The Value of Secondary School Quality*

Improving the quality of state‐funded secondary school education has become a major policy aim in the UK. However, without a valuation of the social benefits derived from public provision of educational services, the rational evaluation of policy to this end is difficult. Utilizing the argument that dwellings near better schools command a price premium, this paper presents results from an empirical exercise aimed at providing such a social valuation of increased school quality. Using a large set of data for England, and an instrumental variable approach, results indicate an elasticity of dwelling purchase price with respect to exam performance by schools at around +0.05. One implication is that society would value a general increase of five percentage points in exam performance by about £450 million per annum.     

Integrating Ethics All the Way Through: The Issue of Moral Agency Reconsidered

Integrating “ethics all the way through” an organization suggests that the issue of moral agency and the corporation be reconsidered. Is the corporation a moral agent in some sense or is it no more than the people who are a part of the organization? Views which stress the role of the individual lose sight of the whole corporate entity, and views which think of the corporation as a collective lose sight of the individual. A view which rejects both these alternatives sees the corporation as a type of community where there is a dynamic tension between the corporation as a whole and the individuals who are part of the organization. This view has implications relative to the focus of efforts to integrate ethics throughout an organization.     

Management Control as an Employee Resource: The Case of Front‐line Service Workers

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the conception of management control as an employee resource can enhance critical understandings of front‐line service work. The argument is developed first through a critique of the contemporary control literature and its prominent worker images of smiling docility and haggard exhaustion. Seeking to encourage accounts more sensitive to the subjectivity and agency of service workers, the paper calls for more research attention to the question of how these employees experience and evaluate management control in relation to their self‐defined interests. Analysis of the nature of contemporary service work suggests that one such perceived interest is likely to be interactive control, or the capacity of workers to control and influence those parties with whom they directly interact. Based on a close reading of the emerging empirical literature on services, the article explores various ways in which the bureaucratic, technical and normative regulation designed by management to control service workers is used in turn by workers to further their own control and influence over managers and customers.     

Credit rationing, race, and the mortgage market

This study applies microdata from the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances to evaluate the effects of borrower race and default risk in mortgage lending. The empirical analysis is based on a probit model of whether borrowers obtain FHA or conventional mortgages; the former are fully insured and are characterized by easier downpayment constraints, but are typically more expensive. Hence, households borrowing through the FHA will tend to be credit constrained in the conventional market. Results of the analysis indicate that variables which proxy lender concerns about default risk and cost have an important effect on the type of loan borrowers obtain. Empirical estimates also suggest that minority households are significantly less likely to obtain conventional financing than whites, even after controlling for various proxies of default risk. These results suggest that race effects in mortgage lending may persist for reasons unrelated to borrower default risk.     

An empirical test of the efficiency of the ADR market

This study examines the weak form efficiency of foreign equities — American Depository Receipts — traded in the U.S. The results of serial correlation and runs tests on a sample of listed and NASDAQ ADRs for the years 1974–1978 were consistent with weak form efficiency.