receives direct benefit from performing research, e.g. in the form of publication and peer recognition. However, the type of research that is more effective in reducing commercialization costs may not be the one generating the highest scientific benefit. It is shown that, while in some cases the academic scientist is more reluctant to commercialize research, in other cases she may commercialize faster than a solely profit‐seeking agent would—and perform less research. Academic and non‐academic scientists also select different projects, and this may explain the good performance of academic entrepreneurs found in several empirical studies. The model offers a unified framework to interpret the mixed evidence on the success of, and the arguments in favor and against, the involvement of universities into commercial activities. Managerial and public policy implications are also examined. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE MEASUREMENT OF EMPLOYMENT STATUS IN SOUTH AFRICA USING COHORT ANALYSIS, 1994‐20041

We analyse trends in employment, unemployment and labour force participation by simple graphical techniques, using all the October Household Surveys and the September Labour Force Surveys. We show that African male employment in 1995 seems high, when compared to all the other surveys. Furthermore much of the increase in African female labour force participation is concentrated in the period 1998 to 2000, which suggests that measurement and sampling changes may be partially responsible for the trend. We track cohorts of individuals over the eleven years for which we have data. We show that young people are leaving school earlier, while being better educated than their elders. They are not, however, being absorbed into employment at a faster rate. This has led to a spike in youth unemployment.     

Spillovers of the Conventional and Unconventional Monetary Policy from the US to South Africa

This paper assesses the effect of US monetary policy on South Africa during the period 1990–2018. We separately analyse and compare the effect of conventional monetary policy, before the Global Financial Crisis, and unconventional monetary policy, after the US monetary policy reached the zero-lower bound. Our impulse response function results indicate that monetary policy in South Africa responds mainly to local inflation, economic activity and financial conditions. While there is strong correlation between the global and South African financial cycle, the financial cycle is not transmitted to the real economy because of the sluggish response of industrial production and domestic credit, especially after the global financial crisis. We see this as an indication of the effects of structural issues to the real economy and constrained households’ balance sheet which has prevented the local economy to take advantage of low local interest rates and the global economic recovery after the crisis.     

Financial Integration in the GCC Region: Market Size Versus National Effects

Open Economies Review - This paper examines financial spillovers between the four largest equity markets (by market capitalization) in the GCC region using a VAR-GARCH (1,1) framework that sheds...     

Family ownership and environmental performance: The mediation effect of human resource practices

Previous literature has found that listed family firms underperform their nonfamily counterparts in terms of environmental performance, but has not explained why this occurs. We address this research gap by hypothesizing that training and development practices (i.e., managerial practices devoted to providing training and development for the workforce) mediate the relationship between family blockholders and environmental performance. Using a sample of 33,901 firm‐year observations from 2002 to 2016 distributed across 56 countries and employing the structural equation model technique, we find that investment in training and development practices explains almost half of the negative relationship between family blockholders and environmental performance. Our study contributes to the agency theory debate on principal–principal problems by explaining why family blockholders could damage other blockholders and minority shareholders.     

Modelling choice and switching behaviour between Scottish ski centres

The paper identifies the need to model the skier's choice of centre and the basic ideas underlying discrete choice models and their estimation. It then identifies data requirements and sources, the final choice of specification and the estimated parameters of the resultant nested multinomial logit model. The results indicate two quite distinct markets. For day-trippers snow cover, cost, and, to a lesser extent, the journey length, were the critical factors. For those staying overnight the key determinant in this market seems to be accommodation. Interestingly centres which for the day-tripper are competitors, become, for the overnight customer, complementary.     

SIR WALDRON SMITHERS AND THE MUDDLE OF THE TORY MIDDLE

Waldron Smithers was highly critical of Attlee's post‐war Labour government and placed much weight on Hayek having dedicated The Road to Serfdom to ‘the Socialists of all parties’. Accordingly, Smithers was assiduous in combating what he saw as a dangerous turn towards middle‐way policy within his own party in the late 1940s.