Things Unions Do, Job Attributes, and Union Membership

Implications of the governance and rent-seeking models of unionism for the job characteristics-union membership relationship are developed. Specific training and membership are found to be positively related, consistent with arguments that specific training governance. Membership is less likely on jobs requiring more general education—where incumbents typically see greater returns to individual mobility. Some support is found for job characteristics associated with efficiency gains to a collectivized employment relationship.     

First Things First

Although successful new product development practices often require joint efforts of professionals from various departments, all too often these professionals are trained as specialists with little exposure to other functional viewpoints. Colin Clipson describes the results of an educational initiative designed to bring together selected technical, business and design students enrolled in classes at The University of Michigan. Members of various student teams quickly ascertained a need to overcome language and cultural barriers in order to develop product recommendations for sponsoring firms. The results of this educational experiment have implications for current educational programs as long as improved innovation management is seen as a desirable social goal.     

Do Women Ask?

Females typically earn less than males. The reasons are not fully understood. This paper re‐examines the idea that women “don't ask,” which potentially assigns part of the responsibility for the gender pay gap onto female behavior. Such an account cannot readily be tested with standard datasets. This paper is the first to be able to use matched employer–employee data in which workers are questioned about their asking behavior. It concludes that males and females ask equally often for promotions and raises. The paper's empirical results suggest, however, that while women do now ask they “don't get.”     

What Do Unions Do to Productivity? A Meta‐Analysis

The impact of unions on productivity is explored using meta-analysis and meta-regression analysis. It is shown that most of the variation in published results is due to specification differences between studies. After controlling for differences between studies, a negative association between unions and productivity is established for the United Kingdom, whereas a positive association is established for the United States in general and for U.S. manufacturing.     

做一位刚柔相济的班主任

班主任管理班级各有特点,有人尚刚,有人尚柔。太刚和太柔都是不可取的,只有做到刚中有柔,柔中有刚,刚柔相济,才能在班级管理中收到长效。     

IBM怎么做生意

IBM的角色越来越不像乙方,更希望成为客户的伙伴。深圳的华为公司总部近两年来总是不定期地接待一些拜访者。这些人不是来谈合作或生意的,而是来向华为"取经"的。他们来自长虹、苏宁、工商银行等国内知名的大企业,而把他们和华为联系在一起的却是IBM。     

Do Riskier Borrowers Borrow More?

Conventional wisdom in the mortgage industry holds that loan-to-value (LTV) ratios are positively correlated with mortgage default rates. However, not all empirical studies of mortgage loan performance support this view. This paper offers a theoretical signaling model of why the correlation between LTV ratios and default risk is contingent upon the default costs of the borrower. Specifically, the model proposes that when default costs are high there exists a separating equilibrium in which risky borrowers will self-select into lower LTV loans to reduce the probability of facing a costly default, while safe borrowers will self-select into higher LTV loans as a signal of their enhanced creditworthiness. This adverse selection process gives rise to the possibility of higher default probabilities for lower LTV loans. Conversely, when default costs are low the conventional result, in which risky borrowers select higher LTV loans than safe borrowers, is obtained. Empirical results, based on a sample of 859 single-family residential mortgage loans drawn from the portfolio of a national mortgage lender, are consistent with the separating equilibria predicted by the model.     

When Do Living Wages Bite?

Many features of living wage laws may influence the strength of their effects on wages and employment of low-skill individuals. Echoing past research, business assistance living wage laws generate stronger wage increases and employment reductions than contractor-only laws. But broader enforcement or implementation and geographic concentration of living wage laws also appear to strengthen their effects. Finally, geographic concentration may be more significant than the distinction between business assistance and contractor-only living wage laws.     

Why Do We Have ARMs?

This paper suggests a resolution to the paradox of inefficient risk bearing by adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) borrowers. The analysis shows that when contracts are written in a realistic way, with payments linked across time via a common loan-rate function, risk sharing and the tilt of the mortgage payment stream become inextricably linked. Unless time preferences are identical or the cost of funds exhibits no time trend, borrowers will accept interest-rate risk in order to gain a more favorable time path of mortgage payments.     

控制权、现金流权分离与企业经营风险关系研究

本文从理论上研究了控制权与现金流权分离、控制股东目标函数和企业经营风险之间的内在关系,研究发现在两权分离的情况下,逐利本性会使控制股东谋求控制权私有收益的动机更为强烈,由此带来成本的增加和利润的减少,使得企业经营风险增大.本文采用2007～2011年间中国上市公司面板数据进行了实证检验,证实了现金流权与经营风险负相关,控制权和两权分离度与经营风险正相关.     

Do Economic Journals Obey Economic Prescriptions?

Review of Industrial Organization - What insures that the system of referred journalsworks well? The responsibility seems not to lie inthe prevailing governance structure. The largelynon-profit...     

Do CRA Agreements Influence Lending Patterns?

This article considers the broader impact of Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) agreements—bank pledges to extend a certain volume of lending to targeted groups and communities—by examining whether they are associated with changes in lending to lower–income and minority communities in the markets where they are initiated. We find the number of newly initiated CRA agreements in a county to be associated with significant increases in CRA, minority and overall conventional mortgage lending in a county over a three–year period. The results are consistent with the view that the increases in lending represent new lending, with some evidence suggesting that the increases in lending are relatively short–lived. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that lenders view CRA agreements as a form of insurance against the potentially large and unknown costs associated with fair lending violations, poor CRA performance ratings and adverse publicity from CRA–related protests of mergers or other applications. The results are also consistent with the view that the effectiveness of CRA agreements in increasing lending activity is ultimately determined by the persistence and sophistication of community groups in monitoring compliance with CRA agreements.     

Do Other Firms Matter in Oligopolies?

This paper examines how firms interact with their rivals. The main novelty of our approach is that we let conjectural variations depend on the actual ability of other firms to react, which we measure by both the physical capacity and financial status of firms. Our main findings are twofold. First, physical and financial capacity significantly affect conjectures. Second, we recover the implied conjectural variations and reject homogeneous conjectures. We generally find that leaders expect aggressive responses, and followers are Cournot players.     

How Do Financial Constraints Affect Creativity?

This paper investigates the effects of financial constraints on the outcome of different types of creative tasks such as product ideation and product repair. Four experimental studies examine the effect of financial constraints on creativity of the outcome of a product ideation task, and compare the effect of financial constraints with the effect of another type of constraint (i.e., input restrictions) on creativity of products ideated and on the amount of resources invested in the development of the creative solution. Furthermore, these studies explore the type of creative process ignited by financial constraints and analyze the effect of financial constraints in interaction with an individual difference such as novelty seeking, which embraces more remote determinants of creative performance, on the creativity of the outcomes to a product ideation task, as well as on the creativity of the outcomes to a more constrained task such as repairing an existing product. The results suggest that constrained financial resources may be beneficial to creativity. Financial constraints lead to the ideation of more creative products. Yet these products are generated using fewer inputs and a lower budget than products generated in an unconstrained condition. Furthermore, while yielding outcomes as creative as the ones generated under input constraints, financial constraints induce a parsimonious mindset reflected in the use of less costly resources. More interestingly, financial constraints activate a top‐down rather than a bottom‐up processing strategy in approaching the creative task. Finally, the results show that the effect of financial constraints is stronger for individuals with inherent tendencies toward novelty seeking, because their stock of experiences and perspectives puts them under stress when facing an unconstrained problem space. This interaction effect holds not only for product ideation tasks, but also when the problem space is already constrained in nature, as in the case of repairing a product. These findings, which are quite counterintuitive from the perspective of classic new product development literature, suggest that, at least under certain conditions, the use of financial constraints might constitute a promising approach to foster new ideas' generation, one that leads to more creative outcomes despite using less costly inputs. In addition, our results suggest that, when dealing with a creative task, companies should modulate the adoption of this kind of constraint on the individual characteristics of their employees, specifically on their innate tendency to seek novelty.     

如何做好技术管理工作

阐述了技术管理的层次概念,传统的技术管理存在的缺陷,以及消除传统技术管理缺陷的对策。指出了做好技术管理工作需要注意的事项和需要理顺的工作关系。