Maximizing the potential of your systems

In the last two decades, manufacturing businesses throughout the United States have learned that an important factor affecting the productivity of their manufacturing systems when implementing manufacturing resource planning is the way they approach the implementation itself. Eighty percent of an implementation effort needs to be devoted to preparing people in the organization to use the system and only 20 percent should be devoted to purchasing the system.     

北京市市域内人户分离观察

通过分析北京市城市内部人户分离现象发现,20%以上的户籍人口处于人户分离状态,其中以中青年为主;50%的人户分离人口从城市功能核心区到城市功能拓展区居住,且将长期分离下去。认为人户分离是社会经济发展和现行管理制度不相适应的结果,只有制度改革创新才是治本之策。     

San Francisco success story: merging hospitals and increasing giving

Pacific Presbyterian Medical Center and Children's Hospital of San Francisco not only pulled off a major merger but they raised total annual giving by nearly 20 percent to $9.4 million.     

The reversal of large stock price declines: The case of large firms

This paper examines the long-run reversal pattern for a sample of large U.S. firms that experienced significant stock price declines of more than 20 percent during a specific month. The results from the analysis are largely consistent with the overreaction hypothesis and significantly greater in magnitude than those reported by previous studies. Six and 12 months after their initial price decline, the stocks of large firms earn approximately 4 and 12 percent in excess of what was expected, respectively. However, the magnitude and trend of that reversal differs substantially across industries. Technology stocks experience the largest and strongest reversal pattern followed by manufacturing stocks, while service industry stocks exhibit a clear downward drift that lasts up to three years and can be described as investorunderreaction to the large price drop.     

The services industry: is it recession-proof?

Steady growth has led the services division to account for nearly 20 percent of total employment in 1980, linked mainly to business and health services; since 1948, it has been nearly immune to recessions and has displayed relative cyclical insensitivity.     

Technical efficiency in texas nursing facilities: A stochastic production frontier approach

A rapidly aging U. S. population is straining the resources available for long term care and increasing the urgency of efficient operations in nursing homes. The scope for productivity improvements can be examined by estimating a stochastic frontier production function. We apply the methods of maximum likelihood and quantile regression to a panel of Texas nursing facilities and infer that the average productivity shortfall due to avoidable technical inefficiency is at least 8 percent and perhaps as large as 20 percent. Non-profit facilities are notably less productive than comparable facilities operated for profit, and the industry has constant returns to scale.     

Transient Jobs and Lifetime Jobs: Dualism in the British Labour Market

How long does a job last in Britain? We find that many workers have very short jobs and many have very long jobs. We estimate that in 1990, 40 percent of men were in jobs that will last 20 years or more. On the other hand, 24 percent were in jobs lasting less than five years. We conclude that the labour market is still capable of offering ‘lifetime jobs’ to many workers. Policy analysis of issues such as reform of the welfare state, pensions, and training should take note that reports of the death of ‘jobs for life’ appear to be exaggerated.     

Burglar and Fire Alarms

A bstract . The alarm industry has been estimated at 8-11 billion dollars in 1993. There are approximately 17 million alarms installed nationwide. The annual growth of installations has been 8 percent over the last five years. At the same time, the number of false activations per system is 1.1 to 1.4 per year, with 20 to 30 percent of police manpower devoted to false activations. 94-98 percent of all activations are false. Indeed, false activations pose a severe problem for local police departments which respond with stiff fines for false activations and reduced response to alarm activations in general which are not high risk such as jewelry stores, banks or government facilities. This paper identifies the social benefits and costs which result from burglar and fire alarms in a given community. Included benefits are reduced burglary, assault , and rape incidents as well as fewer incidents of fire which are detected early and controlled. Costs include police response to alarms, costs of installation and monthly monitoring fees. The-results demonstrate that, indeed, burglar and fire alarms provide a net social benefit to the locality. The paper suggests that charges for false alarms should be allocated directly to the police which service them. Such users' fee method will improve resource allocation, and prevent a situation where alarms become useless.     

Land use regulation and new construction

This paper describes the relationship between land use regulation and residential construction. We characterize regulations as either adding explicit costs, uncertainty, or delays to the development process. The theoretical framework suggests that the effects on new construction vary by the type of regulation. Using quarterly data from a panel of 44 U.S. metropolitan areas between 1985 and 1996, we find that land use regulation lowers the level of the steady-state of new construction. Our estimates suggest that metropolitan areas with more extensive regulation can have up to 45 percent fewer starts and price elasticities that are more than 20 percent lower than those in less-regulated markets. One implication of regulations that lengthen the development process is that the short- and long-run effects of demand shocks will vary relative to conditions in markets without such delays. We find support for this observation in the data. As well, we find other differences by type of regulation: development or impact fees have relatively little impact on new construction, but regulations that lengthen the development process or otherwise constrain new development have larger and more significant effects.     

Economic factors of investment in parking facilities

Investment in parking facilities provides two streams of benefits: net earnings from the operations, and appreciation in the value of assets. A study of 20 parking lots in Vancouver, B.C., indicates that between 1956 and 1976 annual earnings yielded about three percent of the value of assets, while capital gains due to the investment in land returned about four percentage points per year more than inflation after the deduction of all taxes.A further study of 10 parking garages has found similar annual benefits from current operations, but the value of the structures barely increased at the rate of inflation. Details of the method of analysis should be particularly useful to urban planners because they show how standard references on investment in automobile parking should be modified to include land appreciation and inflation.     

我国金融创新人才的需求预测

金融业在现代经济中发挥着极其重要的作用,而金融创新是金融业持续发展的源泉,人才又是金融创新的关键。文章首先运用GM(1,1)模型对我国2012年-2020年金融业人才需求量做了预测,随后根据2009年金融创新人才的占比,以金融业从业人员的平均增长速度作为金融创新人才需求量的平均增长速度推算出了2012年-2020年金融创新人才需求量的占比,最后根据金融业人才需求量和金融创新人才需求量的占比预测出了2012年-2020年金融创新人才需求量,并根据预测结果提出了相关的建议。     

Government-Owned Businesses: Market Presence, Competitive Advantages and Rationales for Their Support by the State

A bstract . In the aggregate, within industries and within non-socialist countries, the market presence of State-owned businesses is large and growing. Such concerns accounted for 15 percent of world trade in 1979 and they produced 70 percent of world oil production , 40 percent of world iron and bauxite and they accounted for 40 percent of the world's banking assets. Certain governments tend to accord them competitive advantages. Reasons given for doing so range from the belief that they foster economic growth and employment , that they equalize the domestic businesses' power to compete with big multinational companies , that they make national planning possible, to the idea that government favor should not go to benefit private owners , even domestic ones, and that the country, rather than the corporation, is the relevant unit of competition.     

THE PUZZLE OF HOUSING PRIVATIZATION IN EASTERN EUROPE

This paper focuses on the part of the housing sector proving most difficult to reform in Eastern Europe-State-owned rentals—which typically constitute about 20 percent on the housing stock overall and half of the units in the largest cities. The paper argues that two objectives must be pursued simultaneously: (1) selling units at or near market prices to tenants or other households willing to purchase them; and (2) integrating the remaining state-owned rentals with the nascent but expanding rental market. The six elements of a strategy for achieving these objectives are described.     

Estimating wage differentials without logarithms

Regression models of wage determination are typically estimated by ordinary least squares using the logarithm of the wage as the dependent variable. These models provide consistent estimates of the proportional impact of wage determinants only under the assumption that the distribution of the error term is independent of the regressors — an assumption that can be violated by the presence of heteroskedasticity, for example. Failure of this assumption is particularly relevant in the estimation of the impact of union status on wages. Alternative wage-equation estimators based on the use of quasi-maximum-likelihood methods are consistent under weaker assumptions about the dependence between the error term and the regressors. They also provide the ability to check the specification of the underlying wage model. Applying this approach to a standard data set, I find that the impact of unions on wages is overstated by a magnitude of 20-30 percent when estimates from log-wage regressions are used for inference.     

人民币汇率重估:实证分析与政策含义

本文以一般均衡理论为基础，构建了一个向量误差修正模型，对人民币均衡汇率和人民币面临的升值压力进行了实证研究。根据协整与误差修正模型，自2000年以来，人民币名义有效汇率处于被低估状态（平均低估幅度为17％）。根据冲击响应分析，人民币汇率升值对中国经济有微弱的通胀效应，对美国经济有微弱的通缩效应。考虑到人民币汇率一次性调整产生的即时效应和滞后积累效应，本文认为，中国经济可以承受的年度汇率调整为7％，这样的升值幅度不至于造成人民币的高估而产生通货紧缩和贸易赤字。为了让中国的企业和居民有更多的时间适应新的汇率机制，渐进式汇率改革策略应该坚持。     

Reward Contingency, Unemployment, and Functional Turnover

Based on the valence model of expectancy theory and the Cornell model of job satisfaction, this field study investigated the relationship between reward contingency, unemployment, pay satisfaction, job satisfaction, and functional turnover. The latter of which separates turnover into four categories: poor performing leavers, good performing leavers, poor performing stayers, and good performing stayers. It was conducted with a geographically dispersed sample of sales representatives (i.e., from 25 states and 66 cities), resulting in unemployment rates that ranged from 2 percent to 12 percent. The sales representatives were employed by four companies that paid different combinations of salary and commissions, ranging from mostly salary and little commission to 100 percent commission. A discriminant analysis accounted for 62 percent of the variance in functional turnover and achieved an overall classification hit rate of 67 percent across the four functional turnover groups. Follow-up univariate analyses indicated that objective reward contingency (R²=.34), state unemployment (R²=.11), state sales unemployment (R²=.08), education (R²=.09), and tenure (R²=.08) accounted for most of the variance in functional turnover. Perceived reward contingency, pay satisfaction, job satisfaction, age, and gender were not related to functional turnover.     

The effect of World Bank trade adjustment assistance on trade and growth, 1987–2004: Is the glass half full or half empty?

This paper studies the association between trade reform, growth, and trade adjustment assistance in a sample of developing countries that underwent trade reforms during 1987–2004. Our analysis explicitly differentiates between a group of countries that received trade adjustment loans from the World Bank and a non-recipient group. The results suggest that trade adjustment assistance is positively associated with economic growth after trade reform in the medium to long run. In comparison to a pre-reform period and to the non-recipient group, the recipient countries registered 0.2 percent higher growth of real GDP per capita, 5.0 percent higher import growth, and 2.5 percent higher export growth over a period of three to five years after trade reform.     

On the welfare cost of rare housing disasters

This paper examines the welfare cost of rare housing disasters characterized by large drops in house prices. I construct an OLG general equilibrium model with recursive preferences and housing disaster shocks. The likelihood and magnitude of housing disasters are inferred from historical housing market experiences in the OECD. The model shows that despite the rarity of housing disasters, Canadian households would willingly give up 6 percent of their non-housing consumption each year to eliminate the housing disaster risk. The welfare evaluation of this risk, however, varies considerably across age groups. The risk translates into a welfare loss of as much as 16 percent of annual non-housing consumption for the old, but a welfare gain of 2 percent for the young. This asymmetry stems from the fact that, compared to the old, younger households suffer less from house price declines in disaster periods, due to smaller holdings of housing assets, and benefit from lower house prices in normal periods, due to the negative price effect of disaster risk.     

Technical efficiency and region The U.S. manufacturing sector 1972–1977

In this paper we estimate the extent of technological bias in an interregional context for U.S. manufacturing during the period 1972–1977 using a factor augmenting production function approach. We present estimates of the elasticity of factor substitution for each of the 48 states in the sample using a variable elasticity of substitution production function. Next, we use these estimates to generate estimates of the rates of change in the efficiencies of capital and labor inputs and compare these estimates across states and census regions. We also examine and compare estimates of total factor productivity across states and regions. We ,find that the average annual rates of growth of capital efficiency during the period are 5.5 percent in the Northeast, 5.3 percent in the Northcentral, 5.6 percent in the West and 3.1 percent in the South. The rates of change of the efficiencies of labor are found to be negative across all regions except the South. The rates of change of total factor productivity are found to be 1.7 percent in the Northeast, 2.3 percent in the Northcentral, 2.4 percent in the West and 1.7 percent in the South. We also find that between 33 percent and 56 percent of the growth of output across regions is due to technical progress.     

Service: the next frontier

There is a revolution taking place in the U.S. economy, a service revolution. Today, over 70 percent of the gross national product and 75 percent of all jobs can be attributed to the service sector. This monumental change is affecting not only service firms but also manufacturers. It is estimated that anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of the value added by a typical manufacturer is due to the service component. This article discusses the increased importance of services in our economy and on our shop floors. If manufacturers are to prosper in the coming decade, they will need to embrace this change and put services and service operations at the forefront of their strategic plans.