Share the Fame or Share the Blame? The Reputational Implications of Partnerships

We use an adverse selection model to study the dynamics of firms' reputations when firms implement joint projects. We show that in the case of joint projects a firm's reputation does not necessarily increase following a success and does not necessarily decrease following a failure. We also study how reputation considerations affect firms' decisions to participate in joint projects. We show that a high‐reputation partner is not necessarily preferable to a low‐reputation partner and, when implementation of the joint project by a single firm is possible, a high‐quality partner may not be preferable to a low‐quality partner.     

Does Innovation Drive Environmental Disclosure? A New Insight into Sustainable Development

Sustainable development is a hot topic in business and the media, and there is a growing demand for reliable environmental disclosure from a wide range of stakeholders. Ethical performance, including social and environmental performance, is actively scrutinized. A firm's stakeholders expect reliable disclosure to correctly assess its performance. Research on the link between environmental disclosure and environmental performance shows mixed results. Both a positive and a negative association have been found. This study reexamines this association by considering environmental innovation as a key determinant of environmental disclosure. We find that environmental performance and environmental innovation jointly determine environmental disclosure. At low levels of environmental performance, innovative firms tend to disclose more than their non‐innovative counterparts to inform stakeholders about their innovation and strategy to obtain an improved environmental performance. This disclosure gap tends to diminish as innovative firms become better environmental performers. The higher levels of environmental disclosure are closely associated with firms' environmental performance for both groups. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Does Managerial Ability Really Drive Cost Efficiency? Evidence from Broiler Businesses

This paper ascertains whether managerial ability really drives cost efficiency of broiler businesses. Data was collected from 354 broiler businesses in Ghana and analysed using a modified stochastic Cobb–Douglas cost frontier and inefficiency effect models in a single‐stage maximum likelihood estimation procedure. Results indicate that managerial abilities such as technical advice, age and experience acquired through full‐time farming and increased batches significantly drive cost efficiency. This highlights the need to provide more technical advice and implement periodic capacity building programmes to develop the managerial ability and competences of broiler producers. The youth should also be encouraged and supported through skills development fund to go into full‐time broiler business to produce more batches. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is it a Timing or a Probability Effect? Four Simulations and an Application of Transition Rate Models to the Analysis of Unemployment Exit

Among the applications of event history analysis, in the last 10 years the lion's share has been played by proportional transition rate model. This type of models suffers from a major draw-back: it does not allow us to distinguish whether a covariate affects the event timing (the event occurs sooner/later) or the overall probability of the ultimate event occurrence (the chances of occurrence are constantly higher/lower). Thus, a positive/negative effect of a covariate found using a proportional transition rate model might reflect an acceleration/deceleration in the timing of the event and/or a high/low probability of the ultimate event occurrence (Yamaguchi, 1992). This paper shows how this problem can be reformulated in terms of the proportionality/non proportionality of the covariate effects. A twofold solution to disentangle the timing/probability problem is presented: this solution consists of a test of the proportionality of the covariate effects and a computation of the survival function at the end of the time interval studied. Two applications are discussed. The first one is based on four simulated processes. The second is based on an analysis of unemployment exit in Italy, with particular attention being paid to the effects of unemployment benefits. In the conclusion, implications for future applications of event history analysis are discussed.     

Inflation is on the rise,but how far will it go?

• September's sharp rise in inflation is likely to mark the start of a steep ascent, which will likely see the CPI measure peaking above 3% in the middle of next year. The initial momentum will come through base effects but the main thrust will come from the pass‐through of the sharp depreciation of the pound. However, inflation is likely to then fall back rapidly in 2018 to average 2.2%.
• The CPI measure of inflation reached a near two‐year high in September. This was partly a function of last autumn's sharp falls in petrol and energy prices dropping out of the calculation, but it also reflected a continuation of the recent pickup in core pressures.
• The degree to which inflation accelerates from this point will depend upon the pass‐through of the weaker pound. The literature suggests that the maximum impact on inflation will come after a year, but there is some variation in the estimates of the degree of pass‐through. Studies conducted over a long period suggest the degree of pass‐through may have become smaller over time.
• We expect the weak economic backdrop to limit the extent to which the weaker pound pushes up inflation, though we still see the CPI measure averaging 2.7% in 2017, with a brief period in the middle of the year where inflation exceeds 3%, hastening a letter of explanation from the Governor of the Bank of England to the Chancellor. However, we would not see this prospect as a serious impediment to a further rate cut, given that the MPC has made it clear that it is prepared to tolerate such an overshoot.
• Inflation should then drop back through 2018 as sterling recovers and the 2017 acceleration provides powerful base effects. This is somewhat at odds with the Bank of England's latest forecast, which shows inflation lower in 2017 but then accelerating in 2018, implying a much more protracted pass‐through.

     

Industrial Relations, Manipulative or Democratic?

Summary: Three historical periods of motivating workers toward increasing productivity still "coexist" today: negative incentives, external rewards, forms of workers' participation in industry. Varying modes of joint consultation at top levels existing in many countries are contrasted with American industrial research emphasizing workers' participation on the workshop level. The problems of "common goals" and "manipulation" in industry are considered as contributing factors to the gap between those two levels. To fill it, industrial sociologists should follow Mayo and others in the use of 'clinical' research to find new institutional forms for a democratic work process based on collective bargaining.     

Weibull, RRSB or extreme-value theorists?

The Weibull distribution was discovered by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett between 1932 and 1936 in the context of particle measurement. Weibull found the same distribution a little later while investigating the strength of materials. More than 10 years after, in 1951, he finally showed that this distribution has the potential for wide applications in statistics. However, does this justify that only his name is used to denote this important probability distribution? A neutral technical name like “powered exponential distribution” might be more suitable. This paper discusses the papers by Rosin, Rammler, Sperling and Bennett as well as Weibull’s work.     

Shrinking Cities,Shrinking Households,or Both?

Household size decline accounts for a substantial portion of population loss in shrinking cities, yet little research has focused on it. Much of the literature presents a simple growth/decline binary that is largely determined via population figures. In this paper, we highlight the importance and assess the impact of household size changes on population decline, and determine what types of household size declines are more acute in shrinking cities than other locales. We find that elderly households and households with school-aged children are under-represented in shrinking cities, while households with pre-school-aged children are over-represented. More tellingly, we find the biggest source of household-related loss in shrinking cities to be the growth of single-person households now living in houses that were once home to entire families. These findings puncture the binary on which much of the shrinking cities discourse is based. The population dynamics of most cities are subtler than either practitioners or critical scholars assert. We argue that plans and development strategies for shrinking cities should reflect a range of demographic changes, including outmigration and internal household restructuring.     

Scarred from the past or afraid of the future? Unemployment and job satisfaction across European labour markets

Previous research has shown that both past unemployment and anticipated future unemployment have a detrimental impact on employees' attitudes and behaviours, which may affect organisational performance. Surprisingly, however, very little is known about the relative impact of past unemployment compared with current job insecurity. Although it is possible that both effects operate simultaneously, this paper – focused on employees' job satisfaction and utilising a set of cross-sectional data derived from the European Social Survey 2006–2007 – reports on a strongly pronounced insecurity effect: anticipated unemployment substantially reduces employees' job satisfaction. Interestingly, inclusion of the perceived risk of future unemployment as a separate predictor variable in ordered probit regressions relegates the experience of past unemployment to a statistically insignificant coefficient and thus weakens the ‘scarring’ hypothesis. These results hold true even when several socio-demographic characteristics and proxies for individual personality traits are controlled. Implications for organisations and human resource practitioners and scope for future research endeavours conclude the analysis of the paper.     

楼市走势,涨or跌?

年年岁岁花相似,岁岁年年景不同。到了年关,楼市“泡沫”论又一次甚嚣尘上。关于“泡沫”的口水仗年年打,年年泡沫满天飞,2004年可谓杭州楼市“不跌的神话”依然是涛声依旧。那么,2005年的楼市到底何去何从?“悬念”挥之不去,也无法说清。     

Does more information-gathering effort raise or lower the average quantity produced?

We aim at some simple theoretical underpinnings for a complex empirical question studied by labor economists and others: does Information-technology improvement lead to occupational shifts–toward “information workers” and away from other occupations–and to changes in the productivity of non-information workers? In our simple model there is a Producer, whose payoff depends on a production quantity and an unknown state of the world, and an Information-gatherer (IG) who expends effort to learn more about the unknown state and then sends the Producer a signal. The Producer responds by revising prior beliefs about the states and using the posterior to make an expected-payoff-maximizing quantity choice. We consider a variety of IGs and variety of Producers. For each IG there is a natural effort measure. Our central aim is to find conditions under which more IG effort leads to a larger average production quantity (“Complements”) and conditions under which it leads to a smaller average quantity (“Substitutes”). We start by considering Blackwell IGs, who meet the strong conditions required in the Blackwell theorems about the comparison of experiments. We then turn to non-Blackwell IGs, where the Blackwell theorems cannot be used and special techniques are needed to obtain Complements/Substitutes results.     

Does rising income increase or decrease damage risk from natural disasters?

Recent empirical literature has found a negative relationship between income per capita and measures of risk from natural disaster, supportive of logic that higher incomes allow countries to mitigate disaster risk. We argue that behavioral changes at the micro level in response to increasing income (such as location choice and extent of costly abatement activity) may lead to a non-linear relationship between aggregate incomes and disaster damages, where the risks increase with income before they decrease. In a country-year panel data set, we show that disaster risk associated with flooding, landslides and windstorms increases with income up to GDP per capita levels of $5044, $3360, and $4688 per year respectively and decrease thereafter. Such non-linear impacts are absent for other disaster types such as extreme temperature events and earthquakes where the links between human behavioral choices and exposure to risk are not as strong. From a policy perspective, this suggests that for the least developed countries, the dual goals of disaster risk prevention and economic development cannot be assumed to be complementary for all forms of natural disaster. In addition to allocating resources to manage disaster risk, the poorest nations may have to be more proactive in enacting policies that alter the behavioral choices of citizens that impact a country's exposure to natural disaster risk.     

How Does Cooperation and Competition Foster or Inhibit Creativity and Innovation?

The current article provides a brief insight into the relationship between cooperation and competition in organizational settings as they relate to the origination and proliferation of new ideas. Does cooperation stifle creativity? Does competition promote innovation? Or is it likely the answer resides in a more complex process somewhere in the middle? With a vested interest in organizational productivity, leadership should pay special attention to what social processes give rise to these phenomena.     

Market exit of firms: Does corruption act as grease or sand?

This paper examines whether corruption acts to “grease” or “sand” firms' exit. Corruption could facilitate exit when it is a tax that distorts markets, or it might retard exit when it empowers firms to obtain undue favors. Results, using panel data across US states and considering market exit and firms' death rates as dependent variables, show that greater corruption acts as grease rather than sand in that it facilitates firms' exit/death. In other findings, larger states, greater regulations, and more unemployment contributed to exit, as did some demographic aspects. Higher state minimum wages resulted in firms' death but not exit.     

大学生“回炉”,前进or倒退?

本期话题:近日,武汉铁路桥梁高级技工学校宣布,今年将重新开设停办了两年的大学生班,并且还扩招成两个班。大学生回炉这一现象再次引起人们热议。有人称这是高等教育的伤疤,是教育资源的再度浪费,然而也有人对此表示支持和呼吁,有争议,有认可。大学生回炉,前进or倒退?     

Strategic location of firms: Does it empower bribe givers or bribe takers?

This paper uses survey data on the corruption experience (rather than corruption perceptions) of firms located in different types of cities in more than one hundred countries to analyze the impact of firms’ strategic location on corruption. In a corrupt economy, location might influence the ability of bureaucrats/politicians and firms to extract and dodge rents. Placing the analysis in the literature on determinants of corruption, our results reveal that the corruption experiences of firms located in nations’ capital cities are qualitatively different from firms located elsewhere: they do not experience greater corruption, while firms in large cities and main business cities do. However, when manufacturing and service firms are considered separately, their corruption experience and perceptions differ.     

Forecasting by factors,by variables,by both or neither?

We consider forecasting with factors, variables and both, modeling in-sample using Autometrics so all principal components and variables can be included jointly, while tackling multiple breaks by impulse-indicator saturation. A forecast-error taxonomy for factor models highlights the impacts of location shifts on forecast-error biases. Forecasting US GDP over 1-, 4- and 8-step horizons using the dataset from Stock and Watson (2009) updated to 2011:2 shows factor models are more useful for nowcasting or short-term forecasting, but their relative performance declines as the forecast horizon increases. Forecasts for GDP levels highlight the need for robust strategies, such as intercept corrections or differencing, when location shifts occur as in the recent financial crisis.