Collective Action with Incomplete Commitment: Experimental Evidence

Face-to-face communication is investigated as an efficiency-enhancing mechanism in experimental common-pool resource environments in which the appropriation activities of outside appropriators create coordination and monitoring problems for the communicating group. We identify three distinct problems that can threaten successful collective action. Outsiders respond strategically to reductions in appropriation by cooperating group members. Members of the communicating group deviate from agreements more frequently when monitoring is imperfect and over appropriation can be blamed on outsiders. Groups that are allowed to communicate anticipate the potential problems and have difficulty reaching agreements or committing to a specific appropriation rule.     

Aggregate risk sharing and equivalent financial mechanisms in an endowment economy of incomplete participation

Summary. A pure endowment overlapping generations economy can be inefficient because of insufficient risk sharing. The introduction of an outside asset by a government or the existence of a clearing house can remedy the inefficiency by allowing some intergenerational risk sharing. While the typical outside asset is fiat money, many alternative financial mechanisms, such as social security, risk-free government bonds, mispriced deposit insurance, and income insurance can serve the same function as fiat money. Hence there are many equivalent financial mechanisms that provide intergenerational insurance. In the presence of uncertainty, there are several concepts of Pareto optimality that can be appropriately applied in an overlapping generations setting. I examine the risk-sharing arrangements associated with two different concepts of optimality, including how these arrangements are financed. The results are related to, and in some instances an extension of, the equivalence results obtained by Chamley and Polemarcharkis (1984), Weiss (1977), and Wallace (1981).Received: 4 March 2003, Revised: 30 January 2004JEL Classification Numbers: E40, E44, D51.P. Labadie: I would like to thank the participants of the Economic Theory Symposium Recent Developments in Money and Finance at Purdue University, May 2-4, 2003 and an anonymous referee for comments on this version. I am grateful to Bruce Smith for comments on an earlier version.     

Revisiting the research–practice gap in HR: A longitudinal analysis

Over 6300 articles published in 4 HR-focused journals over a 30-year period of time (1976–2005) were content analyzed according to 14 topic areas. The purpose of the study was to examine changes that have taken place over a 30-year time frame. Specifically, what HR issues dominate the field during the past and the present? And to what extent has the HR research–practice gap narrowed or widened over time? The results indicate that HR Development and Staffing were dominant HR issues throughout the past 30 years. In addition, some HR topics demonstrated a stable research–practice gap (Motivation-related issues), and other topics were characterized by an increasing gap (Compensation & rewards), a decreasing gap (Employee/Labor relations), or no significant gap (HR Developments, Staffing). These findings are discussed in the context of key human capital trends.     

Welfare and trade elasticity with multinational production

We explore welfare properties in a firm heterogeneity model with multinational production and export. The presence of multinational production plays a crucial role in delivering a partial trade elasticity of total sales by exporters and affiliates that is no longer constant, and depends on both supply and demand parameters. We then analyse counterfactual scenarios. Multinational production with intra-firm trade increases welfare gains by up to 4% with respect to a model with only export and no truncation. Multinational production à la Helpman et al. (American Economic Review, 2004, 94 , 300) generates the largest welfare gains from liberalisation.     

Implied Equity Duration: A New Measure of Equity Risk

Duration is an important and well-established risk characteristic for fixed income securities. We use recent developments in financial statement analysis research to construct a measure of duration for equity securities. We find that the standard empirical predictions and results for fixed income securities extend to equity securities. We show that stock price volatility and stock beta are both positively correlated with equity duration. Moreover, estimates of common shocks to expected equity returns extracted using our measure of equity duration capture a strong common factor in stock returns. Additional analysis shows that the book-to-market ratio provides a crude measure of equity duration and that our more refined measure of equity duration subsumes the Fama and French (1993) book-to-market factor in stock returns. Our research shows how structured financial statement analysis can be used to construct superior measures of equity security risk.     

Patient safety: the four domains of nursing leadership

The role of the nurse leader in patient safety can be characterized as follows: to establish the right culture; to infuse that culture with shared leadership so that the expert voice at the bedside is really defining the work; to possess the competencies necessary to coordinate and advance this complex initiative; and to forge both internal and external partnerships, because we will not be able to do this work alone. To further the work on this topic, nurse leaders who participated in the Nursing Leadership Congress are committed to identifying additional resources to help nurse leader colleagues drive patient safety efforts throughout their organizations.     

The impact of market actions on firm reputation

Drawing on signaling theory, we hypothesize that a firm's reputation is shaped by its own market actions and the actions of its industry rivals. We view market actions as signals that convey information about the underlying competencies of firms and influence stakeholder evaluations of them. We find that the total number of a firm's market actions, the complexity of its action repertoire, the time lag in rivals' responses to its actions, and the similarity of its repertoire with those of its rivals positively affect its reputation. These results suggest that a firm's reputation is influenced both by its own actions and by its rivals' actions. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.