Using a dual-frame design to improve phone surveys on political attitudes: developing a weighting strategy for limited external information in Hong Kong

Quality & Quantity - In recent years, rapid increases in mobile phone ownership and decreases in landline users have led to potential biases in landline phone survey estimations. Mobile-only...     

Training and organisational performance: A meta‐analysis of temporal,institutional and organisational context moderators

Drawing on systems theory, we conducted a moderated meta‐analysis of the training and organisational performance relationship using 119 primary studies. We examined the moderating effects of quality versus quantity of training, time, institutional and organisational context factors in the relationship between training and organisational performance. Our findings reveal that training is positively and directly related to organisational performance with no statistically significant difference between measures of training quality and quantity. We found that the relationship was stronger over time and that country performance orientation and country labour cost moderate the training and organisational performance relationship. We found no evidence for the moderating effects of the three organisational context moderators we examined (i.e. industry sector, organisational size and technology intensity). Finally, our results reveal that training type (i.e. general or firm‐specific) does not moderate the training and organisational performance relationship.     

Fundamental Analysis: Combining the Search for Quality with the Search for Value

Using cross‐sectional forecasts, we combine fundamental analysis strategies based on quality, such as the FSCORE from Piotroski (2000) and the GSCORE from Mohanram (2005), with strategies based on value, such as the V/P ratio from Frankel and Lee (1998) and the PEG ratio. While all four strategies generate significant hedge returns, combining quality‐driven and value‐driven approaches substantially improves the efficacy of fundamental analysis. Our parsimonious two‐dimensional approach can be applied to a wide cross section of stocks and outperforms common practitioner approaches that require a lengthy time series of data. The improvements in hedge returns hold for a variety of partitions and are robust to controls for risk factors and other determinants of stock returns. While the efficacy of fundamental analysis has declined in recent years, this can partially be attributed to investors arbitraging away excess returns by investing in fundamental strategies.     

How much are electric vehicles driven?

The prospect for electric vehicles as a climate change solution hinges on their ability to reduce gasoline consumption. But this depends on how many miles electric vehicles are driven and on how many miles would have otherwise been driven in gasoline-powered vehicles. Using newly-available U.S. nationally representative data, this paper finds that electric vehicles are driven considerably fewer miles per year on average than gasoline-powered vehicles. The difference is highly statistically significant and holds for both all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, for both single- and multiple-vehicle households, and both inside and outside California. The paper discusses potential explanations and policy implications. Overall, the evidence suggests that today’s electric vehicles imply smaller environmental benefits than previously believed.     

You say you want a (Rose) Revolution? The effects of Georgia's 2004 market reforms

After Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, it experienced civil war and strife for more than a decade. In late 2003, the peaceful Rose Revolution installed a new government that began a series of radical market‐liberal reforms. However, the effectiveness of these reforms was controversial. We offer a rigorous evaluation of these reforms via the synthetic control method which creates a credible counterfactual. Compared to the synthetic controls, we find that the reforms enacted after the Rose Revolution led to significant improvements in Georgia's social and economic development, albeit with temporary side effects and argue that this case provides some support for the effectiveness of rapid, multidimensional reform.     

Assessing cost‐effectiveness when environmental benefits are bundled: agricultural water management in Great Barrier Reef catchments

Using economic analysis to prioritise improvements in environmental conditions is particularly difficult when multiple benefits are involved. This includes ‘bundling’ issues in agricultural pollution management, where a change in management action or farming systems generates multiple improvements, such as reductions in more than one pollutant. In this study, we conceptualise and compare two different approaches to analysing cost‐effectiveness when varying bundles of benefits are generated for a single project investment. Each approach requires data to be transformed in some way to allow the analysis to proceed. The index approach requires the transformation on the benefits side so that the effects of multiple pollutant changes can be combined into a measure for each project which can then be compared to costs. By comparison, the disaggregation approach requires the transformation on the costs side where costs for each project have to be apportioned across the different pollutants involved. The paper provides novel insights with an application to agricultural water quality improvements into the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, demonstrating that while both approaches are effective in prioritising projects by cost‐effectiveness, the disaggregation approach provides more insightful results and values that may be relevant for use as upper value guidelines in future project selection.     

Are remittances good for economic growth? The role of political institutions

Within a sample of 109 developing countries for the period 1975–2014 and controlling for country and time-fixed effects, this article presents evidence that workers’ remittances are more effective in promoting growth in developing countries with strong democratic institutions. The evidence is robust to alternative samples and different measures of democratic institutions.     

Why Do People Leave? a Study Of Nonsupervisory Restaurant Employees’ Polychronic Time Use Preference and Turnover Intention

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the study was to present a comprehensive view on the associations among polychronicity, job satisfaction, work engagement, and turnover intention within a restaurant context. Using a sample of 252 servers in full-service restaurants, structural equation modeling results found that polychronicity positively linked with job satisfaction, work engagement, and turnover intention. An indirect effect from polychronicity to job satisfaction to turnover intention was found. Results can assist restaurant managers in selecting candidates that best fit their organization. It will also assist employees in determining which career path best matches their personality traits.     

Accounting for personal disposition and organizational context: connecting role ambiguity,public service motivation,and whistle-blowing in federal agencies

Abstract

Organizational psychologists and HRM scholars have long argued that prosocial organizational behaviors enhance organizational performance. However, prosocial behaviors are motivated by both self-interested and altruistic intent. Moreover, some have recognized that the factors that encourage shifts between egoistically and altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors may result from inherent tensions between individual disposition and situational contexts. As such, this study draws from literature examining prosocial behavior to evaluate whether work situations with clear task expectations dampen the extent to which prosocial personal dispositions diminish egoistically motivated prosocial behavior. Findings from a series of structural equation models reveal that altruistic dispositional traits diminish egoistic motives for engaging in one specific prosocial behavior, whistle-blowing. However, findings also reveal that work situations characterized by clear task expectations dampen the negative effect of altruistic dispositions on egoistically motivated whistle-blowing. Our findings imply that managers can adjust organizational contexts to capitalize on the enhanced benefits resulting from altruistically motivated prosocial behaviors.