Evidence of a glass ceiling for arts and culture professionals in Korea

Using the five available waves of the Wage Structure Survey data, this study employs quantile decomposition to investigate the existence of a glass ceiling among Korean professionals. The decomposition results for all professional workers show an inverse U-shape, which implies no evidence of a glass ceiling. However, we find a monotonically increasing pattern for arts and culture professionals, indicating strong evidence of a glass ceiling on their labour market. This result implies that, as the wage quantile moves from lower to higher levels, female professionals in arts and culture jobs face significant barriers to career advancement. This analysis supports the recent assertion of UNESCO that gender equality in culture is not immune to inequalities and discrimination.     

Does an Audit Judgment Rule Increase or Decrease Auditors' Use of Innovative Audit Procedures?

The current audit environment encourages auditors to conduct defensive auditing procedures in lieu of using new, innovative, and potentially more effective audit procedures, due to concerns these procedures may be second-guessed in litigation or by audit inspectors such as the PCAOB. As a result, auditors may prefer traditional “generally accepted” procedures over innovative procedures that are potentially more effective. We test recent proposals that an Audit Judgment Rule (AJR) encourages the use of innovative, and potentially more effective, audit procedures analogous to the similar Business Judgment Rule that affords legal protections to corporate directors. Under an AJR, litigators or audit inspectors could not second-guess auditor judgments, even if they perceive that alternate judgments would have ordinarily been reached, provided the auditor's judgment was made in good faith and in a rigorous manner. However, the AJR's requirements that auditors must defend the rigor of their innovative judgments could potentially backfire and lead auditors to select more traditional procedures. Under the framework of goal activation theory, we conduct an experiment with audit managers and seniors and find that an AJR makes auditors less likely to select innovative audit procedures, particularly when audit risk is high. They do so despite believing the innovative procedures to be more effective than the traditional procedures. Findings from a supplementary experiment with experienced auditors further suggest that national office affirmation of the reasonableness of the procedures does not help overcome this effect. Overall, our findings suggest that an AJR may have the unintended consequence of further increasing auditors' focus on more traditional, and potentially less effective, audit procedures.     

Can commodity futures risk factors predict economic growth?

This paper examines whether commodity futures risk factors can predict future economic growth. We test risk factors capturing various spot or term premia and find that only three factors capturing term premia on the basis-momentum, basis, and change in slope are robust predictors for future economic growth, especially for long horizons. Our findings highlight the importance of the term premia, rather than the spot premia on which the literature has mainly focused. Moreover, we find that possible explanations for predictability of commodity factors—the intertemporal asset pricing model and information diffusion explanation—are all inconsistent with our empirical results.     

Assessment of the environmental sustainability of restaurants in the U.S.: The effects of restaurant characteristics on environmental sustainability performance

ABSTRACT

This paper investigated the current levels of environmental sustainability in restaurants across the U.S. to determine whether a restaurant’s proclivity for environmental sustainability depended on its characteristics such as chain affiliation or restaurant type.

A web-based survey was administered to 2,500 top-level restaurant managers, from which a total of 218 responses were judged as usable. The data were analyzed using independent

sample t-tests and ANOVA. This study presents an in-depth account of the environmental sustainability in restaurants across the U.S. based on an evaluation of top-level managers. This study also highlights the differences in restaurant environmental sustainability across different restaurant segments.     

Evaluating Industrial Relations Systems of OECD Countries from 1993 to 2005: A Two‐Dimensional Approach

This article uses both cross‐sectional and longitudinal methods to evaluate the national industrial relations systems of 30 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) countries from 1993 to 2005. We adopt a pluralistic view of industrial relations that gives equal weight to efficiency and equity, along with a general systems model consisting of input, process and output. We rank each country in terms of a combined score of efficiency and equity. We find that the 30 OECD countries can be separated into three distinct groups (high on both equity and efficiency; high on efficiency but low on equity; moderate on equity and low on efficiency), and that these groups exhibit considerable stability over time.     

Social exclusion influences on the effectiveness of altruistic versus egoistic appeals in charitable advertising

Marketing Letters - In three experiments, the authors study charitable behaviors and demonstrate that consumers who feel socially excluded react more positively to altruistic, other appeals rather...     

Determinants of organizational performance: some implications for top executive leadership in Korean firms

ABSTRACT

Leadership, although commonly assumed to be greatly significant, is not typically studied in terms of structural characteristics accounted for in organizational performance. The effect of top executive leadership is explored here as a key factor that reflects organizational characteristics by offering a new framework and presenting an empirical test of Korean business firms. This research can be possibly made by focusing on the size of the leadership which explicates the difference between structural, resource and contextual variables in organizations. The multivariate regression analysis shows that firm size, leadership, debt and export significantly affect organizational performance, as measured by net income. The mechanism of Korean business firms needs to readjust to the new environment for organizational performance.     

How about selling commodity futures losers?

This paper explores the benefits of extending the investment universe to commodity futures, from the perspective of momentum traders. We find that the growth-optimal portfolio includes negative (positive) weights on commodity futures losers (stock winners). Motivated by this finding, we construct a joint momentum strategy, buying stock winners and selling commodity futures losers, and show that it generates an average monthly return of up to 1.91% and provides much lower skewness (0.04) and kurtosis (1.27) than a traditional stock momentum strategy. It also greatly improves profitability, especially in unfavorable market states, and thus effectively manages tail risk.     

Anchored putter ban: An examination of whether anchored putting impacts career success and putting performance

The Professional Golfers' Association (PGA) Tour ban on anchored putting (Rule 14‐1b) took effect on January 1, 2016. The ban remains controversial because the governance decision appears to have been made without adequate empirical evidence. Accordingly, to investigate the efficacy of the ban, the impact of using anchored putters on PGA golfers' career success and putting performance was examined. PGA golfers ranked in the top 125 were studied from 2009 to 2015. The analysis revealed an anchored putter offered no unfair advantage with regard to improving players' career success or putting performance when compared with standard putter usage by PGA golfers.     

Make it Your Own: How Process Valence and Self‐Construal Affect Evaluation of Self‐Made Products

Self‐production, participation of consumers in the production process of products for their own consumption, leads to consumers’ enhanced evaluations of the self‐made products. Three experimental studies investigate how and why self‐production affects consumers’ product evaluations and reveal that not all production experiences create additional value for all consumers. In particular, Studies 1 and 2, using hypothetical stories and real experiences, show that only positive (vs. negative) production experiences enhance evaluations of self‐made products over products made by others. Positive (but not negative) experiences decrease the psychological distance between the self and the product and strengthen identification with it. Study 3 manipulates self‐construal (independent vs. interdependent) to investigate its role on evaluation of self‐made products and products made with close others as a group (i.e., group‐made). Consumers with independent self‐construal evaluate self‐made (vs. other‐made) products more favorably only if the process is positive. However, consumers with interdependent self‐construal evaluate self‐made products more favorably even if the process is negative. Additionally, consumers with interdependent (vs. independent) self‐construal exhibit more favorable evaluation of group‐made products. Finally, even if consumers know how another person feels while making a product, other people's process emotions do not affect consumers’ product judgments as strongly as their own experienced process emotions.