Inference by linearization for Zenga’s new inequality index: a comparison with the Gini index

Zenga’s new inequality curve and index are two recent tools for measuring inequality. Proposed in 2007, they should thus not be mistaken for anterior measures suggested by the same author. This paper focuses on the new measures only, which are hereafter referred to simply as the Zenga curve and Zenga index. The Zenga curve Z(α) involves the ratio of the mean income of the 100α % poorest to that of the 100(1?α)% richest. The Zenga index can also be expressed by means of the Lorenz Curve and some of its properties make it an interesting alternative to the Gini index. Like most other inequality measures, inference on the Zenga index is not straightforward. Some research on its properties and on estimation has already been conducted but inference in the sampling framework is still needed. In this paper, we propose an estimator and variance estimator for the Zenga index when estimated from a complex sampling design. The proposed variance estimator is based on linearization techniques and more specifically on the direct approach presented by Demnati and Rao. The quality of the resulting estimators are evaluated in Monte Carlo simulation studies on real sets of income data. Finally, the advantages of the Zenga index relative to the Gini index are discussed.     

Comparing German and Italian Public Universities: Convergence or Divergence in the Higher Education Landscape?

In this paper, we examine and compare the efficiency of Italian and German public universities and its evolution in the period 2001–2007. This topic is particularly important because of two main reasons: (i) as the universities are funded through public money in both countries, it is necessary to assess whether it has been used efficiently; (ii) the comparison among (similar) European countries can stimulate a benchmarking exercise that can be useful for managerial and policy making purposes. The results show that German universities are more efficient than their Italian counterparts are, using data envelopment analysis. However, the latter are catching up: in the period 2001–2007, their efficiency has improved more rapidly. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Using DEA for measuring teachers’ performance and the impact on students’ outcomes: evidence for Spain

This research contributes to the ongoing debate about differences in teachers’ performance. We introduce a new methodology that combines production frontier and impact evaluation insights that allows using DEA as an identification strategy of a treatment with high and low quality teachers within schools to assess their performance. We use a unique database of primary schools in Spain that, for every school, supplies information on two classrooms at 4th grade where students and teachers were randomly assigned into the two classrooms. We find considerable differences in teachers’ efficiency across schools with significant effects on students’ achievement. In line with previous findings, we find that neither teacher experience nor academic training explains teachers’ efficiency. Conversely, being a female teacher, having worked five or more years in the same school or having smaller class sizes positively affects the performance of teachers.     

Performance evaluation of retail banking services: Is there a trade-off between production and quality?

We propose a two-stage data envelopment analysis model to give an insight on the internal structure of the banking sector and study the important role of service quality in the production process. The first stage deals with the production performance and is related with the optimal use of resources to produce banking services, whereas the second stage deals with the service quality performance using customer-reported satisfaction and loyalty measures. This paper analyzes the efficiency and productivity of 36 branches of a single bank of Greece over the period 2016–2018. The results indicate the existence of a strong trade-off between production and service quality. Further insights of the study indicate that the branch size significantly affects the service quality and overall efficiency. Moreover, the employee assessments by the performance appraisal system of the bank are mainly associated with the service production and not with service quality. Finally, this study presents a managerial decision-making matrix and makes recommendations to help bank managers to improve the retail network performance.     

Term frequency – function of document frequency: a new term weighting scheme for enterprise information retrieval

In today's business environment, enterprises are increasingly under pressure to process the vast amount of data produced everyday within enterprises. One method is to focus on the business intelligence (BI) applications and increasing the commercial added-value through such business analytics activities. Term weighting scheme, which has been used to convert the documents as vectors in the term space, is a vital task in enterprise Information Retrieval (IR), text categorisation, text analytics, etc. When determining term weight in a document, the traditional TF-IDF scheme sets weight value for the term considering only its occurrence frequency within the document and in the entire set of documents, which leads to some meaningful terms that cannot get the appropriate weight. In this article, we propose a new term weighting scheme called Term Frequency – Function of Document Frequency (TF-FDF) to address this issue. Instead of using monotonically decreasing function such as Inverse Document Frequency, FDF presents a convex function that dynamically adjusts weights according to the significance of the words in a document set. This function can be manually tuned based on the distribution of the most meaningful words which semantically represent the document set. Our experiments show that the TF-FDF can achieve higher value of Normalised Discounted Cumulative Gain in IR than that of TF-IDF and its variants, and improving the accuracy of relevance ranking of the IR results.     

The ‘old’ and ‘new’ competition and Malaysian manufacturing firms: a case study

The majority of empirical studies dealing with production processes, work organization and industrial relations practices have been conducted in advanced industrial nations. This article reports on a study of the changing nature of work organization and industrial relations policies in the developing economy of Malaysia. It explores the broad patterns of change in human resource management, technology and work organization among Malaysian manufacturing firms in the context of Best's ‘old’ and ‘new’ competition. The question that arises is: does the evidence reveal that Malaysia is embracing elements of the ‘new competition’, or is it still locked into a regime of mass production, or both? The article argues that the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ competition should not be treated as a simple, straightforward duality model of development. The distinction between the two approaches is sometimes blurred and not so clear-cut. The case study observes that both systems could be operating side by side at the same time within an organization. Since the Malaysian manufacturing sector is expected to shift from simple assembly and process-type operations using labour-intensive techniques to the more advanced and higher value-added industries, greater investment in HRD to upgrade the skills of the work-force and the adoption of appropriate industrial relations policies that emphasize decentralization, greater employee involvement and continuous innovation will become crucial. To be able to compete successfully in the global economy would require a change in focus in the adoption of industrial relations and human resource development policies. For Malaysia to realize its aspiration to become an industrialized and developed nation by the year 2020 would require radical changes in those policies within the context of an integrated approach to economic and industrial planning.     

Work–life balance: a longitudinal evaluation of a new measure across Australia and New Zealand workers

The work–life balance literature has recently identified the need for construct refinement. In response to these discussions, this research describes the development and validation of a concise measure of work–life balance, based on individuals' subjective perceptions of balance between their work and other aspects of their lives. The structure, reliability and validity of this unidimensional, four-item measure was confirmed in four independent heterogeneous samples of workers employed in Australia and New Zealand (N = 6983). Work–life balance was negatively associated with work demands, turnover intentions and psychological strain, and positively associated with both family and job satisfaction, confirming the research hypotheses. Evidence of these relationships over time was also demonstrated. This research confirms that this new measure of work–life balance demonstrates robust psychometric properties and predicts relevant criterion variables.     

Small businesses and the environment: turning over a new leaf?

Previous studies on the environmental practices of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK and beyond have portrayed owner‐managers as laggards who underplay their firm's environmental impacts and resist environmental management due to its perceived cost. Yet a recent cross‐sector survey of 220 UK SMEs suggests that this intransigent stance may be slowly changing. Responses indicate a high percentage of owner‐managers actively involved in recycling, energy efficiency, responsible buying and selling, and efforts to reduce their carbon emissions. Owner‐managers saw it as their responsibility to help solve environmental problems and were reportedly willing to accept the costs of tougher environmental regulations and taxation. Business owners were motivated not just by the ‘push’ of legislation and environmental concern but by the ‘pull’ of potential cost savings, new customers, higher staff retention and good publicity for their firms. The survey also found that owner‐managers had resonance with the Stern Review's (2006) conclusions that the benefits of strong early action on climate change outweigh the costs, and that a transition to a low‐carbon economy will bring opportunities for business growth. This indicates that SMEs may be coming round to the idea that there is a business case for sustainability, although there is still some scepticism on the overall profitability of environmental action. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Employee participation and the influence on job satisfaction of the ‘new generation’ of Chinese employees

The participation of ‘new generation’ employees in management and their satisfaction in the workplace, respectively, remain more than ever important issues in the Chinese societal context in particular, as well as having wider implications for human resource management in general. This study accordingly explores the influence of employee participation mechanisms on the satisfaction of this new generation of employees – by carrying out empirical research in the manufacturing industry in China. The main theoretical contribution aims to show that the participation of such new generation employees in management, supervision and decision-making has a significantly positive impact on their work satisfaction. Furthermore, the employees' willingness to participate (participation intention) appears to play a moderating role between actual participation on the one hand, and satisfaction on the other. Such findings, we argue, potentially apply not only in the societal context of China but might also resonate more widely across other countries in the global economy.     

Insider perspectives on growth: Implications for a nondichotomous understanding of ‘sustainable’ and conventional entrepreneurship

The aim of this paper is to offer an alternative to a priori theorising in research on firm-level growth and environmental sustainability. We outline an approach that combines John Shotter's phenomenology with post-hoc application of the Bourdieusian concepts of habitus, practices and social capital. This is illustrated empirically through a study conducted with a small group of Finnish entrepreneurs, which examines their lived experience of growth alongside its practical application in their ventures. The entrepreneurs' responses reveal holistic perspectives on growth that extend beyond the economic to incorporate personal commitments to norms of collectivity and well-being for themselves and others. The paper offers an exploratory but empirically grounded approach, arguing that a combination of insiders' perspectives and attention to the social embedding of economic activity challenge the dichotomous distinctions between sustainable and conventional entrepreneurship and reveal a degree of commonality that would not be evident via conventional categorisations on the basis of features such as business model type.     

Ambiguity on the insurer’s side: The demand for insurance

Empirical evidence suggests that ambiguity is prevalent in insurance pricing and underwriting, and that often insurers tend to exhibit more ambiguity than the insured individuals (e.g., Hogarth and Kunreuther, 1989). Motivated by these findings, we consider a problem of demand for insurance indemnity schedules, where the insurer has ambiguous beliefs about the realizations of the insurable loss, whereas the insured is an expected-utility maximizer. We show that if the ambiguous beliefs of the insurer satisfy a property of compatibility with the non-ambiguous beliefs of the insured, then optimal indemnity schedules exist and are monotonic. By virtue of monotonicity, no ex-post moral hazard issues arise at our solutions (e.g., Huberman et al., 1983). In addition, in the case where the insurer is either ambiguity-seeking or ambiguity-averse, we show that the problem of determining the optimal indemnity schedule reduces to that of solving an auxiliary problem that is simpler than the original one in that it does not involve ambiguity. Finally, under additional assumptions, we give an explicit characterization of the optimal indemnity schedule for the insured, and we show how our results naturally extend the classical result of Arrow (1971) on the optimality of the deductible indemnity schedule.     

Equality and diversity in the public services: moving forward on lesbian,gay and bisexual equality?

A key change for lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people in the European Union has been the prohibition by the Employment Equality Directive (2000) of discrimination in employment on grounds of sexual orientation. This article focuses on the UK, which in 2003 introduced legislation making it unlawful to discriminate on these grounds. It explores the factors encouraging ‘good practice’ in sexual orientation equality work. It considers progress within the public services that have ‘pioneered’ sexual orientation equalities work, drawing on the views of LGB employees, management and trade union stakeholders. The recent legislation is considered to have provided a major impetus for change; however, an emerging ‘business case’ within the public service modernisation agenda is considered to have provided both opportunities and barriers to progress. A challenge for HR practitioners is getting organisational commitment to sexual orientation work, which is still perceived within organisations as a ‘sensitive’ area.     

‘Free actors’ and organizations: critical remarks about the new career literature,based on French insights

What is the reality of contemporary careers? Have individuals become masters of their professional destiny? While the ‘new career literature’ puts forward the figure of an individual free to invent his/her career (the ‘free actor model’), this article shows that the changes purported to affect careers are less radical than they seem. Despite a weakening of environments, discriminating career mechanisms are still imposed on cadres, at least in France. Because individuals do not always have the means or the will to escape those mechanisms, ‘external clues’ continue to mark careers more than the new career literature supposes. To account for the realities observed in France, this paper proposes a specific view on careers, which highlights why career rules still exist in the country.     

Leasing versus purchasing: Direct evidence on a corporation’s motivations for leasing and consequences of leasing

This paper provides new evidence on the possible sources of lessee equity value changes when leasing contracts are announced. We show that lessee common equity value increases significantly in sale and leasebacks and insignificantly in direct leases. We find support, in sale and leasebacks, for the tax-savings hypothesis and for the savings in bankruptcy costs hypothesis. We also find support for the hypothesis that leasing reduces the external financing costs related to adverse selection that arise in markets with asymmetric information. Finally, we show that lessees gain less in direct leases when they lease assets with salvage values that are sensitive to use.     

Employers’ Perspectives on the Canadian National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace

Mental illness is the leading cause of disability in Canada, with costs estimated at 51 billion dollars annually in addition to significant social costs. The Canadian National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (the Standard), recently released by the Mental Health Commission of Canada, aims to promote psychological health and safety in Canadian workplaces. The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives of Canadian employers on the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. Ten employers from large, medium, and small workplaces participated in qualitative semi-structured interviews. Interviews were transcribed and thematic analysis was used to identify themes. Employers are concerned with workplace mental health and see value in the Standard, but are relatively uninformed about it. Employers identified leadership as a critical ingredient for effective Standard implementation, and believed that benefits of the Standard can be far reaching. Roger’s (2003) Diffusion of Innovations model is applied to conceptualize the uptake of this important social change. Employers’ perspectives and foundational knowledge about the Standard provides a starting point for collaborations between human resource professionals, workplace consultants, and workplace leaders to move the implementation of the Standard forward and create psychologically healthy work environments.     

Proposed policymaking scheme for the Knesset Committee for the Examination of the Structure of Elementary and Post-Elementary Education in Israel—an illustration of a policy analysis memorandum

Two of the main problems of improving public policymaking through the utilization of analytical methods are (1) how to analyze complex issues which are difficult to deal with through systems analysis, and (2) how to introduce a more analytical approach into the considerations and proceeding of political bodies, such as legislatures.The following memorandum has been rewritten and is reproduced for wider circulation to illustrate an effort to deal with these two problems. It presents a scheme for improved decisionmaking by a political body on a complex issue. This scheme is on the meta-analysis level : it does not analyse the policy issue itself, but tries to provide a design for doing such an analysis. In other words, the scheme tries to provide a decision network and a proposed structure for dealing with this network, with due allocation of critical events to the political units. Preparation of such schemes is, I think, essential if we want to move on from systems analysis by professional units to policy analysis as a mode (or mood) of real decisionmaking throughout the social guidance cluster. An effort was also made to adjust the language of the scheme to the needs of achieving communication with politicians.I should perhaps add, that due to some special circumstances, this memorandum was never formally submitted to the Committee.