Thought leadership in investment banking: The beginning of a new era

The paper argues that although considerations such as industry consolidation, the role of lending and the effects of technology are still important in shaping the future of investment banking, sustainable competitive advantage necessitates that emphasis is also placed on thought leadership. This entails quite a radical change in terms of the way in which the industry approaches the problem of competition and requires emphasis on value creation for all the constituent parts of the industry: corporations, investors, the banks themselves and research departments. Accordingly, the paper provides a rationale for this change and provides inter alia a range of examples to illustrate how thought leadership could lead to a fundamental change in the future of the investment banking industry.     

A play-the-winner-type urn design with reduced variability

We propose a new adaptive allocation rule, the drop-the-loser, that randomizes subjects in the course of a trial comparing treatments with dichotomous outcomes. The rule tends to assign more patients to better treatments with the same limiting proportion as the randomized play-the-winner rule. The new design has significantly less variable allocation proportion than the randomized play-the-winner rule. Decrease in variability translates into a gain in statistical power. For some values of success probabilities the drop-the-loser rule has a double advantage over conventional equal allocation in that it has better power and assigns more subjects to the better treatment. Acknowledgments. I thank Stephen Durham, the associate editor, and the referees for their helpful suggestions.     

Predicting Household Poverty: A Methodological Note with a Kenyan Example

Household surveys provide data that is used for identifying and measuring the poverty status of households and individuals. However, carrying out such surveys is expensive, especially in poor developing countries. Thus it is important to make maximum use of the available survey data in developing countries, especially in sub‐Saharan Africa, where such data are expensive to collect and analyse. This paper develops a simple method for using poverty indices derived from survey data for a given year, to predict poverty rates for subsequent periods without having to conduct a new household survey. We illustrate the workings of the method with data from Kenyan household surveys for 1994 and 1997.     

Gender and Piece Rates, Commissions, and Bonuses

Previous work shows that establishments with higher proportions of women are more likely to use piece rates but that individual women are less likely to receive performance pay. We present a model in which lower expected tenure and labor force attachment are positively associated with piece rates but are negatively associated with other forms of performance pay. Analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) confirms that women are more likely to be paid piece rates and simultaneously less likely to be paid commissions and bonuses.     

网络预算管理

本文介绍了网络预算管理是如何有效地克服传统预算方法的缺点,通过有效的控制去解决企业预算管理工作中的实际问题,指出了该预算方法能大大提高工作效率和管理效率。