Comparing the impact of management support on police officers’ perceptions of discretionary power and engagement: Australia,USA and Malta

Abstract

This paper uses Social Exchange Theory as a lens for comparing the impact of management support upon police perceptions of discretionary power and employee engagement, across three countries. A survey-based, self-report process collected data from 193 police officers in Australia, 588 from the USA, and 249 from Malta. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data. The findings suggest a significantly different management support context across the three countries, as well as significantly different perceptions of discretionary power. Across the three countries, police perceived relatively poor satisfaction with organizational management support and only some engagement levels. However, USA police perceived significantly more discretionary power than the other country samples. These findings provide greater clarity about the link between management support, discretionary power and engagement for the police officers. Since employee engagement likely affects policing outcomes, the findings suggest that poor management support of police officers could negatively affect the provided service. Potential strategies to enhance police engagement include (a) training police managers about how to manage so as to promote greater engagement, and (b) modifying police managers’ performance indicators in line with achieving better police engagement.     

THE GINI CONCENTRATION INDEX: A REVIEW OF THE INFERENCE LITERATURE

More than a century ago, Corrado Gini proposed his well-known concentration index for measuring the degree of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth. His index is still extremely relevant and widely used in several fields of research and application. In this paper, we focus on the inferential properties of the Gini index, and discuss the main directions of analysis proposed in the literature. The aim of the paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the main developments on the inferential aspects of the Gini concentration ratio. We feel that this work can provide a valuable contribution to those scholars who are approaching the large amount of literature on the inferential properties of the Gini index.     

Institutions and Firms' Productivity: Evidence from Electricity Distribution in the EU

Firms' productivity is influenced by internal and external institutions. Ownership is the core internal institutional feature of the firm, while the most important external institutional feature is the quality of government, which shapes the environment in which firms operate. We explore the relative role of these factors and their interaction in determining total factor productivity of electricity distribution firms in 16 EU countries. Using data from the Amadeus database of balance‐sheet information and from the Quality of Governance database, we find that when the quality of government is poor, public ownership is associated with lower productivity levels; however, public ownership is associated with higher productivity in countries characterized by higher quality of the institutional environment.     

Opt Out or Top Up? Voluntary Health Care Insurance and the Public vs. Private Substitution

We investigate whether in a mixed insurance system, people enrolled into voluntary health care insurance (VHI) substitute public consumption with private (opt out) or just enlarge their private consumption without reducing reliance upon public provisions (top up). We specify a joint model for public and private specialist visits counts, allowing for different degrees of endogenous supplementary insurance coverage. We find evidence of opting out: richer and wealthier individuals consume more private services and concomitantly reduce those services publicly provided through selection into for‐profit VHI. Accounting for VHI endogeneity in the joint model of the two counts is crucial to this conclusion.     

The Success Factors of Food Events: The Case Study of Umbrian Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Gastronomic events are an important part of the “Made in Italy” and a vital tool for rural development. The aim of the study is to identify the complexity of the factors that determine the success of a food event. The authors, after state-of-the-art analysis of the event marketing, formulate the hypothesis of a causal model and form a data collection during the “open oil mills” in the Umbria region. Through in-depth interviews the participants were asked to express themselves about the importance and interest attributed to some aspects directly related to the theme of the event, and finally to indicate the degree of satisfaction and the likelihood of some of their future behavior. Statistical analysis based on structural equation models allowed the authors to highlight which aspects are significant in order to confirm the assumptions made. Results provide guidance for management decisions and organization of food and wine.     

Changing the way the elderly live: Evidence from the home health care market in the United States

I examine how decreases in government coverage of home health care visits to the elderly in the United States have affected their living arrangements. Specifically, I exploit geographic variation in the Medicare Home Health Care reimbursement rate that arose as a result of legislation passed in 1997 and I identify its impact on the living arrangements of older Medicare beneficiaries. I find that less generous reimbursement policies lead to a greater fraction of elderly giving up independent living. Baseline-model estimates suggest that a decline in reimbursement of one visit per user leads to a 0.98% increase in the fraction of elderly Medicare beneficiaries living in shared living arrangements, that is, living with somebody else, rather than alone or with only the spouse. This estimate implies that a decline in reimbursement of 5.1 visits per Medicare beneficiary increases the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements by 1.12 percentage points. Such an increase is consistent with the time-series increase in the fraction of elderly that live in shared living arrangements between 1997 and 2000.     

Mexico in the 1990s: The Main Cross-Sectional Facts

This paper describes the main cross-sectional facts on individual and household earnings, labor supply, income, consumption and wealth in Mexico in the decade of the 1990s. We use two different data sources: the Mexican Employment Survey (ENEU) and the Mexican Income and Expenditure Survey (ENIGH). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we integrate the two surveys to provide a complete characterization of the changes in employment, wages, income, consumption and wealth in the 1990s. Second, we highlight some distinctive features that characterize the Mexican economy in this decade. In particular, we focus on the changes in the size of the informal sector and we study the relationship between changes in informality and changes in wage inequality.     

Productivity and the Euro-Dollar exchange rate

This article analyses the impact of productivity developments in the United States and the euro area on the euro-dollar exchange rate. The article presents a new measure of relative average labour, productivity (ALP) which does not suffer from the biases implicit in readily available relative ALP data. Importantly, the patterns of these series differ widely. Employing the Johansen cointegration framework, four models are estimated using four different productivity proxies. Our results indicate that the extent to which productivity can explain the euro depreciation varies with the productivity proxy used: readily available measures explain most, our new, preferred measure least. In all models, however, productivity can explain only a fraction of the actual euro depreciation experienced in 1999–2000. JEL no. F31, C32, O47 The views expressed in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Central Bank or its staff.     

The historical construction of correlation as a conceptual and operative instrument for empirical research

This article is meant to reconstruct—from the standpoint of sociology and history of science—the development of the concept and the operative instruments of statistical correlation. The starting point is the discussion of some key mathematical aspects of the Error Theory, including a detailed analysis of the various positions regarding its contributions, if any, to the theory of correlation. Then proceeds to examine how the concept (and its relative instruments) emerged in its modern sense, by the late Nineteenth century, thanks to the work of Francis Galton. Finally, it considers the numerous contributions that rendered possible the formalisation and generalisation of both Galton’s concept and methodological tools, in particular those of Karl Pearson, but also those of Walter Weldon, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, George Udny Yule and Charles Spearman.

“Co-relation or correlation of structure” is a phrase much used in biology, and not least in that branch of it which refers to heredity, and the idea is even more frequently present than the phrase; but I am not aware of any previous attempt to define it clearly, to trace its mode of action in detail, or to show how to measure its degree. Francis Galton (1888, 135)