RECEIPT OF INFORMATION AND INFLUENCE OVER DECISIONS IN HOSPITALS BY THE BOARD, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER AND MEDICAL STAFF

This article examines relationships between receipt of internal administrative information in hospitals, influence over general management decisions, and the extent to which certain organizational characteristics predict the receipt of information by each of the three major groups in hospitals: the board, the CEO, and the medical staff. Using a US national sample of 287 non-profit community hospitals, CEOs were found to receive the greatest amount of information and had highest influence while medical staffs were lowest on both measures. of five major organizational characteristics, hospital size emerged as the single strongest predictor of receipt of information for both boards (beta =?0.28, p 0.001) and medical staffs (beta =?0.42, p 0.001). Overall, the five dependent variables explained 18 per cent of the variance in receipt of information by boards and 28 percent of the variance for medical staffs.     

The impact of cultural value orientations on individual HRM preferences in developing countries: lessons from Kenyan organizations

The intention of the study is to examine the impact that individual national culture value orientations have on the preference for the design of HR policies and practices. The value orientation structure and preferences for thirty-four HR design choices are studied in a sample of 274 Kenyan employees from eight multinational, state and private domestic firms operating in the manufacturing and processing sector. The study shows that the HR design choices of Kenyan employees reflect the following picture across four factors: high HR involvement/participation: high predictability of rewards; performance rather than loyalty-based policies; and moderate levels of HR empowerment. Kenyan employee value orientations reflect: activity thinking over activity doing; individual over collective relationships; relationship to nature mastery over relationship to nature harmony; low subjugation to nature; and human nature evil (manipulative). More importantly, three out of the four HR preference factors are valuesrelated, i.e. the individual's value orientation is highly predictive of their preference for the design of HR policies and practices. From 9 per cent to 19 per cent of the variance in preferences for involvement, empowerment and predictability of rewards is accounted for by national culture value orientations. HR involvement preferences are related to activity thinking values. Predictability of rewards is related to high activity doing. Empowerment HR is related to low relationships hierarchical values. Preferences for performance versus loyalty-based HRM are intriguingly values-free judgements, although ethnic factors play a role here.     

Government Popularity and the Economic Cycle

In June 1987 the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher were re-elected with a majority of over 100 seats against Labour. They received 42.3 per cent of the total vote, the size of the majority owing much to the significant number of votes received by third parties. But it is also believed that the Conservatives' share of the vote, unchanged from 1983, reflected the performance of the macro economy. In the four years of Mrs. Thatcher's second term, output rose more than 3 per cent a year and by the time of the election inflation was below 1 per cent, interest rates were under 10 per cent, and unemployment had come back below 3 million. If Mrs. Thatcher and her Cabinet colleagues had planned an economic strategy for the next four (or five) years in order to be in a strong position to win a fourth term of office, it might have included the following factors: output growth of 2–3 per cent a year; inflation staying around 1 per cent; interest rates of 10 per cent or thereabouts; unemployment down further from the near-3 million mark of June 1987. On our current forecast, that is, with the exception of output, the economic record of the Conservatives' third (Thatcher/Major) term. Yet the Conservatives have been running neck and neck with Labour in tile opinion polls and, barring unforeseen developments, the coming election will be extremely close, with the possibility still of either a small Conservative majority or a small Labour majority or even a hung Parliament. Why is it that, against the background of a similar economic performance in aggregate, the Conservatives have lost popularity? The arguments are complex and a full explanation would include the introduction of the community charge arid the fall of Mrs. Thatcher herself. But the economy is part of the explanation. The economic literature on Government popularity examines the state of a number of economic variables at the time of the election. At its most extreme, some believe that all a Government has to do to be re-elected is deliver a low mortgage rate in time for the election. Other analysts have explained Government popularity in a simple regression framework, with a lagged dependent variable to capture sluggish adjustment. A weakness of this research is that it implicitly believes all the Government has to do is to ‘get it right on the night’. As long as the economy falls into place by the time of the election, re-election is certain. This implies that the electorate both forgets and forgives, and is indifferent to the course of the economy in the previous three or four years. But it cannot be the case that the electorate evaluates only the average performance of the economy over the lifetime of a Parliament or even the most recent developments. As in any simple utility maximisation problem, it is not just the mean of the distribution that counts but also its variance. In other words the combination of late 1980s' boom and early 1990s' recession counts against the Government in a way that four or five years of steady progress would not have done. If this is correct, it may not be sufficient for the Government to deliver low inflation and interest rates and some recovery in output in time for the election; it may simply be that the electorate remains unforgiving of a five-year track record of boom and bust.     

Een prijsindex van nieuwe personenauto's, 1950–1965*

Summary In constructing a price index of new motorcars the main problem is how to deal with the introduction of new models and with quality variation generally. The first difficulty is turned by compiling year-to-year indices based on models that each account for 2 per cent or more of total sales in either year. The shifting basis of these indices comprises from 7 to 15 models which together account for 45 to 70 per cent of total registrations. All models are subject to minor improvements; this quality variation is taken into account by representing increases in horse power and overall length by equivalent price reductions. The elasticity coefficients involved in this translation are derived from a cross section analysis of prices and technical characteristics of some fifty widely ranging models in 1964. A price index for the period from 1950 to 1965 is then obtained by linking successive year-to-year indices. Over the whole period list prices have risen by a third, to a large extent as the result of changes in purchase tax; this price rise is just about offset by imporvements in quality of some 2 per cent per annum.     

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.     

Detecting predictable non-linear dynamics in Dow Jones Islamic Market and Dow Jones Industrial Average indices using nonparametric regressions

This study performs the challenging task of examining the forecastability behavior of the stock market returns for the Dow Jones Islamic Market (DJIM) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) indices, using non-parametric regressions. These indices represent different markets in terms of their institutional and balance sheet characteristics. The empirical results posit that stock market indices are generally difficult to predict accurately. However, our results reveal some point forecasting capacity for a 15-week horizon at the 95 per cent confidence level for the DJIA index, and for nine-week horizon at the 99 per cent confidence for the DJIM index, using the non-parametric regressions. On the other hand, the ratio of the correctly predicted signs (the success ratio) shows a percentage above 60 per cent for both indices which is evidence of predictability for those indices. This predictability is however statistically significant only four-weeks ahead for the DJIM case, and twelve weeks ahead for the DJIA as their respective success ratios differ significantly from the 50 percent, the expected percentage for an unpredictable time series. In sum, it seems that the forecastability of DJIM is slightly better than that of DJIA. This result on the forecastability of DJIM adds to its other findings in the literature that cast doubts on its suitability in hedging and asset allocation in portfolios that contain conventional stocks.     

Arbitration of accommodation in US workplaces: employee,stakeholder and human resources characteristics

This research examines how arbitrators consider accommodations for employees with physical and mental illnesses. Unlike other recent research on the subject, the authors specifically and purposely draw their sample from recent US arbitration cases—2015 to 2018, n = 209. Additionally, using content analysis software, NVivo , the case characteristics were autocoded, and the case outcomes were manually coded. Using logistic regression, the following model was developed to predict the odds of case outcomes: disability, injury, discrimination, retaliation, absence and reinstatement. The Cox and Snell and Nagelkerke analysis indicates that our model accounts for approximately 15.6 to 21.5 per cent of the variance, with 33.3 per cent of the individual and split arbitration cases outcomes and 91.2 per cent for organisation arbitration cases correctly predicted. The model predicts 71.2 per cent of the cases.     

Forecast Summary

In comparison with our February forecast, we are more optimistic on the prospects for output and unemployment both this year and into the medium term. But in consequence we have raised our forecast for the current account deficit. GDP growth, nearly 5 per cent last year, falls back to 3½ per cent this year and 2½ per cent in 1989; from 1990 onwards output is expected to increase at its underlying trend of 3 per cent. Inflation is currently rising but, as output decelerates, it peaks at 5 per cent and drifts gradually lower over the medium term. The current account deficit is projected at £5bn both this year and next; helped by a steadily depreciating exchange rate, which boosts exports, the deficit narrows from 1990 onwards.     

Why do U.S. states adopt public–private partnership enabling legislation?

Public–private partnerships, or PPPs, have the potential to address a range of urban economic issues. As of late 2012, thirty-two U.S. states and Puerto Rico had enacted legislation enabling the use of PPPs. PPP enabling laws address such issues as the treatment of unsolicited PPP proposals, prior legislative approval of PPP contracts, and the mixing of public and private funds. We utilize 13 key elements of PPP enabling laws to develop an index reflecting the degree to which a state’s law is encouraging or discouraging of private infrastructure investment. We examine why states pass such laws, and why some states pass legislation that is relatively more favorable to private investment. We consider demand side, supply side, and political/institutional drivers of passage. Vehicle registration growth and greater traffic congestion both increase the likelihood of passage, as does political agreement between a state’s executive and legislative branches. Traffic congestion, growth in per-capita income, and the percent of Republicans in the state’s House of Representatives all increase a law’s favorability to private investment. There is little indication that traditional public finance variables, such as federal highway aid, affect the likelihood of passage or the favorability of a state’s PPP enabling law.     

Financial performance and the long‐term link with HR practices,work climate and job stress

Using data front a large financial services organisation in the Netherlands, this article reports a longitudinal study at the business unit level. The study addresses the question of which longitudinal relations exist between survey data on perceived HR practices, work climate and job stress on the one hand, and prospective and retrospective financial performance on the other. Data from 223 business units were available for this study. Eight scales were selected from an employee survey answered by 18,142 respondents. These were aggregated to mean scores at the business unit level. Financial performance is operationalised by a yearly profits‐to‐costs ratio. Correcting for employee and business unit characteristics, the eight survey scales predict 22 per cent of the variance in business unit financial performance in the year after the survey.‘Co‐operation between departments’ appears to be the most important predictor. Equally strong evidence was friund for a reverse causation sequence: business unit financial performance in the year before the survey was a significant predictor for four out of eight survey scales, especially for ‘co‐operation between departments’ and ‘job security’. The results underline the importance of studying variance in HR and performance variables within large organisatiuns, and the possibilities of using employee surveys in this research context. Limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.     

THE MONETARY CONUNDRUM

The broad money supply, sterling M3, has grown by 14.1 per cent (ie an annual rate of over 30 per cent) over the past six months. Over the same period the narrow money supply definition (M1) has increased by only 4.4 per cent, while the difference between the two money supply measures — broadly speaking, the interest bearing component of sterling M3 — has grown by no less than 23.1 percent. The real economy is showing all the signs of a severe monetary squeeze with stocks and imports falling rapidly, while the balance of payments and the exchange rate are exceptionally strong. Over the past six months, industrial production (excluding North Sea oil) has fallen by 7.9 per cent while wholesale prices have risen by only 4.2 per cent. Thus, there is a double conundrum: the sharply different growth trends in M1 and sterling M3, and the contrast between the explosive growth of sterling M3 and the subdued behaviour of the real economy.
One possible answer to this puzzle, spelt out in more detail in the following pages of this Forecast Release, is that the rate of interest being paid on the interest-bearing component of sterling M3 is now abnormally high. Consequently, the asset demand for the interest-bearing component of sterling M3 is exceptionally large, with the result that both the non-interest-bearing component of the money stock (ie M1) and the real economy are being squeezed Under these circumstances, the short-run behaviour of sterling M3 may not be an entirely reliable guide to the behaviour of the real economy.     

Forecast Summary

The January crisis, which occurred despite (or perhaps because of) signs of accelerating recovery, will not, we believe, prevent output from rising by over 3 1/2 per cent this year and by over 2 per cent p.a. over the medium term. Although the recent fall in sterling will put up prices - especially of traded manufactures - we expect retail price inflation to fall below 5 per cent after reaching almost 6 per cent this spring.     

Focus: Productivity in UK Manufacturing Industry

Manufacturing industry has been the major casualty of the recession, recording a total fall in output of about 20 per cent. It is unusual for productivity to rise when output is falling, yet in the last two years output per person employed in manufacturing has risen by 15 per cent. As a result, and in spite of earnings growth of over 25 per cent between 1980 and 1982, the increase in unit labour costs was held to under 15 per cent in the same two-year period. In this Focus we examine how and why these developments have taken place. Our general conclusion is that, with a recovery now under way, normal pro-cyclical productivity gains are reinforcing the abnormal achievements of the last two years and that, in consequence, industrial costs and profits are improving sharply.     

Forecast Summary

Monetary policy was tightened to defend the exchange rate earlier this year. Any adverse effects on activity have since been balanced by growing business confidence, restored by the successful rescue of sterling, falling interest rates and above all by the end of the miners' strike. We therefore still expect output to rise this year by 31/4–31/2 per cent and by over 2 per cent p.a. in the next three years. The recent acceleration in prices, the underlying reason for a tighter policy stance, is not expected to continue. We forecast a fall in inflation to 6 per cent or below by the end of the year and to under 5 per cent during 1986.     

Forecast Summary

Led by private sector demand, the economy has grown very rapidly in the last 12 months, Output has risen nearly 6 per cent and unemployment has fallen by over ½ million but the current account deficit has widened dramatically and wage and price inflation is increasing. Monetary policy has been tightened sufficiently, we believe, to produce a gradual reduction in the current deficit over the medium term and to prevent inflation from breaking the 7 per cent level which a higher mortgage rate will ensure early next year. But, as demand is reined back, there is a cost to output which rises 3 per cent next year, 2–2½ per cent thereafter. Unemployment continues to fall, dropping below 2 million at the end of next year and reaching 1.8 million by 1992.     

WORLD OUTLOOK

World output, which was strengthening immediately prior to last October, appears to have barely suffered in the short term from the stock market crash. Apart from an early reaction by US consumers - since reversed - demand is proving robust and in early 1988 OECD industrial production is, we estimate, 6 per cent up on year-earlier levels, with GNP more than 4 per cent higher. Indeed such is the strength of activity that the present balance of risk is not that recession is imminent but that inflation may pick up again. In the United States, where activity rates are at their highest level for eight years and unemployment is at a fourteen-year low, monetary policy has been tightened and interest rates are moving higher. The Bundesbank is keen to follow suit and the BoJ is keeping the situation under review. Nevertheless, with wages in most countries still adjusting to the low inflation rates of the last two years, there is little evidence yet that prices are accelerating.
We expect to see world interest rates edging higher in the second half of the year as recorded inflation picks lip. But we believe that underlying inflation remains low and that, even on the assumption that oil prices return to 18 a barrel, OECD consumer price inflation will peak early next year at a little over 4 per cent. Tighter monetary policy is also expected to hold back demand over the next 12 months. Consequently, we expect some weak- ness in output in the first half of next year but discount the possibility of a severe recession. GNP growth in the OECD area is forecast to decline from the 3 per cent rate of 1987–8 to a little over 2 per cent next year and to a sustainable 2½ per cent p.a. over the medium term.     

A Comparitive Study of the Use of Financial Graphs in the Corporate Annual Reports of Major U.S. and U.K. Companies

The use of graphs to disclose information in corporate annual reports represents a significant dimension in financial disclosure management. Surprisingly, no inter-country comparative analysis of this area of voluntary disclosure has been conducted. This study compares the graphical reporting practices in the 1990 annual reports of 176 leading U.S. and U.K. industrial companies. Ninety-two per cent of U.S. companies use graphs compared with 80% of U.K. companies; the mean number of graphs per company being 13.0 and 7.7, respectively. Sales, an earnings measure, earnings per share and dividends per share are the four most frequently graphed aggregate financial performance variables in both countries. Significant differences in several of the variables graphed are found and explained in terms of environmental factors. In both countries, evidence of graphical information manipulation exists in the form of selectivity, measurement distortion, and presentational enhancement. Moderate evidence supports the hypothesis that U.K. companies are more likely than U.S. companies to adopt interpretative shading. Regulators need to clarify the responsibilities of directors and auditors by setting graphical guidelines.     

Monopoly Pricing as a Consumer Exaction in the Public Utility Sector

A bstract . The many studies on the measurement of deadweight welfare loss due to monopoly pricing have largely ignored the public utility sector of the economy. For the residential customer class in the municipally-owned water industry , the useable formula for the welfare loss triangle depends on the divergence between price and long run marginal cos and the price elasticity of demand Only price is directly observable. Statistical methodology developed here and elsewhere provides unique estimates of marginal cost and elasticity for each utility. The welfare loss, as a percentage of the residential customer class's annual water bill, is 9 to 10 per cent for locally regulated water utilities and 5 to 6 per cent for state regulated utilities–a level above those reported in most of the studies on manufacturing industries. Regulation , however, can make a difference.     

A TVM-Copula-MIDAS-GARCH model with applications to VaR-based portfolio selection

This paper develops a novel time-varying multivariate Copula-MIDAS-GARCH (TVM-Copula-MIDAS-GARCH) model with exogenous explanatory variables to model the joint distribution of returns. The model accounts for mixed frequency factors that affect the time-varying dependence structure of financial assets. Furthermore, we examine the effectiveness of the proposed model in VaR-based portfolio selection. We conduct an empirical analysis on estimating the 90%, 95%, 99% VaRs of the portfolio constituted of the Shanghai Composite Index, Shanghai SE Fund Index, and Shanghai SE Treasury Bond Index. The empirical results show that the proposed TVM-Copula-MIDAS-GARCH model is effective to investigate the nonlinear time-varying dependence among those three indices and performs better in portfolio selection.     

Inference on inequality from household survey data

I develop a theory of asymptotic inference for the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient for testing economic inequality when the data come from stratified and clustered household surveys with large number of clusters per stratum. Using the asymptotic framework of Bhattacharya [Asymptotic Inference from multi-stage surveys. Journal of Econometrics 126(1), 145–171], I derive a weak convergence result for the continuously-indexed Lorenz process even when the underlying density is not uniformly bounded away from zero. I provide analytical formulae for the asymptotic covariance functions that are corrected for both stratification and clustering and develop consistent tests for Lorenz dominance. Inference on the Gini coefficient follows as a corollary. The methods are applied to per capita household expenditure data from the complexly designed Indian national sample survey to test for changes in inequality before and after the reforms of the early 1990s. Ignoring the survey design is seen to produce qualitatively different results, especially in the urban sector where the population sorts more completely into rich and poor neighborhoods.