Another look at the relationship between socioeconomic factors and the black-white health benefit inequality

This paper illustrates the black-white disparity in health benefit coverage and the socioeconomic variables-unemployment, income, and education. The health benefit disparity is strongly related to the disparity in underlying socioeconomic variables. Moreover, the time-series examination reveals that the change in white workers' health insurance coverage is largely determined by its year-to-year persistence and the labor market tightness (or the business cycle), while that of black workers is largely determined by the change in their earnings with a slight persistence. The effect of the change in annual earnings seems to dominate the effect of the labor market condition (unemployment rate) and other variables. Finally, although marginally significant, an increase in the attainment of higher education (college) has a positive effect on the black-white health benefit disparity.     

Lord Acton and Employment Doctrines: Absolute Power and the Spread of At-Will Employment

This study analyzes the at-will employment doctrine using a tool that encompasses the complementarity of results-based utilitarian ethics, rule-based duty ethics, and virtue-based character ethics. The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of the problem followed by its evolution and current status. After describing the method of analysis, the central section evaluates the employment at-will doctrine, and is informed by Lord Acton’s dictum, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The conclusion explores the implications of the findings. This is a revised version of a paper presented at the World Ethics Forum, Oxford University, Oxford, UK April 9–12, 2006.     

Consumer perceptions of higher and lower-level designed store environments

The role and influence of esthetics in the consumption of store environments remains poorly understood. Little is known about how esthetics propose substantial or adjunctive roles in consumers’ store experiences. The aim of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of store design-architecture in high and low-level design contexts. Building on the esthetics, and environmental psychology literatures, our findings confirm consumers’ determinations of perceptual differences in the esthetic content contained in presented store environmental stimuli. Latent means comparisons confirm consumers’ perceptions of the presence of a high-level design in one fast-fashion store with a low-level design of a second store of the same retailer using a Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results demonstrate the reliability and validity of the proposed constructs in confirming the presence of higher and low-levels of design. This research, thus, expands on the extant number of store specification and response constructs and prospectively opens up new lines of store environments research.     

Non-Governmental Organizations, Shareholder Activism, and Socially Responsible Investments: Ethical, Strategic, and Governance Implications

In this article, we document the growing influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the realm of socially responsible investing (SRI). Drawing from ethical and economic perspectives on stakeholder management and agency theory, we develop a framework to understand how and when NGOs will be most influential in shaping the ethical and social responsibility orientations of business using the emergence of SRI as the primary influencing vehicle. We find that NGOs have opportunities to influence corporate conduct via direct, indirect, and interactive influences on the investment community, and that the overall influence of NGOs as major actors in socially responsible investment is growing, with attendant consequences for corporate strategy, governance, and social performance.     

How many factors are important in U.K. stock returns?

I use the sequential approach of Harvey and Liu ([2018]. Lucky factors (Working Paper). Duke University) to build linear factor models in U.K. stock returns among a set of 13 candidate factors using individual stocks and three groups of test portfolios between July 1983 and December 2017. My study finds that the Market factor is the dominant factor in reducing mispricing in individual stocks and test portfolios regardless of the pricing error metric used. The Market factor has a bigger impact when using a value weighting pricing error metric. Whether a second factor is used or not depends upon which metric is used for mispricing and the time period examined. My study finds support for a two-factor model for the whole sample period of the Market factor and the Conservative Minus Aggressive (CMA) factor of Fama and French ([2015]. “A five-factor asset pricing model.” Journal of Financial Economics 116: 1–22) when giving greater weight to the mispricing of larger companies.     

Heterogeneous private sector information,central bank disclosure,and stabilization policy

Conventional wisdom has it that a central bank that uses an informational advantage to undertake active policy intervention can do as well, at least so far as real outcomes are concerned, by making its information publicly available and abstaining from stabilization. This notion is examined using a framework incorporating heterogeneous private sector information concerning aggregate demand shocks. An activist regime, in which the central bank exploits its own information to engage in stabilization, is found to be unambiguously superior to a noninterventionist regime, where the central bank maintains a constant setting of policy but publicly discloses its own information.     

Was the Green Revolution intended to maximise food production?

The evidence on yields, food-production, food-calories per capita, and declining levels of malnutrition in countries experiencing a Green Revolution are commonly cited in support of the claim that the GR sought to maximise food production. If one looks closely at the actual design of GR programmes (in India and elsewhere), however, it is clear that they were instead intended to boost yields and profitability in a small number of targeted areas. The underlying rationale for targeting was that achieving very high yields in such regions would persuade farmers to abandon subsistence farming in favour of commercial production, relying upon the market for the purchase of inputs as well as the sale of produce. In response to widespread criticism of the Green Revolution ca. 1970 for neglecting the needs of peasant farmers (as well as accentuating rural unrest), the World Bank and other donors began to direct more attention and resources to smallholders, but the aim of commercialising farming remained unchanged.     

The Information Content of Guidance and Earnings

I compare the information content of quarterly earnings guidance and quarterly earnings by examining their associations with current and future stock returns when the two signals are bundled at earnings announcements. At the bundled announcement, I find a significantly stronger association between announcement returns and guidance news. From the day after the bundled announcement through the next earnings announcement, both signals generate abnormal return drifts of about 200 basis points. However, the timing of the post-announcement returns differs considerably. For guidance, about 50% of the post-announcement drift occurs at the next earnings announcement. In contrast, for earnings, about 20% of the preceding drift reverses at the next earnings announcement. Investor ignorance of the drift following guidance news coupled with a fixation on post-earnings announcement drift potentially explains this surprising difference in the timing of the post-announcement returns. Overall, this study indicates that bundled quarterly earnings guidance contains more information than quarterly earnings and that investors incorrectly overweight the earnings news and underweight the guidance news during the post-announcement period until the next earnings announcement.     

Bidding for Firms with Unknown Characteristics

When a region successfully attracts a firm by offering subsidies, the firm often commits itself to performance targets in terms of employment. In this paper, we interpret these firm‐specific targets as a consequence of incomplete information. We analyze a model of two regions that compete for a firm, assuming that the firm's productivity is ex ante unknown. We show that performance targets often induce overemployment in high‐productivity firms, and that tax credits are often superior to lump‐sum payments. Moreover, when regions differ in wage rates, the low‐wage region wins the bid and has a higher surplus than under complete information. Finally, we show that, under incomplete information, bidding might not lead to efficient firm location.     

Creating a multilayered representational ‘package’ for subcontracted workers: the case of cleaners at Ben‐Gurion University

Research into the organising of subcontracted workers tends to focus on how such campaigns contribute to union revitalisation, the shortcomings of non‐union organisations in comparison with classic unionism and opposition rather than complementarity between strategies. Analysing the organising of subcontracted cleaners at a university, this article shifts this focus, evaluating the campaign in terms of how it assisted the workers, regardless of whether it contributed to union renewal, and in terms of complementarity between new and traditional industrial relations actors. Drawing on the power resources approach, it asserts that collaboration across different ‘paths to representation’ can create a multilayered representational ‘package’ in which different organisations with different power resources take on different aspects of what was once a (single) union's role, covering each other's shortcomings in a kind of de facto representational ‘division of labour’.