Urbanization and food imports in sub-Saharan Africa

The Granger statistical test of causality was used to examine the relationship between total food imports and urbanization and between food aid and urbanization. Urbanization appears to have caused total food imports to increase in 13 of the 24 countries. Food imports appear to be a cause of urbanization in three countries. Food aid, however, apparently was a cause of urbanization in 16 of the 24 countries used in the analysis.     

Premiums paid in block transactions

We document the premiums over market price paid in negotiated third-party purchases and negotiated repurchases of blocks of common stock. The blocks range from 1.5% to 44% of outstanding shares and the average premium is approximately 10%. There is no significant difference between the premiums paid by managers in block repurchases and the premiums paid by outsiders in block purchases. Repurchasing managers pay a premium that corresponds to the market value of control associated with the block.     

Personal characteristics and salesperson’s justifications as moderators of supervisory discipline in cases involving unethical salesforce behavior

Role-playing sales managers were asked to evaluate the personnel records of a salesperson who has been found to be using an unethical selling practice. Overall, saleswomen and salespeople who were described as extremely overweight were evaluated more harshly. Using excuses as justification did not neutralize the sales managers’ supervisory responses and, in the case of blaming one’s unethical behavior on the unethical behavior of customers, harsher disciplinary treatment resulted. Attribution theory is used to explain the findings.     

Managing Individual Performance in Work Groups

This research was driven by the question, “In empowered work groups, who should be responsible for determining disciplinary actions in response to group member poor performance: the formal manager, a single group member, or the group as a whole?” Results in a study of 231 group members representing 41 groups from four diverse organizations showed that the severity of disciplinary actions made by formal managers is equivalent to actions taken by groups through consensus decision‐making. Selecting one member of the group, however, to handle a poorly performing member resulted in relatively lenient disciplinary actions. Consistent with this finding, the attitude survey results revealed that individual group members are reluctant to assume responsibility for disciplining a poorly performing group member. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Fixed-percentage commissions and moral hazard in residential real estate brokerage

If home sellers cannot monitor real estate brokers' efforts on their behalf, fixed-percentage brokerage commissions can promote welfare by giving brokers an incentive to tailor their services to their clients' demands. This article shows how a competitive broker optimally allocates selling effort across clients who pay different commissions. There is an equilibrium in which clients who value brokerage services more highly offer to pay larger commissions and consequently receive more selling effort from the broker. If clients who are selling higher-priced houses tend to value brokerage services more highly, then this result helps explain the prevalence of fixed-percentage commissions in the residential real estate brokerage industry and suggests that they could emerge in a competitive setting.     

An Insurance Approach to Risk Analysis of Debt Home Equity Conversion Programs

The use of home equity conversion debt creates a compounding obligation against the home that makes collateral deficiency a potentially dominant risk. Using an insurance methodology, an examination of this risk and its impact upon the potential for home equity conversion is conducted. The paper includes a consideration of how deficiency risk and maximum potential benefits are affected by the interaction of household characteristics with demographic and economic factors.     

The retail inventory method: The third major costing system

An organization that has but a single product would be a rarity in the United States today. While single-product firms and tools such as break-even analysis may have been in vogue at the turn of the century, today jointness pervades the scene. The bank that issues a mortgage to a customer also may have managed his or her checking account or granted a student loan to his or her daughter. The department store that sold a suit one week earlier may have attracted the customer with its furniture, toys, and cosmetics. The hospital whose obstetrical team delivered the baby may have been chosen because its excellent orthopedics department set the husband's broken leg three years prior. The sporting goods manufacturer may sell its golf clubs because of its reknown for skis and tennis rackets. It makes no difference whether it is products or services or departments; all share equipment, time, and reputation. The list goes on forever; jointness is the rule, not the exception.Management can pretend that there is only one product and attempt to isolate its effects, as if it were in a vacuum. However, pretending does not eliminate jointness and the purifying assumption is apt to mislead analysis. So how should jointness be treated?Other than the mathematical programming models of the last forty years, only one model for dealing with jointness has been widely adopted for most of the twentieth century; that model is the retail inventory method. The retail system typically is used by department stores to control inventories that consist of 100,000 or more items.The retail system recognizes costs and prices, inflation and obsolescence, mistakes and successes. It tracks purchases and sales, deals with discounts and transfers, and controls investment while providing an estimate of ending inventory. Fortunately, the retail system, the favorite of the department store and the boutique, could be used in the factory as well as in a variety of service and nonprofit organizations.This article briefly reviews the retail method and then uses linear programming (LP) and postoptimality analysis to modernize the traditional conceptions—to attempt to make a good system even better.Many constraints are studied including overlapping seasons, sales quotas, target inventories, product life cycles, and spatial and monetary limitations, among others. In the process, one comes to appreciate the size of the inventories being controlled, the human and departmental interactions, and the usefulness of the LP-retail system (“knotty retail” is perhaps an appropriate name) not only to generate cash budget estimates and to manage stock levels, but also to select the most satisfying alterations of managerial policy.The article concludes by discussing further constraints and other types of organizations that might benefit from adapting the retail system.     

A model of the classical gold standard with depletion

The operation and properties of the classical gold standard are well recognized. However, one aspect that has not been dealt with is that gold has the characteristics of a durable, but depletable resource. In this paper, we compare the simple classical model of the gold standard with a model of the gold standard that incorporates the durable, depletable nature of gold. Using numerical simulation techniques, we demonstrate an inescapable tendency to long-run deflation when account is taken of the resource constraint. These results are consistent, with and without technological progress and variable real rates of return.