What Can Acreage Allocations Say about Crop Supply Elasticities? A Convex Programming Approach to Supply Response Disaggregation

This article has two goals. The first is to extend previous results regarding calibration of land‐constrained programming models of agricultural supply against supply elasticities to the general case of multiple constraints. The second goal is to demonstrate how the resulting calibration conditions can be used as a source of identification to disaggregate crop supply elasticities down to the level at which static information on acreage allocations is available. We propose an information‐based disaggregation algorithm to systematically generate regionalised elasticities from a single prior, and provide an empirical illustration.     

The development of the Personality Audit: a psychodynamic multiple feedback assessment instrument

The Personality Audit (PA) was developed to meet a need for a relatively simple multiple feedback instrument that could clarify the various motivational needs of executives. Using a psychodynamic approach to leadership, the PA allows the test-taker to assess him- or herself in seven personality dimensions important in human behaviour and to identify personal ‘blind spots’. The resulting insights can be used to formulate appropriate leadership development goals.

The objective of this paper is to describe the design and psychometric properties of the PA. This instrument, in contrast with other tools that can be used to clarify the inner theatre of individuals, is designed not only to report information given by the test-taker but also to reflect the perceptions of observers representing both the test-taker's public and private spheres. This paper describes in detail the conceptual foundations of the questionnaire, the psychometric methods used to confirm its validity and reliability, and possible directions for future research.     

Costos del despido y ventajas de la medición con métodos directos

Es frecuente achacar los malos resultados del mercado laboral a los costos del despido y a las normas que rigen las relaciones de trabajo. Ahora bien, las investigaciones acerca de las consecuencias económicas de los despidos prestan muy poca atención a la calidad y la precisión de las mediciones, y no arrojan indicaciones concluyentes. Después de pasar revista a los métodos actuales de medición, el autor sostiene que es muy conveniente usar métodos cuantitativos directos a fin de complementar las mediciones indirectas habituales. Para ilustrar esta afirmación se vale de una encuesta efectuada recientemente en Australia.     

Measuring and explaining the efficiencies of the United Arab Emirates banking system

Using newly collected data from a survey distributed to all banks in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), this article measures economic efficiency in the banking industry, namely allocative, technical, pure technical and scale efficiency. Employing a nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach, the study estimates the efficiency for a cross section of the UAE banks in 2004. The results indicate that the dominant source of inefficiency in the UAE banking is stemming from allocative inefficiency rather than technical inefficiency. Furthermore, the main source of the relatively small size, technical inefficiency in the UAE banking industry is not the scale inefficiency but rather pure technical inefficiency. The results further indicate that the UAE banks are able to use their input resources more efficiently when they have more branches, and that newer banks are performing better than older banks on average. Moreover, the results also show that short experiences of employees affect efficiencies negatively and government ownership tends to reduce efficiency (as the government shares increase in the bank, the efficiency scores get lower). Finally, the most interesting results have to do with finding higher average efficiencies in banks that employ more women, more managers and less national citizens of the UAE.     

Decentralization and growth: what if the cross-jurisdiction approach had met a dead end?

The relationship between decentralization and economic growth is generally studied from a perspective stressing universal or quasi-universal regularities across jurisdictions. That approach has generated many insights but seems to reach its limits. The paper explains why it allows contrasting positions with regard to the benefits of decentralization even among proponents of free and competitive markets. And it seems from the empirical literature that no robust and economically significant cross-jurisdiction relation between decentralization and economic performance or growth, except perhaps their independence, has been found. The absence of a relation valid across jurisdictions, however, does not entail the absence of relations specific to each. When jurisdiction specificity is very strong, it is normally difficult to say if there is a relation between observable decentralization arrangements in a jurisdiction and its observable economic performance. However, this may be different under particular circumstances reflecting disequilibrium. Episodes of growth acceleration, when they follow persistent underperformance and include changes in decentralization arrangements, may provide some empirical support to the claim that the relation exists.     

Illicit Drug Use,Employment, and Labor Force Participation

Illicit drug use has declined among the U.S. adult population, but national surveys show the majority of illicit drug users are employed. Concern about workplace productivity, absenteeism, and safety has led many employers to establish employee assistance and drug testing programs. Given the sharp interest in workplace interventions, more information is needed about the relationships between drug use and labor market status. This study estimated the probability of employment and labor force participation for different types of drug users using nationally representative data from the 1997 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Results strongly indicated that chronic drug use was significantly related (negative) to employment for both genders and labor force participation for males. Furthermore, nonchronic drug use was not significantly related to employment or labor force participation. These findings suggest that workplace policies for illicit drug use should consider chronic or problem drug users apart from light or casual users.     

Influence Allocation Methods in Group Decision Support Systems

Influence allocation processes are voting and opinion aggregating methods that allow members to distribute some or all of their decision making influence to others in the group in order to exploit not only the group's knowledge of the alternatives, but its knowledge of itself. Only with the common use of group decision support systems (GDSS) has their use become practical. In this paper we reconsider SPAN, an influence allocation process introduced by MacKinnon (1966a). Experimental comparison shows SPAN to be significantly better at selecting a correct option from a set of options than two common voting methods. An alternative influence allocation process that we call RCON (Rational Consensus), is based on a weighting method proposed by DeGroot (1974) and has been explicated as a normative standard for combining opinion by Lehrer and Wagner (1981). The judgmental inputs to SPAN would appear to be logically related to those for RCON. Submitting the SPAN inputs from the experiment, transformed in this logical way, to the RCON process results in somewhat better performance than with SPAN. However, evidence indicated that the two methods are conceptually and psychologically sufficiently different that an experimental comparison is needed between them.     

Alternative Demand for University Outreach Services from Georgia's Golf Industry

Recent technological advancements have influenced farmers' growing demand for private information suppliers, a service traditionally monopolized by public outreach programs of land grant educational institutions. This waning appeal for university extension services creates pressure for these institutions to explore other market segments to broaden their audience coverage. This study demonstrates a potential market niche in Georgia's golf industry for university outreach services. Binomial logistic regression results indicate that significant demand ( a ) is negatively influenced by golf facility size; ( b ) is directly related to the level of industry experience of the golf superintendents; and ( c ) could come from facilities that require assistance in growth-, pest-, and employment-related concerns.     

Team Incentives and Organizational Form

Conventional wisdom regarding nonprofit firms is that the absence of a profit motive renders them inefficient. However, the costs and product quality realized by profit-taking firms is determined by how well those firms deal with a variety of internal incentive and information problems, and this should be equally true for nonprofits. This article analyzes the team incentive problem in nonprofit organizations. Holmstrom (1982) showed that the introduction of a budget-breaker into a team permitted the creation of incentives to provide efficient effort when it is otherwise impossible. A similar result obtains for a nonprofit team, but the role of principal differs from that found in profit-taking teams. It is shown that any of: donors, government regulators, or Trustees can fulfill this role in a nonprofit team. One implication of this is shown to be that nonprofit firms may indeed pay employees less than otherwise identical employees earn in identical jobs in profit-taking firms.