Employee Participation and Equal Opportunities Practices: Productivity Effect and Potential Complementarities

The relationships between employee participation, equal opportunities practices and productivity are explored. Data from the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey of 1998 provide strong evidence that equal opportunities practices improve productivity overall, and increasingly so as the share of female and ethnic minority employees increases. However, short‐term effects may be negative in segregated workplaces. Non‐financial participation schemes are negatively associated with productivity, but in most cases the joint presence of these participatory schemes and equal opportunities practices significantly increases productivity. Interactions between participatory and equal opportunities schemes are also affected by work‐force composition and by the level of equal opportunities policies implemented.     

Communicating the future

A lot of time, money, and wisdom is wasted if the strategic planner fails to communicate his message. A substantial investment in a long and detailed forecasting exercise can only pay dividends if the results of that exercise are effectively brought to the attention of the clients, the people who can act upon the forecast. Here the author argues that this final stage of a forecasting exercise is as important as all the other stages, but that it is an area which is largely ignored by planners. So, using the example of a business environment, he gives simple practical guidance as to how planners can improve their performance in this final stage, the presentation of the results to the executives. Basically, this involves a shift away from the objective of transmitting the maximum amount of information, towards the idea of maximising the amount of information assimilated by the audience.     

Some Dissatisfaction with Satisfaction: Universities, Values, and Quality

This article moves beyond the narrow discussion of the applicability of Total Quality Management to the university which has amounted to a debate over whether business has something to teach the university about customers and satisfaction. The article goes at the matter from a different direction as it investigates what business can learn from the university about quality.     

Economic value of analyst recommendations in Australia: an application of the Black–Litterman asset allocation model

This study empirically examines the investment value of security analyst recommendations on constituent stocks of the S&P/ASX 50 index. We find that stocks with favourable (unfavourable) recommendations on average outperformed (underperformed) the benchmark index. An investment strategy using the Black–Litterman asset allocation model that incorporates consensus analyst recommendations, in conjunction with daily rebalancing, outperforms the market in terms of return and risk‐adjusted performance measures. The investment strategy involves high levels of trading, and no significant abnormal returns are achieved after transaction costs. Less frequent rebalancing, under most situations, causes a decrease in both performance and turnover. Filtering of dated recommendations causes an increase in turnover, while having mixed effects on investment returns.     

Bargaining Through Agents: An Experimental Study of Delegation and Commitment

While face-to-face bargaining has proven itself to be extremely efficient in the laboratory, it appears to break down often in the real world. This discrepancy, we assert, is explained by the fact that in the real world face-to-face bargaining is usually conducted not between principals but between the agents of principals. We find a substantial increase in inefficiency when bargaining is conducted through agents rather than through principals and offer an explanation for this rise in inefficiency. As such, this paper helps to shed light on the growing literature on delegation, commitment, and preference distortion games. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C92.     

The Potential Impacts of State Trading Enterprises on World Markets: The Exporting Country Case

Export state trading enterprises (STEs) play an important role in global agricultural trade. STE behavior has significant implications for world food markets, irrespective of whether or not these markets are inherently competitive. Previous literature has suggested that STEs have market power and can earn oligopolistic rents. We find there is no compelling empirical evidence to support this argument. However, we show the cross-commodity effects of export STEs can disrupt competitive world markets, through offering an implicit export subsidy to a downstream industry.     

Trade liberalization and organizational change

We embed a simple incomplete-contracts model of organization design in a standard two-country perfectly-competitive trade model to examine how the liberalization of product and factor markets affects the ownership structure of firms. In our model, managers decide whether or not to integrate their firms, trading off the pecuniary benefits of coordinating production decisions with the private benefits of operating in their preferred ways. The price of output is a crucial determinant of this choice, since it affects the size of the pecuniary benefits. Organizational choices also depend on the terms of trade in supplier markets, which affect the division of surplus between managers. We show that, even when firms do not relocate across countries, the price changes triggered by the liberalization of product markets can lead to changes in ownership structures within countries. The removal of barriers to factor mobility can also induce widespread restructuring, which can lead to increases in product prices (or declines in quality), hurting consumers worldwide.     

Do employers discriminate by gender? A field experiment in female-dominated occupations

We test for gender discrimination by sending fake CVs to apply for entry-level jobs. Female candidates are more likely to receive a callback, with the difference being largest in occupations that are more female-dominated.