The natural rate of interest: An estimate for the United Kingdom

The natural rate of interest, also known as R*, is a central concept for many monetary economists. Although policymakers and commentators make judgements based on an implicit belief regarding its value, attempts to measure it are quite rare. This article uses productivity data to estimate the natural rate for the UK economy during 1998–2018. It finds that the median real natural rate up to and including 2008:2 was 2.11 per cent and has been 1.9 per cent since then. This supports the view that the natural rate can change over time and has fallen in recent years. Policymakers who use the natural rate as a benchmark should therefore monitor this more closely.     

'If only there were simple solutions,but there aren't': some reflections on Zimmerman's critique of empirical management accounting research

Although having some sympathies with Zimmerman's critique of Ittner and Larcker's review of the empirical management accounting research literature, this analysis points out how Zimmerman has too easily allowed his own prejudices to influence both his assessment of the empirical management accounting literature and his recommendations for improvement. Particular emphasis is put on analysing Zimmerman's classification of the accounting research literature and his unproblematic optimism in the potential of economic modes of understanding.     

Residential care for the elderly: A billion‐pound experiment in policy‐making

Supporters of the Government's privatisation programme stress the advantages of subjecting State‐owned business to market pressure. But it is not always clear, as this study of three possible ways of privatising the British Airports Authority shows, precisely how those advantages are to be realised.     

The supply of qualified nurses: a classical model of labour supply

The need to ensure adequate numbers of nurses is a key requirement of the current modernization of the UK NHS. However, it is unclear how effective wages are as an instrument to maintain or increase the nursing workforce, both in terms of absolute numbers and in the number of whole time equivalents. This study sets out to estimate a classical model of labour supply for British qualified married or cohabiting nurses and midwives, looking at both the participation decision and the hours of work supplied. Data are from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey over the years 1999–2000. Participation and hours of work are found to be inelastic with respect to own wage. These results suggest that increasing the wage would only have a moderate effect on labour supply. Interestingly, there is no significant statistical difference between having a child of nursery age (3–4) and having a child of school age (5–15) on participation and hours supplied. This suggests that recent policy initiatives to increase female labour force participation, through the provision of free nursery places, has been successful. Preliminary analysis of a split private and public sector sample suggests that hours supplied are completely inelastic with respect to wages in the public sector.     

Assessing the antecedents of transfer intentions in a training context

This study examined the underlying structure of transfer climate and those aspects of transfer climate that were related to pre‐training self‐efficacy, pre‐training motivation, and post‐training transfer implementation intentions. Positive and negative affectivity (PA and NA) were also measured in order to better understand the relationship of these variables to trainees’ perceptions of the transfer climate and the other training‐related variables. Transfer climate was best represented by two underlying constructs, although these were correlated. After controlling for PA and NA, none of the transfer climate variables were significantly related to pre‐training self‐efficacy, while only positive reinforcement was significantly related to pre‐training motivation. Pre‐training self‐efficacy was also a significant predictor of pre‐training motivation, even after controlling for PA and NA. Negative affectivity was the only significant predictor of post‐training transfer implementation intentions. Further research needs to clarify whether PA and NA are contributors to the trainees’ perceptions of the transfer climate or are a product of these perceptions.     

An application of health-portals to improve electronic listening

Electronic listening (eListening) is an innovation that potentially provides patients and other users with the right answer in the right place at the right time. Thus, eListening can potentially improve service flexibility, adaptability and quality. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which new web-based service delivery channels, which we refer to as health-portals (he-portals), facilitate eListening in the Spanish public healthcare sector. In this paper, we investigate the relative importance and significance of hospital size and three different types of information and communications technologies (Internet, groupware and collective systems) on the use of eListening through an empirical investigation of 300 Spanish public he-portals. Our main conclusion is that the implementation of Internet systems alone does not guarantee the development of effective eListening. In addition, we demonstrate that hospital size does not affect the level of eListening achieved by hospitals.     

Strategic orientations and new product commercialization: mediator,moderator, and interplay

Why are some firms more successful at commercializing new products than others in emerging economies? It is possible that the strategic orientations, which firms adopt as a type of business strategy, lead at least partially to the superior performance of the new products they introduce to the market. Strategic orientations facilitate a match between firm strategy and resource endowment, on the one hand, and the adaptation to market conditions, on the other. In this paper, we empirically test whether four major types of strategic orientations (market orientation, technology orientation, entrepreneurial orientation, and networking orientation) are simultaneously related to new product commercialization performance using data collected from China. We find that strategic orientations are positively related to three aspects of new product commercialization, namely new product advantage, new product newness, and number of new products introduced to the market. Interestingly, we find that pairs of strategic orientations support each other in exerting their impacts on new product commercialization performance. In addition, we find that organizational learning mediates the effects of strategic orientations on new product commercialization and that environmental dynamism moderates the effect of strategic orientations on new product commercialization. We obtain the valuable insight that a firm's successful commercialization of new products hinges upon the development of critical yet complementary sets of strategic orientations, especially in a dynamic business environment.     

Tax Reform and Progressivity

The established theory of tax progressivity cannot handle basic tax reform questions, such as whether an increase in personal allowances makes the tax system more progressive, because the core results assume that tax liability is never zero. This paper generalises the core theory to allow for zero tax payments, and applies the new framework to the analysis of allowances, income-related deductions and tax credits. Log concavity of the tax schedule—a property quite distinct from any existing notion of progressivity—emerges as the critical determinant of whether the distribution of the tax burden becomes more progressive as allowances are increased.