An agency theory perspective of the Israeli labor market segmentation: Past,present, and future

In this paper we use agency theory to present a process of the dichotomization of the Israeli workforce into two structures, each representing distinct organizational cultures. The first structure is the private sector, led by the high-tech industry; a model where the principal has strong control over the activities of the agent. The second is the public sector, an opposing model in which the principal has virtually no control over the activities of the agents and as a result, the effectiveness within this sector deteriorates. We argue that such conflicting systems cannot exist side by side without affecting each other and we suggest a role for human resource management (HRM) in future developments. Within the public sector it is the responsibility of the principal, the Israeli government, to gain more control over the agent and employ professional HRM systems for this purpose.     

‘Post‐Third‐World City' or Neoliberal ‘City of Exception'? Rio de Janeiro in the Olympic Era

This article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega‐event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega‐event‐led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a ‘post‐Third‐World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega‐events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the ‘city‐of‐exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city‐of‐exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically—in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts—urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil.     

Are immigrants really attracted to the welfare state? Evidence from OECD countries

This paper examines the impact of fiscal policies on both the size and educational levels of immigrants in destination countries. We find that whether or not a country’s policies are attracting highly educated immigrants goes beyond the issue of the “welfare state”. Immigrants are making important distinctions between the different benefits provided by a receiving country’s government. Health and education spending are found to have a positive impact on the education levels of immigrants while the reverse is true for unemployment and retirement benefits. Welfare programs are found to be insignificant once other government programs/taxes and other factors are taken into account. These results imply that countries should be less concerned about whether they are a “big government” with regards to attracting immigrants, and more concerned with what types of benefits they offer.     

Efficiency and information aggregation in large uniform-price auctions

We prove that the equilibria of a large interdependent-value, uniform-price auction model where bidders have arbitrary preferences for multiple units can be approximated by a nonatomic exchange economy. We show that the uniform-price auction is approximately efficient with a large number of participants and asymptotically aggregates idiosyncratic bidder information into the market price. More generally our analysis framework provides conditions justifying the use of nonatomic limit model approximations to analyze the large-market behavior of game-theoretic models. We demonstrate continuity requirements on the economic primitives sufficient for the equilibrium strategies of the two models to converge as the number of participants in the finite game approaches infinity.     

Characteristics,consumer surplus,and new activities: A proposed ski area

Physical characteristics of activities and personal characteristics of the individual are incorporated into an expenditure function. This function is used to define the compensating and equivalent variation for changes in the costs or physical characteristics of the existing activities, or for a proposed activity as a function of its proposed characteristics and cost. The model is used to estimate the demand for, and the CVs and EVs associated with, the development of a Colorado ski area. These vary across skiers as a function of skiing ability, value of time, location of residence, and skiing budget.     

Brand love: development and validation of a practical scale

Batra et al. (Journal of Marketing 76, 1–16, 2012) created a new conceptualization of brand love but did not develop a pragmatically useful measure for studies where questionnaire length is a constraint. The current research develops a more parsimonious brand love scale, with three nested versions of 26, 13, and 6 items, respectively. This research also validates the scales, and in so doing conducts several important validity tests not considered by Batra et al. The 26-item scale is able to predict consumer loyalty, word of mouth, and resistance to negative information, with an R ² of .90, after correcting for measurement error.     

Are we overconfident in executive overconfidence research? An examination of the convergent and content validity of extant unobtrusive measures

Building understanding of overconfident executives is central to a growing literature that spans a number of disciplines. Much of this research has utilized unobtrusive, or indirect, measures to assess executive overconfidence from secondary data sources. We analyze the convergent and content validity of seven extant unobtrusive measures of executive overconfidence. The results of our analyses indicate that these measures do not exhibit adequate convergence, suggesting that existing measures are not measuring the same construct. Further, we administer a sort task to academic colleagues to assess whether scholars believe that the seven measures are adequately assessing the intended construct. The results of our sort task indicate that scholars did not categorize any of the seven measures as sufficient for measuring overconfidence. We conclude with suggestions for future research to address the inadequate convergent and content validity found in our assessment of extant measures of executive overconfidence.