Technological change and agricultural household income distribution: theory and evidence from China

This article applies a general equilibrium model to analyse the impact of new rice technology on household income and uses agricultural household survey data from China to test the implications of this model. It is shown that, when a new rice technology becomes available, the adopting household will reallocate resources to increase rice production and reduce the production of other goods. Meanwhile, the non-adopting households will do the opposite. Thus, the income from rice becomes increasingly concentrated in the adopting households and income from non-rice becomes increasingly concentrated in the non-adopting households. If only one source of income is examined, the introduction of new rice technology increases the inequality of income distribution in rural areas. But, if the total household income is examined, the distributional inequality is mitigated.     

COMPARING FEDERAL AND PRIVATE‐SECTOR WAGES WITHOUT LOGS

I use Current Population Survey data from 2005 through 2010 to compare the wages of federal employees and workers in the private sector who have similar observable characteristics. The distribution of wages differed drastically between the federal and private sectors. In particular, I find that federal employees with no more than a high school diploma earned 21% more, on average, than their private‐sector counterparts, whereas those with a professional degree or doctorate earned 23% less. Overall, the average of federal wages was about 2% higher than the average wage of similar private‐sector workers. Other researchers have found larger differences because they used log‐linearized models, which result in comparisons of geometric means. I show that arithmetic means are more relevant in the context of the relationship between a government's compensation policy and its budget. The discrepancy between differences in arithmetic and geometric means occurs because the wages of federal employees were much less dispersed than those of employees with similar characteristics in the private sector. (JEL J31, J38, J45)     

A Few Bad Apples? Scandalous Behavior of Mutual Fund Managers

Recent scandals in the business world have intensified the demand for an explanation of the causes of corporate wrongdoing. This study empirically tests the effects of mutual fund management fees and control structures on the likelihood of illegal activity within mutual fund organizations. Specific attention is given to the presence of agency duality issues in the mutual fund industry and how this influences the motivations and decisions of fund managers. Findings provide support for the hypothesized relationship that higher levels of management fees decrease the likelihood of illegal behavior. Additionally, control of the mutual fund by external management is found to have a negative impact on the likelihood of illegal activity while also acting as a moderator of the management fee-illegal behavior relationship. Justin Davis is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management at Ohio University and Doctoral Candidate at The University of Texas at Arlington. His primary research interests include firm-level entrepreneurship, agency issues in corporate governance, and venture capital investment. Dr. G. Tyge Payne is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Management in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. His primary research interests include organization-environment fit/misfit, firm-level and corporate enterpreneurship; dual agency issues, and interorganizational relationships. Dr. Gary C. McMahan is an Associate Professor of Management and Coordinator of the Ph.D. Program in Management at The University of Texas at Arlington. His research interests include the strategic role of human resources in organizations and corporate governance and ethics in financial services institutions. He has published over 40 articles, monographs, proceedings, and book chapters.     

Growth of industry clusters and innovation: Lessons from Beijing Zhongguancun Science Park

The success of technology parks in promoting technology transfer and attracting clusters of highly innovative firms has motivated countries from around the world in an attempt to promote regional development, including the People's Republic of China. Due to its similarities with other formerly planned economies undergoing transition towards market economies, the Chinese model of technology parks has been closely watched and emulated by other transitional economies. However, despite its economic significance, such development has been largely ignored in organizational research.In this study, I investigate a specific example of an industry cluster in China, the Beijing Zhongguancun (ZGC) Science Park, which has seen the largest cluster of semiconductor, computer, and telecommunication firms in China, consisting of both domestic and foreign invested firms. I examine the origin and growth of industry cluster in a traditionally heavily regulated economy and region, its role in promoting technology transfer and innovation, and challenges firms face in the future. I close by proposing some issues for future research.     

Strategic entrepreneurship: Creating competitive advantage through streams of innovation

In today's fast-paced competitive environment, firms face the need to be increasingly nimble and adaptive. While often able to establish a certain level of performance based upon existing technologies, firms are equally as often to be left flat-footed in the face of emerging, novel technologies. We discuss strategic entrepreneurship as the means through which firms simultaneously exploit their current competitive advantages while exploring for future opportunities. Achieving a balance between exploration and exploitation consists of more than merely allocating resources evenly between the two processes. As discussed, exploration and exploitation are operationally, structurally, and culturally distinct processes.     

Tour Guide Styles and Penal History Museums in Canada

Although the existing penal tourism literature examines displays at penal heritage sites, little research has explored the work of tour guides within them. Drawing from interviews and observations, this article assesses the styles of tour guides working at penal history museums in Canada. We situate carceral guides' styles along a continuum encompassing those who claim to convey historical facts as well as ones who explicitly engage in staging and performance, which are primarily responsive to penal tourists' expectations for fun and entertainment. In the discussion and conclusion, we address the practical implications of this assessment of guide styles. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Advertising agency operating efficiency

This study uses data envelopment analysis to evaluate the operating efficiency of a sample of 41 US advertising agencies, based on their profits and expenditures in six key areas (i.e., payroll to employees, other payroll-related expenses, administrative expenses, space and facilities expenses, corporate expenses, and professional fees). The analyses reveal that, on average, 5% of an agency's budget is wasted, incurring the greatest amount of waste in the administrative and corporate expenses. The tobit model also indicates that professional fees contributed the most agency inefficiency overall.     

Information, Informal Finance, and SME Financing

Informal finance exists extensively and has been playing an important role in small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing in developing economies. This paper tries to rationalize the extensiveness of informal finance. SME financing suffers more serious information asymmetry to the extent that most SMEs are more opaque and can only provide less collateral. Informal lenders have an advantage over formal financial institutions in collecting “soft information” about SME borrowers. This paper establishes a model including formal and informal lenders and high- and low-risk borrowers with or without sufficient collateral and shows that the credit market in which informal finance is eliminated will allocate funds in some inefficient way, and the efficiency of allocating credit funds can be improved once informal finance is allowed to coexist with formal finance. Translated from Economic Research Journal, 2005, 7 (in Chinese)     

Estimating demand systems when outcomes are correlated counts

We describe and employ a Bayesian posterior simulator for fitting a high-dimensional system of ordinal or count outcome equations. The model is then applied to describe the multiple site recreation demands of individual agents, and we argue that our approach provides advantages relative to existing methods commonly applied in this area. In particular, our model flexibly adjusts to match observed frequencies in trip outcomes, permits a flexible correlation pattern among the sites visited by individuals, and the posterior simulator for fitting this model is relatively easy to implement in practice. We also describe how the posterior simulations produced from the model can be used to conduct a variety of counterfactual experiments, including predicting behavioral changes and describing welfare implications resulting from shifts in exogenous demographic and site characteristics. We illustrate our method using data from the Iowa Lakes Project by modeling the visitation patterns of individuals to a set of twenty-nine large Iowa lakes. Consistent with previous findings in the literature, we see strong evidence that own and cross-price effects on trip demand are negative and positive, respectively, that higher income increases the likelihood of visiting most sites, and that a commonly used indicator of water quality, Secchi transparency, is positively correlated with the number of trips taken. In addition, the correlation structure among the errors reveals a complex pattern in which unobserved factors affecting trip demand are generally (though not strictly) positively correlated across sites. The flexibility and richness with which we are able to characterize the demand system provides a solid platform for counterfactual analysis, where we find significant behavioral and welfare effects from changes in site availability, water quality, and travel costs.     

A finite‐sample hierarchical analysis of wage variation across public high schools: evidence from the NLSY and high school and beyond

Using data from both the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and High School and Beyond (HSB), we investigate if public high schools differ in the “production” of earnings and if rates of return to future education vary with public high school attended. Given evidence of such variation, we seek to explain why schools differ by proposing that standard measures of school “quality” as well as proxies for community characteristics can explain the observed parameter variation across high schools. Since analysis of widely‐used data sets such as the NLSY and HSB necessarily involves observing only a few students per high school, we employ an exact finite sample estimation approach. We find evidence that schools differ and that most proxies for high school quality play modest roles in explaining the variation in outcomes across public high schools. We do find evidence that the education of the teachers in the high school as well as the average family income associated with students in the school play a small part in explaining variation at the school‐level. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.