An empirical investigation of scheduling performance criteria

Planning and scheduling significantly influence organizational performance, but literature that pays attention to how organizations could or should organize and assess their planning processes is limited. We extend planning and scheduling theory with a categorization of scheduling performance criteria, based on a three-stage survey research design. Particularly, the results show that, next to schedule quality, the planning process factors timeliness, flexibility, communication, and negotiation are important performance criteria, and especially so in organizations that are faced with high levels of uncertainty. The results suggest that organizational and behavioral aspects of planning and scheduling cannot be mitigated with advanced models and software that solely focus on good schedules. Rather, high quality schedules and high quality scheduling processes need to be facilitated simultaneously to attain high planning and scheduling performance.     

Towards a phenomenology of civil war: Hobbes meets Benjamin in Beirut

Based on interviews with Beirut intellectuals and architects, this essay endeavours to trace the contours for a phenomenology or anthropology of civil war. Thomas Hobbes serves as a guide, with his idea of civil war representing a relapse into the ‘state of nature’; as absence of sovereignty resulting in a ‘war of everybody against everybody’. The effects of ever-latent civil war in Beirut are far-reaching: the fragmentation of urban space and the disappearance of public space, the loss of memory and the fragmentation of time, even the reification of language. In the collective imagination and in the arts, Beirut appears as a ghost town, a spectral city with a spectral civility. What we discover is a city, its inhabitants, its social behaviour, but also its art and literature, in the grip of post-traumatic stress syndrome. From all this, we take home two things: first, any city can (at least in principle) relapse into a similar state of nature — Beirut can become a paradigm of latent civil war; and second, the traumatic modernity of Beirut mirrors the traumatic artistic expressions of modernism — the shock of modernity is also always a modernity of shock.     

Country versus sector factors in equity returns: The roles of non-unit exposures

In this paper we disentangle, analytically and empirically, the roles of the unit-exposure restriction in Heston and Rouwenhorst (1994). We show that if the purpose is to construct factors, the unit-exposure variance-analysis model can be viewed as just an algorithm that does not really assume a return-generating process; and in practice the effect of relaxing the restriction is immaterial. The restriction is more important if one wants to estimate whether, for a typical stock, the country factor generates more variance than the sector factor: exposure estimation becomes more important (i) the further the average exposures are from unity; or (ii) the higher the dispersion of the exposures. With respect to (i), the more important the corrections for sector (or geographical) structure in country (or sector) factors are, the more the average exposure falls below unity. Thus, the average exposure provides an alternative indicator of the importance of country versus sector effects. We empirically find that the average sector exposure is low (0.3) compared to the average country exposure (0.9). With respect to (ii) we correct the dispersion of exposures for estimation error in the exposures. We find that in our sample these estimation error corrections are more important for sector factors than for country factors, and that country factors are generating far more variance, in a typical stock's return, than do sector factors.     

Extending the investment development path model to include the human environment factor

This article aims to address Dunning's call to include the “human environment” (HE) as a new trend and trajectory for research in international business (IB). Dunning argues that the most important driver for economic advancement is knowledge, which arises from the HE. We extend Dunning's IB theory of the five stages of a country's investment development path (IDP) to include the HE factor. Further, we use China as an example in which to examine the role of human resource management (HRM). We identify and analyze an important link between foreign direct investment, multinational enterprises, and both domestic and global HRM. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Does central bank communication really lead to better forecasts of policy decisions? New evidence based on a Taylor rule model for the ECB

Nowadays, it is widely believed that greater disclosure and clarity over policy may lead to greater predictability of central bank actions. We examine whether communication by the European Central Bank (ECB) adds information compared to the information provided by a Taylor rule model in which real-time expected inflation and output growth are used. We use five indicators of ECB communication that are all based on the ECB President’s introductory statement at the press conference following an ECB policy meeting. Our results suggest that even though the indicators are sometimes quite different from one another, they add information that helps predict the next policy decision of the ECB. Furthermore, also when the interbank rate is included in our Taylor rule model, the ECB communication indicators remain significant.     

广西信息产业与传统优势制造业互动发展研究

在对信息产业与传统制造业的互动发展相关理论概述的基础上,结合广西信息产业和传统优势制造业的业态分析,构建了符合广西经济发展的两个产业互动发展模型,并提出了促进互动发展的若干策略建议。     

Literacy Skills and Earnings: Race and Gender Differences

This study examines differences in returns to literacy skills on earnings of black and white men and women. Literacy skill is a composite measure of three scales: reading comprehension, document literacy (the ability to locate and use information in, say, tables and graphs), and mathematics proficiency. Using data from the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS), we estimate earnings determination models separately for each racial/gender group. Our findings show that the effect of literacy on earnings varies by race and gender. Literacy skills favorably rewarded black men relative to black women and white men and women, net of education and other relevant variables. More importantly, literacy completely explained the effect of a high school diploma and some college on earnings of black men. We conclude that the economic importance of literacy skills is particularly salient for less-educated black men.     

Differences in Psychological Strategies of Failed and Operational Business Owners in the Fiji Islands*

This study investigates the differences between failed and operational businesses from a psychological perspective. The sample included 71 operational and 20 failed business owners from Suva, the capital of Fiji. It was hypothesized that operational business owners more often employ a detailed and long‐term planning strategy, whereas failed business owners more often pursue a reactive strategy, that operational business owners set more specific and more difficult goals, and that they have a higher degree of human capital than failed entrepreneurs. The data were analyzed using discriminant analysis. Results confirmed the hypotheses regarding planning and goal specificity.