International assignments: is there a role for gender and race in decisions?

The authors argue that international managers and researchers need to avoid an ostrich-like attitude of ‘gender and race blindness’ when dealing with diversity in the workforce. This issue is addressed specifically in the case of international assignments. The paper draws on previous studies investigating gender, race and international assignment, and considers a sample of regulations pertaining to gender and race in the context of international assignment decisions. The authors present the results of a preliminary study focusing specifically on the interplay of these variables. Based on the issues discussed, the authors examine selection, preparation and support activities as important avenues for meaningfully incorporating gender and race into the international assignment process.     

Commonotonicity and time-consistency for Lebesgue-continuous monetary utility functions

Finance and Stochastics - It is proved that monetary utility functions that are commonotonic and time-consistent are conditional expectations. We also give additional results on atomless and...     

Cross‐Country Differences in Unemployment: Fiscal Policy,Unions, and Household Preferences in General Equilibrium

We develop a five‐period overlapping generations model with individuals who differ by ability and with an imperfect labour market (union wage setting) for individuals of lower ability. The model explains human capital formation, hours worked, and unemployment within one coherent framework. Its predictions match the differences in the unemployment rate across 12 OECD countries remarkably well. A Shapley decomposition of these differences reveals an almost equal role for fiscal policy variables and union preferences. As to fiscal policy, differences in unemployment benefits play a much more important role than tax differences. Differences in households’ taste for leisure are unimportant.     

Representation of the penalty term of dynamic concave utilities

In the context of a Brownian filtration and with a fixed finite time horizon, we provide a representation of the penalty term of general dynamic concave utilities (hence of dynamic convex risk measures) by applying the theory of g-expectations.     

A note on the no arbitrage condition for international financial markets

We consider an international financial market model that consists ofN currencies. The purpose is to derive a no arbitrage condition which is not affected by the choice of numéraire between theN currencies. As a result, we show that a finiteness condition for an arbitrary chosen currency and the no arbitrage condition for the basket currency are necessary and sufficient for the no arbitrage property of all theN currencies. Research supported in part by Nomura Foundation for Social Science and by the European Community Stimulation Plan for Economic Science contract Number SPES-CT91-0089. The authors thank an anonymous FEJM referee for helpful comments.     

Weighted norm inequalities and hedging in incomplete markets

Let be an -valued special semimartingale on a probability space with canonical decomposition . Denote by the space of all random variables , where is a predictable -integrable process such that the stochastic integral is in the space of semimartingales. We investigate under which conditions on the semimartingale the space is closed in , a question which arises naturally in the applications to financial mathematics. Our main results give necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the closedness of in . Most of these conditions deal with BMO-martingales and reverse H?lder inequalities which are equivalent to weighted norm inequalities. By means of these last inequalities, we also extend previous results on the F?llmer-Schweizer decomposition.     

A Note on Option Pricing for the Constant Elasticity of Variance Model

We study the arbitrage free optionpricing problem for the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) model. To treatthestochastic aspect of the CEV model, we direct attention to the relationship between the CEV modeland squared Bessel processes. Then we show the existence of a unique equivalentmartingale measure and derive the Cox's arbitrage free option pricing formulathrough the properties of squared Bessel processes. Finally we show that the CEVmodel admits arbitrage opportunities when it is conditioned to be strictlypositive.     

Designing and supporting transnational teams: The human resource agenda

As the challenges of managing across borders become increasingly complex, companies are exploring innovative ways to organize and manage people. Many are turning to the use of transnational teams composed of individuals from multiple nationalities working on tasks that span multiple countries. This article reports the findings from a study of human resource practices used in 34 transnational teams from 23 multinational firms. The article provides specific examples of how staffing, training, and rewards systems are adapted to support the strategic orientations of these teams.¹ © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

An Interest Rate Model with Upper and Lower Bounds

We propose a new interest rate dynamicsmodel where the interest rates fluctuate in a bounded region. The model ischaracterised by five parameters which are sufficiently flexible to reflect theprediction of the future interest rates distribution. The interest rate convergesin law to a Beta distribution and has transition probabilities which arerepresented by a series of Jacobi polynomials. We derive the moment evaluationformula of the interest rate. We also derive the arbitrage free pure discountbond price formula by a weighted series of Jacobi polynomials. Furthermore wegive simple lower and upper bounds for the arbitrage free discount bond pricewhich are tight for the narrow interest rates region case. Finally we show thatthe numerical evaluation procedure converges to the exact value in the limitand evaluate the accuracy of the approximation formulas for the discount bondprices.