THE LEARNING STYLES QUESTIONNAIRE: AN ALTERNATIVE TO KOLB'S INVENTORY?

An important consideration in the design of educational programmes is the learning style of students. In the field of management education, Kolb's theory of learning styles has received particular attention. Research has shown, however, that his associated measure, the Learning Style Inventory (LSI), may be of doubtful utility. the present study of British and overseas managers examines the measurement properties of one alternative, Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ). the results, calling into question Kolb's theory itself, suggest that the LSQ may be preferred to the LSI on account of the distribution of its scores, its temporal stability and its construct and face validity. Its predictive validity, however, remains in doubt.     

New Evidence on Gay and Lesbian Household Incomes

Using independent data from the Centers for Disease Control, the author tests a key assumption of previous research on gay and lesbian incomes: that same-sex unmarried partner households are, indeed, gay or lesbian. The author shows that this independent data suffers from less severe underreporting of same-sex unmarried partner households than the 1990 Decennial Census. Furthermore, individual level information on sexual behavior and family planning is used to show that these households exhibit sexual behavior that is systematically different from married and different-sex couples and that is consistent with a large body of public health and HIV literature on gay men and lesbians. Finally, the author replicates, confirms, and extends previously published Census-based results on the household income penalty faced by gay male couples, showing that these results are not an artifact of deficient data. He finds similar results for lesbian couples. (JEL J1 , J3 )     

Pandemic (COVID‐19) Policy,Regional Cooperation and the Emerging Global Production Network†

In this paper, we explore the possible policy responses to the COVID‐19 pandemic shock as well as the related economic (financial crisis) shocks on trade and global value chains (GVC) in East Asia. We find that regional policy coordination is critical to mitigate and isolate the pandemic shock. It is important to identify the pandemic events early to flatten the pandemic curve at the national and regional level. This supports a recent study by the World Bank (2020), which highlights the importance of early mitigation policies during the pandemic shock. The cost of the pandemic and economic shocks will increase significantly when several countries in the region experience the pandemic shock concurrently. In this case, flattening the regional pandemic curve becomes important. The results also indicate the need for greater coordination in East Asia to mitigate the pending economic shock in terms of unemployment, corporate bankruptcy and financial market fragility. The paper also highlights that the stability of the GVC network is critical during the pandemic in terms of hedging the risk of disruptions to the procurement of critical medical and health products as well as maintaining service linkages to manufacturing, such as the logistics sector. Regional policy coordination and the stability of GVC will be valuable in the post‐pandemic recovery of the region.     

STABILIZATION POLICY AT THE ZERO LOWER BOUND

We construct a monetary economy with aggregate liquidity shocks and heterogeneous idiosyncratic preference shocks. In this environment, not all agents are satiated at the zero lower bound (ZLB) even when the Friedman rule is the best interest‐rate policy the central bank can implement. As a consequence, central bank stabilization policy, which takes the form of repo arrangements in response to aggregate demand shocks, temporarily relaxes the liquidity constraint of impatient agents at the ZLB. Due to a pecuniary externality, this policy may have beneficial general equilibrium effects for patient agents even if they are unconstrained in their money balances.     

INSURANCE‐INDUCED MORAL HAZARD: A DYNAMIC MODEL OF WITHIN‐YEAR MEDICAL CARE DECISION MAKING UNDER UNCERTAINTY

This study quantifies the moral hazard effect of health insurance on medical expenditure by estimating a dynamic model of within‐year medical care consumption that allows for insurance selection, endogenous health transitions, and individual uncertainty about medical care prices in an environment where insurance has nonlinear cost‐sharing features. The results suggest that moral hazard accounts for 53.1%, on average, of total annual medical expenditure when insured. This estimate is significantly different, and generally larger, than that produced by an alternative model that is representative of the annual medical care decision‐making models commonly found in the literature.     

Walking and Talking Corporate Social Responsibility: Implications of Firm Size and Organizational Cost

In this paper we address two interrelated research gaps in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) literature. The first results from a lack of understanding of different patterns of CSR engagement with respect to CSR talk (impression management and the creation of symbolic images and documentation) and CSR walk (substantive implementation of CSR policies, structures and procedures). Related to this, the second gap concerns limited knowledge about the influence of firm size on CSR engagement. We develop a conceptual model that explains differences in CSR talk versus walk based on organizational cost and firm size. This allows us to theorize the antecedents of what we call the large firm implementation gap (large firms tend to focus on communicating CSR symbolically but do less to implement it into their core structures and procedures) and vice versa the small firm communication gap (less active communication and more emphasis on implementation). Our model expands a new theoretical understanding of CSR engagement based on as yet underemphasized firm‐level antecedents of CSR, and opens up several new avenues for future, and in particular comparative, research.