The missing links: cultural,software, task and personal influences on computer self-efficacy

Culture exerts a fundamental effect on employees and their use of technologies. We examine the influence of culture (and other factors) on computer self-efficacy (CSE). CSE, or employees' judgments about their capabilities to use a specific software system, is important given its relationship with work performance. By drawing a sample from two different countries, we show that culture affects CSE indirectly through employees' preferences for individualism and task interdependence. Furthermore, individualism, task interdependence and software personal innovativeness relate positively, whereas task ambiguity and software complexity associate negatively with CSE. Finally, we discuss several implications for human resource management.     

A collective labor supply model with complementarities in leisure: Identification and estimation by means of panel data

We present a novel identification strategy for a collective labor supply model that allows for complementarities in leisure (i.e., individuals may enjoy leisure more in company of their spouse). Individual preferences and the Pareto weights (which capture the intra-household bargaining process) are identified by making use of panel data with couples and individuals who became a widow(er) in the observation period, along with the assumption that an individual's preferences can only change in a particular manner after the spouse's death. The change in preferences comes from changes in observable variables that can be controlled for (like mental health) and from the loss of the possibility to jointly enjoy leisure after the couple's dissolution. We apply the model to American households coming from the first nine waves of the Health and Retirement Study (1992-2008) and show that complementarities in leisure are indeed important when modeling spouses' labor supply choices.     

HOUSEHOLDS’ BEHAVIOUR AND ENVIRONMENTAL EMISSIONS IN A REGIONAL ECONOMY

Households have significant demand-side potential to drive reductions in atmospheric emissions, including both direct and indirect emissions. Our analysis focuses on the behaviour of a regional economy (Aragon, Spain) and its impact on greenhouse gases (GHG) and sulphur dioxide (SO₂). Using a CGE model, we simulate scenarios and evaluate the environmental impact of adopting changes considered in the Aragonese Climate Change and Clean Energy Strategy. Specifically, we analyse the impact of electricity savings and the promotion of public transport (bus or train) versus private car use. The results indicate that 1 MWh of saving in electricity consumption by households could reduce emissions of GHG by 0.112 kt of equivalent CO₂ and 8.209 kg of SO₂ with a shift in demand preferences and 0.022 kt of equivalent CO₂ and 7.612 kg of SO₂ with an efficiency improvement. Moreover, household changes in demand preferences regarding private/public transport, also contribute to reduce emissions.     

Planned Global Interdependence as a Foreign Policy Goal: The Problem of Coordinating Trading Relationships

A bstract . The significance of the concept of interdependence is dealt with from four aspects. 1) Attention is focused upon the meanings attached to the concept of interdependence in the growing literature on the subject. 2) The mathematical structure of the concept is analyzed and its implications for, and restraints upon, global planning are emphasized. 3) the analysis of the implications of the concept for global planning is further extended by a discussion of the tasks that would be involved in all efforts to coordinate global plans that have been developed within a framework of International forms of interdependence. 4) An effort is made to relate the tasks of coordination for global plans that reflect various forms of interdependence, to economic concerns and to the relationships that arise for interdependencies of trade.     

A model of residential change and neighborhood tipping

This paper applies the theory of probabilistic consumer demand to an analysis of residential change at the urban neighborhood scale. By developing the profit maximizing pricing behavior of housing suppliers, it is shown that neighborhood transitions from high income to low income and from white to black can be explained on purely economic grounds without involving prejudicial preferences. The analytical model explains two types of transition. In the first, a neighborhood's social mix changes gradually in response to gradual exogenous changes. In the second, a neighborhood “tips” suddenly in response to similar exogenous changes. The two transitions can occur depending on the characteristics of the demand functions for the two competing groups.     

In union lies strength: Collaborative competence in new product development and its performance effects

It is widely recognized that new product development (NPD) is a highly interdependent process, yet efforts to empirically model the interdependence and examine its effect on firm performance are scarce. Our study addresses this research gap. We model firms’ abilities to collectively collaborate with suppliers, customers, and internal employee teams in NPD as collaborative competence and examine its impact on project and market performance. Using responses collected from 189 NPD managers, we find empirical evidence for collaborative competence and its differential impact on project and market performance. Specifically, we find that collaborative competence has a direct impact on project performance, but its impact on market performance is indirect, mediated through project performance. The results have significant managerial implications; achieving superior market performance from inter- and intra-organizational involvement is contingent on achieving superior project performance, and companies that fail to achieve desired project performance outcomes will also fail in achieving market performance goals.     

Volatility transmission across currencies and commodities with US uncertainty measures

This paper uses the Multi-chain Markov Switching model (MCMS) conditioned on US uncertainty measures (VIX, VIX-oil and FSI) to examine the patterns of volatility transmission across the resource, major and safe haven currencies The results with and without the uncertainty variables generally identify three patterns of volatility transmission: interdependence, spillover and comovement. They reveal the dominance of interdependence over spillovers and comovements when the uncertainty variables are excluded, highlighting the significance of mutual reciprocity of individual market shocks over common shocks across the selected assets. Within portfolios of a two-variable framework (two variables representing two minimum variance portfolios (à la Markowitz), containing a weighted combination of the currencies and of the commodities, respectively), we find interdependence between the two portfolios with and without the VIX, a spillover from commodities to currencies in the case when the FSI is included and independence between the two portfolios in the case when the oil-VIX is accounted for. The implications of the results are important for the portfolio managers in selecting portfolios’ components during high oil volatility periods.     

Challenges of green consumption in China: a household energy use perspective

To encourage economic progress, China's government has been pushing domestic consumption as a substitute for its waning growth in investment and exports. It has also been promoting greener policies for growth, of which green consumerism is a prime component. By examining the economy through the lens of household energy consumption, this paper lays out the challenges the nation must overcome through green consumption. We explore the trends in household energy use and decompose energy used indirectly by households into six factors: changes in total population, urbanization rate, energy efficiency, interindustry input mix, household consumption preferences, and per capita household consumption level. Doing so yields insights into how progress in industrial technology, household income, urbanization, and lifestyles has affected energy use in the production of goods and services used by households. It also offers policy suggestions on how China might guide lifestyle changes to effect green consumption.     

The relative income hypothesis

Despite its theoretical dominance, the empirical case in favor of the permanent income hypothesis is weak. Contrary to one of its basic implications, a growing body of evidence suggests that rich households save a higher proportion of their permanent income than poor households. We propose an overlapping-generations economy where households care about relative consumption. As a result, an individual's consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his reference group; a permanent income version of Duesenberry's (1949) relative income hypothesis. Across households the savings rate increases with income while aggregate savings are independent of the income distribution.     

Local public goods and private suppliers: Musical suburbs replayed

This paper deals with the existence of private market suppliers in a standard local public goods model. The result of this modification can be a cycling process instigated by rich households rather than poor households. The theoretical model provides empirical implications for capitalization studies and policy implications for the provision and financing of local public goods including education.     

Shedding new light on the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and firm performance: An investigation of internal contingencies

This research investigates four key factors that influence the relationship between contextual ambidexterity and firm performance: two knowledge exchange elements (i.e., informational justice and task conflict) and two aspects of the internal competitive environment (i.e., resource competition and reward interdependence). These components define a firm's ability to convert its ambidextrous posture into enhanced performance. A sample of Canadian-based firms shows that the contextual ambidexterity–firm performance relationship is amplified at higher levels of informational justice and reward interdependence but suppressed at higher levels of task conflict and resource competition. The authors discuss the study's implications as well as future research directions.     

A characterization of Ramsey equilibrium in a model with limited borrowing

This paper considers a one-sector economic growth model with several infinitely-lived heterogeneous households, who differ both in the discount factors as well as preferences over consumption. Unlike the extreme form of borrowing constraint observed in the classical Ramsey model, recently surveyed in Becker (2006), we allow limited borrowing by the households and prove the existence of a perfect foresight equilibrium. We also show that irrespective of production technology employed by the firms, the capital stock sequence converges to the steady state stock and from some time onward all impatient households are in the maximum borrowing state, whereas the most patient household owns entire capital stock and the debts of all other households.     

The impact of sourcing enterprise system use and work process interdependence on sourcing professionals’ job outcomes

We examine sourcing professionals’ work context to conceptualize how they use sourcing enterprise systems (SESs) and to understand when SES use results in positive/negative job outcomes. We differentiate between SES use for supplier selection and supplier governance, identify sourcing professionals’ work process interdependence as a moderator for the impacts of SES use on job satisfaction, and suggest job satisfaction mediates the impacts of SES use on job performance. We conducted a field study of sourcing professionals’ SES use at one of the largest consumer product companies in the United States, which has implemented an SES to innovate its sourcing professionals’ work processes. Based on our analysis of the survey and qualitative data we collected, we found the impacts of both types of SES use (1) to be negative on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was high, (2) to be positive on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was low, and (3) to be mediated by job satisfaction for job performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature at the intersection of information systems and operations management as well as for the information technology enabled innovation of sourcing processes and, more generally, complex business processes.     

Including the Feedback of Local Health Improvement in Assessing Costs and Benefits of GHG Reduction

Ancillary benefits of greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation refer to benefits from GHG mitigation in addition to lowered adverse impacts of global climate change. A major ancillary benefit of GHG mitigation is reduced local air toxins, which improves health. The purpose of the study is not to determine whether ancillary benefits of GHG mitigation can or cannot justify GHG mitigation. Rather, we discuss how an important benefit of addressing GHG emission — the local health effects — should and can be incorporated using the approaches put forth. A CGE model is used for simulating a carbon tax policy. A health effects submodel takes the local air emissions output from the CGE model and assesses the implications for ambient air concentration, health, and labor supply. Labor and medical expenditure changes are fed back into the economy. Applying this approach to Thailand, when health feedback is included we find that: (1) negative impact on GDP under a carbon tax drops by 45%, and (2) welfare improves for households and cleaner producers.     

Capitalization,population movement,and the local public sector: a probabilistic analysis

Using data collected from household interviews in a 1965 San Francisco Bay Area Transportation Study, a probabilistic model is developed to explain the relationship between population movement and the capitalization of changes in the public sector in the price of housing. This model is constructed to compare 2 competing explanations for the flight of higher income households to the suburbs: 1) the accessibility model and 2) the flight from blight model. The accessibility model explains the decay of cities as a natural outgrowth of decreasing transportation costs, whereas the flight from blight model suggests that the wealthy leave the central city for the suburbs because of urban decay. An analysis of the San Francisco data demonstrates that high income households are more sensitive than the rest of the population to changes in the median income of the neighborhood and in expenditures and general government and education, but less sensitive to changes in property tax rate and expenditures on public safety, parks, and recreation. It is unlikely that undesirable changes in the public sector will result in a mass exodus of higher income households; capitalization in the price of housing appears sufficient to prevent this. The 2 models combined help explain the flight from the central cities, while the combined variables increase the logit estimation's prediction of bids for housing.     

Optimal Control of Heteroscedastic Macroeconomic Models

This paper analyses the implications of heteroscedasticity for optimal macroeconomic policy and welfare. We find that changes in the variance structure driven by exogenous processes like generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) affect welfare but not the optimal feedback rule. However, changes in the variance structure driven by state‐dependent processes affect both. We also derive certainty‐equivalent transformations of state‐dependent volatility models that allow standard quadratic dynamic programming algorithms to be employed to study optimal policy. These results are illustrated numerically using a reduced‐form model of the US economy in which changes in volatility are driven by a GARCH process and the rate of inflation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE THEORY OF ENDOGENOUS MARKET STRUCTURES

Most market structures are neither perfectly or monopolistically competitive: they are characterized by a few large firms that are engaged in strategic interactions in their production and investment decisions and whose number is endogenous. The theory of endogenous market structures analyzes markets in partial and general equilibrium where strategies affect entry and entry affects strategies, and exogenous primitive conditions on technology and preferences affect the equilibrium. We discuss applications to industrial organization, international trade, business cycle theory, international finance, growth and implications for welfare and for competition, trade, fiscal and monetary policy.     

Collective Household Models: Principles and Main Results

In the traditional approach to consumer behaviour it is assumed that households behave as if they were single decision‐making units. This approach has methodological, empirical and welfare economic deficiencies. A valuable alternative to the traditional model is the collective approach to household behaviour. The collective approach explicitly takes account of the fact that multi‐person households consist of several members which may have different preferences. Among these household members, an intrahousehold bargaining process is assumed to take place. In addition to providing an introduction to the collective approach, this survey intends to show how different collective household models, each with their own aims and assumptions, are connected.     

An empirical model of residential location and the journey-to-work in a metropolitan area

In this paper we present and estimate a single equation model designed to explain the residential location behaviour of individuals living in a multi-centered metropolitan area. We test the model for heads of households and non-heads of households separately, as well as for the total working population, in order to isolate differences in commuting behaviour between primary and secondary wage earners. The relationships are estimated from 1971 Census, cross-section data using least squares multiple regression. The data pertain to the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) and sixty-three designated zones therein.The estimation results reveal that although location-rents prove to be significant in the individual's residential location decision-making process, their effect was limited to discouraging those employed in or near the central business district (CBD) from living close to work. The existence of secondary employment centres did not have the same significant effect in bidding up location-rents. Furthermore, contrary to the standard theory, the results suggest that residential location decisions are made in response to the availability of collective residential opportunities and workers' preferences for specific residential attributes rather than by reference to the “transportation cost—housing cost” trade-off. Among the socio-economic variables, age of the worker is found to be most significant in affecting journey-to-work distance. The results provide some evidence that non-heads are, to a certain extent, more sensitive to urban structural constraints in their commuting behaviour.     

A path-analytic investigation of the determinants of career withdrawal intentions of engineers: some HRM issues arising in a professional labour market in Singapore

Data obtained from engineers (N = 230) in Singapore were used to test a model of career withdrawal intentions. The model hypothesized personal, organizational and environmental variables as exogenous variables that affect career satisfaction and job satisfaction. These affective states in turn affect career commitment which was posited directly to affect career withdrawal intentions. The findings suggest that the model is useful in explaining career withdrawal intentions as 50 per cent (R²) of the variance was explained. As hypothesized, career commitment revealed a significant negative path to career withdrawal intentions. Some of the exogenous variables, particularly organizational variables, showed direct significant paths to career withdrawal intentions, though work–family conflict, a personal variable, approached significance. A limitation of the study, direction for future studies and implications of the findings are discussed.