Retail change: effects on employees' job demands and home life

Causes and effects of occupational stress have received research attention for several decades, with increasing focus during the 1990s as organizations and individual workers attempt to adapt to economic change. Stress arising from either the work or home domain can have a variety of outcomes in the workplace, and similarly can impact in many ways on relationships and activities at home. This paper reports the first phase of a research study to identify the impact on work and home life of changes in retailing, a sector of the economy which has experienced significant change over the past few years. A qualitative methodology was adopted, using group discussions to allow staff to identify the specific changes in retailing most important for themselves, and then to explore how these changes related to satisfactions and dissatisfactions at work, and their impact on general aspects of home life. The results suggest that the 'spillover' relationship between work and home stress seems to be the most useful in describing the impact of change. This suggests that additional role demands at work brought about by change have an impact on relationships and social life outside work. However, some individuals described instances of 'compensation' between work and home, and independence between the two domains. This suggests that the issue of stress in the home/work interface is complex, and that the demands in each domain may be positively or negatively related depending on characteristics of the demands themselves, or may vary according to individual characteristics of the people in the study.     

Explaining the Persistence of Profits: A Time-Varying Approach

The present paper analyzes the determinants of profit persistence using a newly developed methodology that allows the persistence parameter to vary with time. It therefore addresses a significant limitation of previous persistence models, which have assumed unrealistically that persistence is fixed over relatively long periods of 20 years and upwards. The concentration of the industry is found to have a significant positive impact on profit persistence. However, at firm level, market share and risk have a surprisingly negative impact     

Profit persistence and stock returns

This article attempts to assemble further empirical evidence on the relationship between the product and the financial market. Drawing back on work in industrial organization, we analyse the relationship between profit persistence and factor-adjusted stock returns looking at about 2000 listed US firms over the last 34 years. While the relationship between (current, lagged and unexpected) profits/earnings and returns has been extensively analysed before, to our knowledge this is the first study to look at the relationship between stock returns and profit persistence. We interpret profit persistence as a result of market competition and innovation of the firm. It is shown that firm-specific long-run profit persistence after correction for other additional economic fundamentals of the firm has a positive impact on four-factor adjusted returns and a negative impact on their volatility.     

A retail failure prediction model

Retailing is a labour-intensive industry, and one which relies heavily on the employment of women. The gender and occupational structure of one major mixed retail company is analysed. This reveals that men and women ocuupy different positions within the company structure. Although recruited equally to management trainee positions, the evidence suggests women in retailing may be encountering a glass ceiling. Achieving senior management positions is clearly more difficult for women than men. Some explanations for the lack of women in retail management are proposed and among the strategies to enable their more equal participation are: readdressing personnel policies, recognizing the benefits of women's values and management style to the company, identifying training needs to allow women to pursue management careers successfully and flexible working at all levels within the company. To be successful it is crucial these strategies are supported by top management.     

Profit persistence in the ‘very’ long run: evidence from survivors and exiters

One of the main shortcomings of the profit persistence literature is the fact that it looks only at surviving companies. This paper uses a unique dataset to analyse profit persistence in two different samples of stationary series: 85 surviving US companies from 1950–1999 and 72 exiters. While the exiters perform more competitively than the survivors there is still significant evidence for profit persistence in both samples. Concentration and growth of the industry as well as size and volatility of profits seem to play an important role in explaining persistence.     

UK Charity Retailing: Managing in a Newly Professionalised Sector

The charity retail sector has seen unprecedented growth in the UK over the past ten years. Alongside this growth charities have become progressively professionalised and commercialised and have begun to adopt strategies developed in commercial retail contexts. This paper unpacks this process of professionalisation examining exactly what it constitutes on the ground. It then goes on to consider in turn how this new professionalism has impacted on store managers. The paper closes in considering the challenges represented by these requirements and offers some suggestions for future research.     

The Organic Food Premium: A Local Assessment in the UK

The present study combines stated and revealed preferences in order to estimate the hypothetical bias of a sample of organic food consumers from Canterbury in the UK. It uses contingent valuation and hedonic pricing to compare stated and revealed preferences, and employs the Almost Ideal Demand System to estimate the elasticity of organic products. The results show that the average price premium is fairly large (approximately 10%). They also demonstrate, crucially, that the size of this estimate is encouragingly similar whether a willingness-to-pay or hedonic pricing method is used. The estimated elasticity of organic products is on average >1, suggesting an elastic response to pricing policy in the present sample. Desirable next steps and potential policy applications for future research are also discussed.     

Impact of national culture on the quality of information delivery in services

A nation’s culture has a significant influence on an employee’s behavior and communication. Culture-specific characteristics cause information delivery biases, especially in services. This paper studies how a nation’s culture affects the quality of information delivery using a global airline dataset. Cultural differences are measured by two commonly used datasets, Hofstede and Globe projects. Our results show that cultural characteristics have statistically significant effects on the website quality, inflight media options, and inflight communications. We suggest firms in each culture become aware of these findings and step forward to remedy their shortcomings or to bolster their performance.     

Who Will Pay for Long‐Term Care in the UK? Projections Linking Macro‐ and Micro‐Simulation Models

The long‐term care funding system continues to attract much debate in the UK. We produce projections of state and private long‐term care expenditure and analyse the distributional impact of state‐financed care, through innovative linking of macro‐ and micro‐simulation models. Variant assumptions about life expectancy, dependency and care costs are examined and the impact of universal state‐financed (‘free’) personal care, based on need but not ability to pay, is investigated. We find that future long‐term care expenditure is subject to considerable uncertainty and is particularly sensitive to assumed future trends in real input costs. On a central set of assumptions, free personal care would, by 2051, increase public spending on long‐term care from 1.1 per cent of GDP to 1.3 per cent, or more if it generated an increase in demand. Among the care‐home population aged 85 or over, the immediate beneficiaries of free personal care would be those with relatively high incomes.