Supply,Factor Shares and Inflation Persistence: Re‐examining Euro‐area New‐Keynesian Phillips Curves*

Using euro‐area data, we re‐examine the empirical success of New‐Keynesian Phillips curves (NKPCs). We re‐estimate with a suitably specified optimizing supply side (which attempts to treat non‐stationarity in factor income shares and mark‐ups) that allows us to derive estimates of technology parameters, marginal costs and ‘price gaps’. Our resulting estimates of the euro‐area NKPCs are robust, provide reasonable estimates for fixed‐price durations and discount rates and embody plausible dynamic properties. Our method for identifying the underlying determinants of NKPCs has general applicability to a wide set of countries as well as of use for sectoral studies.     

A Note on Student Academic Performance

ABSTRACT This study compares the educational performance of both highly rural and highly urban area students to students from areas of moderate population density. The results suggest (1) that students from both highly rural and highly urban areas perform similarly, but less well, in terms of educational achievement than students from moderate areas, and (2) that empirical studies of student educational performance should include measures of both cognitive skills and educational market competition as explanatory variables. The policy implications of this research include our recommendation that policymakers consider students from highly urban areas to be subjects of concern similar to students from highly rural areas in attempts to affect expected student achievement. Implications also include our recommendation that policymakers recognize that competitive educational market systems that allow educational consumers greater choice in the acquisition of educational services are those systems within which student academic achievement is higher.     

Social embeddedness and job performance of tenured and non‐tenured professionals

This study examines how different employment relationships in academic settings, ie tenured versus non‐tenured appointments, are associated with different types of job performance efforts. The social embeddedness model contends that employees' efforts to perform well depend on embeddedness in the social environment. Adopting this perspective, we ask what types of embeddedness are likely to improve job performance efforts, namely compliance and contextual performance, under the condition of different employment relationships. Regression analyses on the responses of both tenured and non‐tenured faculty members show that employees' efforts to perform well can be explained by social embeddedness. Temporal embeddedness appears to be important in explaining the job performance efforts of tenured faculty members, while, in contrast, network embeddedness seems important in explaining the efforts of nontenured faculty members; and institutional embeddedness explained the efforts of both groups of faculty members.     

Innovation by design: SPARK and the Overcoming of Stanford University's Translational “Valley of Death” in Bio-Medicine

Stanford University's world leadership as an entrepreneurial university induced a “paradox of success,” inhibiting further development of its organizational infrastructure for entrepreneurship support. Nevertheless, some prospective academic entrepreneurs realized that there were invisible persisting gaps in the university's innovation system. We discuss the role of the entrepreneurial university and provide a case study of SPARK, an organizational innovation, created to address Stanford's translational research gap, that was then spread to other universities. The creation of a support structure to encourage students and faculty to define entrepreneurial projects as part of their education and research revealed a novel organizational change dynamic.     

Determinants of the adoption of sustainability assurance statements: an international investigation

This paper explores the factors associated with voluntary decisions to assure social, environmental and sustainability reports. Since the market for assurance services in this area is in its formative stages, there is a limited understanding of the demand for this emergent non‐financial auditing practice, which is evolving rapidly across different countries. Drawing from extant literature in international auditing and environmental accounting, we focus on a set of country‐level institutional factors to explain the adoption of sustainability assurance statements among an international panel of 212 Fortune Global 250 companies for the years 1999, 2002 and 2005. Consistent with our expectations, our results provide evidence that companies operating in countries that are more stakeholder oriented and have a weaker governance enforcement regime are more likely to adopt a sustainability assurance statement. Further, the demand for assurance is higher in countries where sustainable corporate practices are better enabled by market and institutional mechanisms. Our exploratory findings also indicate that the likelihood of choosing a large accounting firm as assurance provider increases for companies domiciled in countries that are shareholder oriented and have a lower level of litigation. We conclude the paper by suggesting three directions of research in the area of sustainability assurance that have relevant academic and practical implications. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

The Relative Price of Non‐traded Goods under Imperfect Competition*

We consider the role of imperfect competition in explaining the relative price of non‐traded to traded goods within the Balassa–Samuelson framework. Under imperfect competition in these two sectors, relative prices depend on both productivity and mark‐up differentials. We test this hypothesis using a panel of sectors for 12 OECD countries. The empirical evidence suggests that relative price movements are well explained by productivity and mark‐up differentials.     

PROBLEMS OF PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE USA: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

High costs and low graduation rates characteristic of 21^st‐century US public higher education stem from the bout of rent‐seeking attributable to the post‐Sputnik explosion in research spending and the consequent crusade to enrol new students, with diminishing concern for academic aptitude. New policies that tighten admission standards, encourage earlier graduation and enhance financial aid for the truly needy would constructively address these problems, as would incentives for faculty members to curtail outside consulting.     

Corporate Social Responsibility in Management Research: Focus,Nature, Salience and Sources of Influence*

abstract In this paper we investigate the status of corporate social responsibility (CSR) research within the management literature. In particular, we examine the focus and nature of knowledge, the changing salience of this knowledge and the academic influences on the knowledge. We present empirical evidence based on publication and citation analyses of research published from 1992 to 2002. Our results demonstrate that, for CSR research published in management journals, the most popular issues investigated have been environmental and ethics; the empirical research has been overwhelmingly of a quantitative nature; the theoretical research has been primarily non‐normative; the field is driven by agendas in the business environment as well as by continuing scientific engagement; and the single most important source of references for CSR articles was the management literature itself.     

A performance‐based,minimalist human resource management approach in business schools

This article examines the professorial human resource base in academic institutions. More specifically, we focus on professors in business schools. All academic institutions, business schools included, must have top‐quality faculty. Their drive for enhancing academic value creation, generating cutting‐edge research, leading teaching, and building strong interrelationships with students and executive participants fuels the success of the academic institution. Obviously, the other employees also are important.The administration must be outstanding, along with the research associates, finance staff, marketing team, and the like. Still, in order to contribute to the overall success of the academic institution, these other functions all depend on an outstanding professorial staff—they cannot create success alone. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Determinants of Relative Sectoral Prices: The Role of Demographic Change

Demographic change raises demand for non‐tradable old‐age related services relative to tradable commodities. This demand shift increases the relative price of non‐tradables and thereby causes real exchange rates to appreciate. We claim that the change in demand affects prices via imperfect intersectoral factor mobility. Using a sample of 15 OECD countries, we estimate a robust increase of relative prices. According to our main estimate, up to one fifth of the average increase in relative prices between 1970 and 2009 can be attributed to population ageing. Further findings confirm the relevance of imperfect factor mobility: Countries with more rigid labour markets experience stronger price effects.     

Markup Pricing and the Auto Industry: A Partial Explanation of Stagflation in an Oligopolistic Economy

A bstract . Price leadership firms and especially wage leadership unions frequently are not operating at points of maximization in the neoclassical sense, because contrived high level demand has brought low price consciousness or elasticity of demand for their commodities or services. Accordingly, they can get higher profits or wages anytime they choose to raise their price except during severe recession. If output falls as a consequence, goveniment and the central hank have stood ready to expand total spending. The contrived high demand has interacted with oligopolistic practices to obviate the distinction between elasticity for the firm and that of its industry, with empirical studies showing demand elasticity commonly not much above unity. The automobile industry is the focus of attention in this study. It appears that stable and high employment market capitalism no longer is possible, because at a minimum t requires generalized maximization behavior, which involves operation against constraining supply and demand parameters.     

Adoption and Coverage of Performance‐Related Pay during Institutional Change: An Integration of Institutional and Agency Theories

Whether or not to adopt and how extensively to use a newly legitimized practice are discrete decisions made by firms undergoing institutional change. The aim of this paper is to identify the distinct effects of economic, social, and political factors on the adoption of performance‐related pay practices and their coverage (i.e. the proportion of employees covered by the practices) by integrating institutional and agency theories. An empirical analysis is performed with a unique sample of Korean firms that experienced the East Asian financial crisis of 1997. The results show that while performance‐related pay adoption was influenced by economic and social factors, performance‐related pay coverage was related to political factors as well as economic and social factors. This finding suggests that while firms adopt performance‐related pay practices in search of legitimacy, they do not blindly imitate such practices but rather proactively adapt them based on economic efficiency considerations. This study makes valuable contributions to research on institutionalism and remuneration by empirically identifying the conditions under which a pay practice adopted for social legitimacy fits or fails to fit the economic needs of the adopters.     

Durable Purchases over the Later Life Cycle

We investigate life‐cycle patterns of demand for services from household durables using UK panel data. We take careful account of prices, demographics, labour supply and health. Demand for consumer electronics rises with age, while the demand for household appliances is flat. These findings contrast with the well documented decline in non‐durable consumption at older ages, and suggest that studies that estimate the overall discount rate from nondurable consumption may underestimate consumer patience and the savings required to fund retirement. We also find important non‐separabilities between the demand for durables, labour supply and health status.     

Anti-Abortion Activities and the Market for Abortion Services: Protest as a Disincentive

Cross-section data for the US are used to estimate the effects of anti-abortion activity on the demand and supply of abortion services in 1992. Empirical results show that anti-abortion activity had a signi~cant negative impact on both the demand and supply of abortion services. Using estimates from a two-stage least-squares estimation of demand and supply, anti-abortion activities (measured as picketing with physical contact or blocking of patients) have decreased the market equilibrium abortion rate by an estimated 19 percent and raised the price of an abortion by approximately 4.3 percent. Taken together, the empirical results show that anti-abortion activities have been successful in making abortion services scarcer.     

Research performance evaluation of Chinese university: A non-homogeneous network DEA approach

Performance evaluation for universities or research institutions has become a hot topic in recent years. However, the previous works rarely investigate the multiple departments’ performance of a university, and especially, none of them consider the non-homogeneity among the universities’ departments. In this paper, we develop data envelopment analysis (DEA) models to evaluate the performance of general non-homogeneous decision making units (DMUs) with two-stage network structures and then apply them to a university in China. Specifically, the first stage is faculty research process, and the second stage is student research process. We first spit each DMU (i.e. department) into a combination of several mutually exclusive maximal input subgroups and output subgroups in terms of their homogeneity in both stages. Then an additive DEA model is proposed to evaluate the performance of the overall efficiency of the non-homogeneous DMUs with two-stage network structure. By analyzing the empirical results, some implications are provided to support the university to promote the research performance of each department as well as the whole university.     

Knowledge‐intensive firms: the influence of the client on HR systems

HR systems play a critical role in growing knowledge‐intensive firms (KIFs) by facilitating the conversion of human capital into intellectual capital, which has market value. However, the choice of HR system is constrained by the relatively small number of clients they have in business‐to‐business relationships. This article seeks to understand how and why these client relationships affect the choice of HR practices in these firms. We address this issue by drawing on extensive empirical research currently under way in KIFs. Our research shows that HR practices can be influenced strongly by the client, both directly and indirectly. However, some KIFs will use their HR practices as a means of managing the relationships they have with their clients by shaping their boundaries with their clients and building organisational, professional and client identities. The varying client influence can be understood by examining the nature of the power relationship between the client and supplier, which is influenced by the uniqueness of the services provided. This has implications for our understanding of the factors affecting the exercise of a constrained choice of HR systems.     

高校快递代取服务终端的优化——以江南大学为例

为了优化高校快递终端服务,解决高校师生不便自取快递的问题,通过在江南大学进行快递代取服务的实地调研与数据收集,运用统计学、运筹学、工效学等学科知识,对服务体系不断改进与完善,实现供应链式的服务系统管理,完整优化代取服务终端。     

Factors Related to the Academic Performance of Students in the Statistics Course in Psychology

Many studies have examined the factors that influence academic performance in primary and secondary education as well as at university, with the purpose of enhancing learning at these stages and reducing drop-out rates. It is within this research framework that we want to emphasise the deficient performance of students enrolled on the statistics course in the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Barcelona. Consequently, this paper attempts to determine the factors that affect student performance in this subject by undertaking an analysis of a structural equation model and determining its stability over time. In order to accomplish our objective, we worked with two samples of students enrolled statistics classes. The first group comprised 211 students enrolled in the academic year 2000–2001, while the second comprised 287 students enrolled in the academic year 2001–2002. By administering a questionnaire, we obtained information concerning such variables as demographic data, previous academic record, information related to the subject and the degree of satisfaction with it, and the final mark obtained by the students in the subject. The parameters for each group of students were estimated separately and the goodness of fit of the proposed structural model was assessed. The data analysis showed a good fit with both data bases, but the set of estimated parameters differed in the two academic years under consideration.     

Processes of non-identification: Business school brands and academic faculty

This paper examines the internal implications of branding within higher education, a specific context which is dominated by the co-existence of strong professional logics and identity structures. We focus on how and whether academic faculty identify with the branding practices undertaken by their respective institution. The paper proposes a communicative perspective on brand identification to understand how academic faculty relate to and make sense of the brand. The findings, from responses of 65 faculty members at five business schools, indicate widespread indifference and non-identification with brand messages. Specifically, we identify four types of disconnects between faculty members and branding practices of their respective schools, namely ambiguity, emptiness, misalignment, and irrelevance. The evidence of these disconnects, we argue, suggests that the faculty members refrain from relating the brand to their own identities. Although individuals relate to discourses around the brand, these are often not internalized and do not thereby impact on their individual identity. Rather than navigating between identity tensions, they eschew identification altogether. We contribute to research on how branding works inside contemporary organizations – including higher education - through questioning the role of identity in branding processes seen as the management of meaning.