Skilled-unskilled wage inequality and unemployment: A general equilibrium analysis

The paper develops a static three sector competitive general equilibrium model of a small open economy in which skilled labor is mobile between a traded good sector and the non-traded good sector and unskilled labor is specific to another traded good sector. Capital is perfectly mobile among all these three sectors. We introduce involuntary unemployment equilibrium in both the labor markets and explain unemployment using efficiency wage hypothesis. We examine the effects of change in different factor endowments and prices of traded goods on the unemployment rates and on the skilled-unskilled relative wage. Also, we introduce Gini-Coefficient of wage income distribution as a measure of wage income inequality; and show that a comparative static effect may force the skilled-unskilled relative wage and the Gini-Coefficient of wage income distribution to move in opposite directions in the presence of unemployment.     

Extending Business Education Beyond Traditional Boundaries: A Case Study in Negotiated Problem Resolution in a Remote Regional Indigenous Community in Australia

It is widely accepted that the concepts and practices of management can only be of benefit when they are anchored to the contextual architecture of people, processes, structures, and technologies. The challenge of establishing a bridging program for providing managerial competencies to Australian Indigenous people has become a serious one for multinational mining companies. As the wings of globalization interact with the long-ignored reality of marginalized local milieu, a need for an innovative management education system has become a major imperative compelling multinational mining companies to work collaboratively with the government, educational institutions, and Indigenous communities. The article outlines a specific decision-making dilemma in an Indigenous context, while explaining the imperatives for educators, who have the challenging task of instructing potential graduates how to manage the unique contextuality of rural Australian Aboriginal communities. The article presents implications for large-scale modern multinationals as they move to geographically remote regions of the world where large number of marginalized local people need to be drawn into the workforce not only as an act of a social responsibility imperative, but also as sound business pragmatism.     

The Determinants of Child Labour and Child Schooling in Ghana

This paper investigates the main determinants of child labourand child schooling in Ghana, with special reference to theirinteraction. The study provides evidence on the impact of povertyand quality of schooling on child labour hours, taking intoaccount their potential endogeneity. The exercise distinguishesbetween cluster poverty and household poverty in the two-stageHeckman estimation procedure. In addition, it relies on a setof non-common regressors to identify the child labour hoursregression from the selection equation. Other methodologicalfeatures include simultaneous equations estimation of childlabour, child schooling and poverty, taking into account theirjoint endogeneity. The empirical results contain some evidenceof sharp rural urban differences, thus, pointing to the needto adopt region specific policies in enhancing child welfare.However, rural, semi-urban and urban Ghana agree on the effectiverole that improved school attendance can play in curbing childlabour.     

International Poverty Comparisons on Unit Record Data of Developing and Developed Countries

Cross country poverty comparisons on unit records have, rarely, involved both developing and developed countries. The present study attempts to fill this gap by comparing poverty across fourteen nations with diverse economic and demographic characteristics and at vastly different stages of economic development. The study contains evidence on (a) cross country variation in the equivalence scales estimated in the presence of both household size economies and adult/child relativities, (b) impact of demographic adjustment of the poverty line, that incorporate household size and composition changes, on the poverty rates, and (c) sensitivity of the poverty estimates and their rankings to the ‘equivalence elasticity’. The study finds that country rankings based on per capita GNP bear very little resemblance with that based on the aggregate poverty rates. The latter hide substantial variation in the poverty estimates across different household types.     

Why Do Firms Issue Equity after Splitting Stocks?

This paper examines the motivations of firms that conduct seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) after splitting stocks. We find no difference in equity announcement and issue period returns between these firms and other equity‐issuing firms, suggesting that firms do not split stocks to reveal information and reduce adverse selection costs at the subsequent SEO. However, because investors react positively to split announcements, firms that issue equity after splitting stocks sell new shares at a higher price and raise more funds. We also find that firms split stocks to make the subsequent SEO more marketable to individual investors who are attracted to low‐priced shares.     

Representative dissonance: India’s Self and Western Image

Western media have often been criticized for portraying Third World destinations through a colonial prism via images of primitiveness and exoticism. Contrastingly, some destinations have begun to resist those representations with media campaigns of their own. The purpose of this study was to critically construe the differences between ways that India is represented in American tourism media and how it is represented by the Indian government itself. The findings revealed that these two representations are different in ways that reflect the colonial nature of international tourism and the postcolonial stage of India’s nationalism. Moreover, the study of representative dissonance is proposed as a tool for understanding the conflicting ideological forces that shape destination images.     

Internal control and internal capital allocation: evidence from internal capital markets of multi-segment firms

We investigate the impact of internal control over financial reporting on management decisions in directing corporate resources to alternative investment projects in multi-segment firms. Results from cross-sectional and inter-temporal analyses indicate that internal control weaknesses (ICWs) are associated with distortionary internal capital allocations. The adverse impact on internal capital markets is more pronounced for firms with company-level ICWs. Our analyses also show that firms with weak existing governance mechanisms benefit more from maintaining effective internal control. We further document that the negative impact of ICWs on firms’ internal capital transfers manifests in a lower excess value of diversification.     

The impact of coffee certification on small‐scale producers’ livelihoods: a case study from the Jimma Zone,Ethiopia

What is the impact of product certification on small‐scale farmers’ livelihoods? To what extent does the participation of Ethiopian small‐scale coffee farmers in certified local cooperative structures improve their socioeconomic situation? To answer these questions, this article employs household data of 249 coffee farmers from six different cooperatives collected in the Jimma zone of Southwestern Ethiopia in 2009. Findings show that the certification of coffee cooperatives has in total a low impact on small‐scale coffee producers’ livelihoods mainly due to (1) low productivity, (2) insignificant price premium, and (3) poor access to credit and information from the cooperative. Differences in production and organizational capacities between the local cooperatives are mirrored in the extent of the certification benefits for the smallholders. “Good” cooperatives have reaped the benefits of certification, whereas “bad” ones did not fare well. In this regard the “cooperative effect” overlies the “certification effect.”