Technologies in caregiving: professionals’ strategies for engaging with new technology

This article explores the adoption of new technology in organisations that provide senior citizen care. Inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, we study how technology reduces complexity by identifying client needs and ensuring predictability in service delivery. However, how technologies are adopted in practice is not determined by technology since it is also structured by care-workers' continuous decision-making. Against this backdrop, we explore how technologies alter the conditions for decision-making in two settings of elderly care, and we describe how care workers seek to adapt technologies to their practical needs as well as conception of care ethics. Developing a systems theory approach, the article eschews a priori assumptions of technological constraint on care-workers’ professional autonomy, offering a more open-ended exploration of diversified strategies for coping with new technology. Our case studies show that employees develop diversified strategies for technology adoption, including both non-usage, heated resistance, excessive embrace, and creative adaption.     

Climate for conflict management,exposure to workplace bullying and work engagement: a moderated mediation analysis

The present study investigates a potential preventive factor in relation to workplace bullying. Specifically, we examine how climate for conflict management (CCM) may be related to less bullying, increased work engagement, as well as whether CCM is a moderator in the bullying engagement relationship. The study was based on a cross-sectional survey among employees in a transport company (N = 312). Hypotheses were tested simultaneously in a moderated mediation analysis which showed that bullying and job engagement were related (H1), CCM was related to less reports of bullying (H2), CCM was related to work engagement (H3) and that CCM was indirectly related to job engagement through bullying (H4), but only when CCM was weak (H5). That is, CCM moderated the relationship between bullying and work engagement in that this relationship only existed when CCM was low. The present study contributes to theory within this research field by showing that organizational measures may not only prevent bullying, but may also affect how employees react when subjected to bullying. Furthermore, the effect of climate in relation to bullying may be down to the narrow bandwidth facet of CCM. The study informs employers how they may act to prevent bullying while also reducing the potential negative outcomes of those cases of bullying that inevitably will show up from time to time.     

Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Stock market volatility forecasting: Do we need high-frequency data?

The general consensus in the volatility forecasting literature is that high-frequency volatility models outperform low-frequency volatility models. However, such a conclusion is reached when low-frequency volatility models are estimated from daily returns. Instead, we study this question considering daily, low-frequency volatility estimators based on open, high, low, and close daily prices. Our data sample consists of 18 stock market indices. We find that high-frequency volatility models tend to outperform low-frequency volatility models only for short-term forecasts. As the forecast horizon increases (up to one month), the difference in forecast accuracy becomes statistically indistinguishable for most market indices. To evaluate the practical implications of our results, we study a simple asset allocation problem. The results reveal that asset allocation based on high-frequency volatility model forecasts does not outperform asset allocation based on low-frequency volatility model forecasts.     

Do interventions in foreign exchange markets modify investors' expectations? The experience of Japan between 1992 and 2004

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of the Bank of Japan's official interventions on the JPY/USD parity during the period 1992–2004. The novelty of our approach is to combine two recent advances of the empirical literature on foreign exchange interventions: (i) drawing on over-the-counter option prices to characterize more precisely the distribution of market expectations; (ii) redefining interventions in terms of events as they tend to come in clusters. Moreover, in order to deal with the features of the data (small sample size, non-standard distribution), we use bootstrap tests.We show that interventions have a significant impact on the mean expectation (the forward rate). The results are more ambiguous for variance. Additionally, we find that the effect of interventions on skewness is significant, robust to different definitions of skewness, and consistent with the direction of interventions. On the contrary, our results clearly show that kurtosis is not affected by interventions. We finally show that: (i) coordination increases effectiveness of interventions; (ii) results are not altered when controlling for other economic and political news.     

How to measure mutual fund performance: economic versus statistical relevance

In the present paper a comprehensive assessment of existing mutual fund performance models is presented. Using a survivor‐bias free database of all US mutual funds, we explore the added value of introducing extra variables such as size, book‐to‐market, momentum and a bond index. In addition to that we evaluate the use of introducing time‐variation in betas and alpha. The search for the most suitable model to measure mutual fund performance will be addressed along two lines. First, we are interested in the statistical significance of adding more factors to the single factor model. Second, we focus on the economic importance of more elaborate model specifications. The added value of the present study lies both in the step‐wise process of identifying relevant factors, and the use of a rich US mutual fund database that was recently released by the Center for Research in Security Prices.     

A comparison of parametric and non-parametric efficiency measures: The case of Norwegian ferries

The trunk road system in Norway has to be supplemented by a number of ferries due to the long coastline with numerous islands and fjords. Most of the ferries are run by private companies, but at a loss. The deficit are covered by the Ministry of Transport. The subsidies have risen rapidly in the last years and have focussed attention on whether the ferries are really run as efficiently as possible. To change the incentives to economize, a lump-sum payment is considered. To implement such a system, an initial assessment of reasonable input requirements is needed. The aim of this article is to provide such a yardstick by establishing a best practice frontier. Both a non-parametric and a parametric approach to a deterministic frontier are tried and differences of results discussed. Peculiarities due to choice of methods are revealed. The efficiency distributions are quite similar for the two methods except for scale efficiency, where the parametric method indicates substantial unrealized scale economies, while the non-parametric approach shows the largest and some small ferries to be scale efficient. The results indicate a substantial rationalization potential of about 30 percent in total.I am indebted to three referees for forcing me to improve significantly the quality of the study. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my responsibility.