A diagrammatical template for business market demand estimation

This article describes a template that can help guide managers through a minefield of complex product interactions and demand drivers on the way to producing a realistic demand estimation. It is based on many years of consulting and conducting postmortems to find out what went wrong when demand forecasts have gone awry.A menu of troublesome variables that make up a rogue's gallery of the worst offending causes of estimation error are presented. The premise being, if we are aware of the potential trouble spots in demand estimation, we are likely to avoid some of the more serious problems that plague market projections.A diagrammatical template is presented that shows these troublesome variables and where they enter into the demand evaluation process. Next, the template components are introduced to show how the various product interactions and drivers that affect demand estimation are used and how they impact market projections. Throughout, a list of dos and don'ts are provided along with a sufficient number of real-life disaster stories to reinforce the issues.     

Rule of Law and the Resource Curse: Abundance Versus Intensity

We examine the ‘resource curse’ using new data on historic resource stocks and an improved econometric methodology. The paper distinguishes between resource abundance (stocks) and extractive intensity (flows), focusing on relationships between resources and rule of law. Previously unavailable information on past resource stocks is estimated. We find that economically large initial natural resource stocks are associated with subsequent lower levels of rule of law and do not directly affect growth, while raw resource exports do not have a significant effect on rule of law when stocks are included in the analysis but do affect average growth rates. Sample size is maximized through the use of an EMis (expectation maximization with importance sampling) algorithm to replace missing data, minimizing the bias and inefficiency associated with listwise deletion, which commonly eliminates half or more of the available data in this setting. An earlier version of this work appeared as part of my doctoral dissertation in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Thanks are due to my dissertation committee: Robert T. Deacon, Stephen J. DeCanio and Carol McAusland; as well as Okan Kavuncu, Henning Bohn, Kelly Bedard, Olivier Deschennes, Doug Steigerwald and numerous seminar participants as well as two anonymous referees.     

中国高速铁路技术经济分析

在综合交通体系中。铁路具有运输能力大、成本低、能源消耗少、环境污染轻、占地少等技术经济优势,高速铁路的技术经济优势则更为显著。立足于中国国情,从技术特点、经济性、可持续发展三方面对中国高速铁路与相关运输方式的技术经济特征进行分析和比较。同时结合我国经济发展特点,就能源消耗、土地资源利用、安全等方面采用量化分析的方法对高速铁路与相关运输方式进行比较分析。     

Farm subsidies and obesity in the United States: National evidence and international comparisons

Many commentators have claimed that farm subsidies have contributed significantly to the “obesity epidemic” by making fattening foods relatively cheap and abundant. But U.S. farm policies have generally small and mixed effects on farm commodity prices, which in turn have even smaller and still mixed effects on the relative prices of more- and less-fattening foods. Other factors have had much more influence on reducing the farm prices of food commodities and the consumer prices of food such that any effects of U.S. farm policies on U.S. obesity patterns must have been negligible. Moreover, while many arguments can be made for changing U.S. farm subsidies, even entirely eliminating the current programs could not be expected to have a significant influence on obesity rates. International evidence reinforces this finding. The countries that support their farmers most strongly tend to have relatively low obesity rates. In these countries the main support for farmers comes through trade barriers and higher consumer prices, which—like U.S. policies for sugar, dairy, orange juice, and beef—discourage consumption and reduce obesity. In contrast with agricultural subsidies, agricultural R&D has had a significant effect in the past on the relative price of food commodities and food, and has the potential to influence obesity patterns in the future, but R&D policy is a very blunt instrument for pursuing public health policy objectives.     

Managing the good and bad of looking to others: The use of proxies for self-assessment

Employees often compare themselves to the actions and performance of others in order to understand their relative standing and assess their likelihood of succeeding at future tasks. The challenge, however, is that managerial advice for facilitating informative comparisons is sparse. Accordingly, this article adopts the viewpoint that managers need to better understand how to facilitate useful comparisons between employees in order help them attain success. We provide suggestions that help managers direct employees in ways that develop their self-efficacy and assist with their goal attainment.     

Legal rights,national culture and social networks: Exploring the uneven adoption of United Nations Global Compact

We develop and test a novel framework for explaining cross-country differences in corporate participation in a prominent initiative often associated with social responsibility, United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). Drawing upon neo-institutional and cross-country comparative literatures, we explore the impact of (a) stakeholder legal rights; (b) national culture, and (c) the country's social network position, as reflected by international trade patterns. Results suggest that firms from countries with strong labor rights, collectivist cultures, and long traditions of stock trading join UNGC at higher rates. Our framework can be modified for future cross-country research on the adoption of practices.     

Reliability of Assessment of Reading Ability in Three Countries

Over the last few decades, there have been a number ofnational and international programmes to assessperformance in key subjects. For example theInternational Association for Evaluation ofEducational Attainment (IEA), International Assessmentof Educational Progress (IAEP), and the ThirdInternational Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS)programs have aimed to compare performance betweenparticipating countries.Such exercises have different requirements from thosetests, such as public examinations, which aim toassess the attainment of individuals. National andinternational assessments aim to cover a very widerange of materials, and often use the technique ofmultiple matrix sampling to do so.The investigation is based on generalizability-typeanalyses of three national data sets at two ages, andlooks not only at the variance components arising fromsampling of schools, and of pupils within them, butalso at the variation between different assessmentinstruments, and between items within assessmentinstruments. If interpreted with care, such resultscan be of value in the design of future studies. Thispaper concentrates largely on the precision ofestimates of overall means, but analyses of the typedescribed could also be used to compare theperformance of subpopulations.     

中西方比较视角下我国慈善捐赠发展的问题及对策

随着现代文明的发展，慈善事业已经成为社会保障的重要组成部分，社会急需一套健全并适合中国国情的慈善捐赠模式。文章旨在对中西慈善捐赠存在的差异进行相应的分析，从而发现我国慈善捐赠的问题所在，并试着探索出一条走出困境的行之有效的解决途径。     

Returns to skills around the world: Evidence from PIAAC

Existing estimates of the labor-market returns to human capital give a distorted picture of the role of skills across different economies. International comparisons of earnings analyses rely almost exclusively on school attainment measures of human capital, and evidence incorporating direct measures of cognitive skills is mostly restricted to early-career workers in the United States. Analysis of the new PIAAC survey of adult skills over the full lifecycle in 23 countries shows that the focus on early-career earnings leads to underestimating the lifetime returns to skills by about one quarter. On average, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is associated with an 18 percent wage increase among prime-age workers. But this masks considerable heterogeneity across countries. Eight countries, including all Nordic countries, have returns between 12 and 15 percent, while six are above 21 percent with the largest return being 28 percent in the United States. Estimates are remarkably robust to different earnings and skill measures, additional controls, and various subgroups. Instrumental-variable models that use skill variation stemming from school attainment, parental education, or compulsory-schooling laws provide even higher estimates. Intriguingly, returns to skills are systematically lower in countries with higher union density, stricter employment protection, and larger public-sector shares.     

Endogenous Social Comparisons and the Internal Organization of Firms

Should workers of a firm be organizationally integrated to realize benefits from benchmarking? Or should they be separated to preclude horizontal social comparisons? This paper highlights a trade‐off that arises if social comparisons in firms are endogenous. We analyze a principal multi‐agent model in which the principal trades off the reduction of agents' risk exposures by use of relative performance evaluation and the thereby induced social comparisons for which agents must be compensated. Contrary to standard theoretical predictions, relative performance evaluation is optimal only if the performance measures are sufficiently correlated relative to the agents' regard for others. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.