Inventories and antidumping: the case of orange juice trade

The United States and Brazil are key players in the international market for orange juice, mainly frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ). The U.S. orange juice industry benefits from one of the highest levels of import protection in U.S. agriculture. Additional trade protection was recently added with a U.S. industry victory in an antidumping trade suit against Brazil. We study the impact of FCOJ imports from Brazil on U.S. prices using time series econometric models and find only a weak FCOJ domestic price response to imports from Brazil, because extremely large U.S. inventories mute the price impact of any fluctuation in imports. Our findings imply that the antidumping tariffs were unjustified based on a material injury argument.     

Perceptions versus performance when managing extensions: new evidence about the role of fit between a parent brand and an extension

The extant literature contends that a new product extension’s success is an increasing function of the parent brand’s quality and the degree of fit between the parent brand and extension. We develop theory to explore relationships between parent quality, image fit and functional fit. Each of these components should trigger positive pre-purchase associations from the parent. However, at the point of sale, high levels of functional fit are expected to increase the probability of substitution between parent and extension. To test this and related assertions, we augment UPC scanner data with perceptual measures for 42 matched parent–extension pairs. Findings confirm that high parent quality negatively impacts an extension’s sales when functional fit is high. Equally telling, low parent quality can actually increase an extension’s sales in some cases. We use our fitted model to present counter-factual experiments to show the magnitude of these increases or decreases under combinations of our key variables and extension type, line or brand. The combinations we explore occur frequently in-market.     

Managing basis risk with multiscale index insurance

Agricultural index insurance indemnifies a farmer against losses based on an index that is correlated with, but not identical to, her or his individual outcomes. In practice, the level of correlation may be modest, exposing insured farmers to residual, basis risk. In this article, we study the impact of basis risk on the demand for index insurance under risk and compound risk aversion. We simulate the impact of basis risk on the demand for index insurance by Malian cotton farmers using data from field experiments that reveal the distributions of risk and compound risk aversion. The analysis shows that compound risk aversion depresses demand for a conventional index insurance contract some 13 percentage points below what would be predicted based on risk aversion alone. We then analyze an innovative multiscale index insurance contract that reduces basis risk relative to conventional, single‐scale index insurance contract. Simulations indicate that demand for this multiscale contract would be some 40% higher than the demand for an equivalently priced conventional contract in the population of Malian cotton farmers. Finally, we report and discuss the actual uptake of a multiscale contract introduced in Mali.     

‘Nothing gets done and no one knows why’: PCS and workplace control of Lean in HM Revenue and Customs

This article examines the willingness and capacity of public sector unions to mobilise action against changes in the labour process in order to maintain some measure of control at the point of production. Taking as an instance an extended dispute in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs over the introduction and impact of Lean processes, it marshals evidence gathered from documentary sources, branch representatives and national lay full‐time officers to engage with the notion of a trade union bureaucracy. In taking a union with a left‐wing leadership and a section with 80 per cent membership with an expressed willingness to escalate industrial action, the article tests Hyman's 1979 contention that, rather than a concentration on a bureaucratic caste, a much better explanation for conservatism centres on the nature of social relations within the union that encompass a wider layer of representatives.     

The effects of employee engagement and self-efficacy on job performance: a longitudinal field study

Abstract

Self-efficacy’s influence on individual job performance has been well documented in laboratory studies. However, there have been very few rigorous field studies of self-efficacy’s relationship with objectively measured individual job performance in organizational settings. This research history might account for the low take-up of self-efficacy within the business literature as well as within business itself. When it comes to studies of employee engagement, the same lack of rigorous individual studies applies, although several organizational-level studies link employee engagement to organizational performance, while its claimed benefits have been widely discussed in the business literature. Finally, the degree to which employee engagement and self-efficacy have independent and additive effects on individual-level job performance remains unknown. In order to address these issues, a longitudinal field study was undertaken within an Australian financial services firm. Using survey data linked to objectively measured job performance, we found the additive effects of self-efficacy and employee engagement explained 12% of appointments made and 39% of products sold over and above that explained by past performance. This finding suggests human resource management (HRM) practitioners should address both self-efficacy and employee engagement in order to boost job performance while encouraging HRM scholars to incorporate both measures when conducting job performance studies.     

KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study (KIDS) 1993–98: A longitudinal household database for South African policy analysis

An important adjunct of apartheid has been the absence of credible and comprehensive data on which policies, such as poverty reduction strategies, can be grounded. The 1993 Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development (PSLSD) provided the first comprehensive household database for South Africa. Despite its usefulness, however, the one round PSLSD cannot provide answers to many questions important to policy researchers and practitioners, particularly questions about dynamic processes. The primary objective in this article is to introduce a new longitudinal household database, based on the PSLSD, which begins to fill this gap. Households surveyed by the PSLSD in KwaZulu-Natal province were re-surveyed in 1998 by the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Survey (KIDS). As a research endeavour, the KIDS project addresses one of the most vexing and important problems confronting contemporary South Africa: understanding the forces and mechanisms which contribute to the perpetuation of apartheid's legacy of poverty and inequality.     

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How Focused are the World’s Top-Rated Business Schools on Educating Women for Global Management?

Persuaded by the observed positive link between the flow of appropriately skilled and trained female talent and female presence at the upper echelons of management (Plitch, Dow Jones Newswire February 9, 2005), this study has examined current trends on women’s uptake of graduate and executive education programs in the world’s top 100 business schools and explored the extent to which these business schools promote female studentship and career advancement. It contributes by providing pioneering research insight, albeit at an exploratory level, into the emerging best practice on this important aspect of business school behavior, an area which is bound to become increasingly appreciated as more global economic actors wise up to the significant diseconomies inherent in the under-utilization of female talent, particularly in the developing world. Among the study’s main findings are that female graduate students averaged 30% in the sample business schools, a figure not achieved by a majority of the elite schools, including some of the highest ranked. Only 10% of these business schools have a specialist center for developing women business leaders, and only a third offered women-focused programs or executive education courses, including flextime options. A higher, and increasing, percentage of business schools, however, reported offering fellowships, scholarships or bursaries to prospective female students, and having affiliations with pro-women external organizations and networks that typically facilitate career-promoting on-campus events and activities. The implications of the foregoing are discussed, replete with a call on key stakeholder groups to more actively embrace the challenge of improving the supply of appropriately trained female talent, or top management prospects. Future research ideas are also suggested.     

Return Volatility,Trading Imbalance and the Information Content of Volume

In this paper, we examine the relationship between volume and return volatility using the transaction data. We introduce transaction and volume imbalance measures to capture the information content of trades. These two information measures are shown to have a strong explanatory power for return volatility and contain incremental information about the asset values over and above that conveyed by the size and frequency of trades. Also, return volatility is significantly correlated with the percentage of trading volume taking place at NYSE. This result suggests that NYSE trades are more informative and contribute more to price discovery. There is evidence that price discovery concentrates in more heavily traded stocks, particularly the Dow Jones Stocks. Finally, return volatility is found to be persistent at the intraday level. The persistence level is higher for less frequently traded stocks. Return volatility also exhibits temporal variations. In particular, return volatility is significantly higher in the opening half-hour for less frequently traded stocks. Thus, stocks with different frequencies of trades may follow different volatility processes.