Functions of industrial supplier relationships and their impact on relationship quality

Although recent scholarly work on business relationships often discusses relationship quality as a major issue, especially with regard to the phenomenon of vendor stratification, there is still little empirical research on this important construct. In this paper, the authors provide a thorough conceptualization of relationship quality and its possible antecedents, i.e., the direct and indirect functions of the relationship for the customer. Drawing on an empirical base of 230 buyer questionnaires, the authors show that the extent to which a supplier fulfills direct and indirect functions in a relationship has a direct positive impact on the relationship quality perceived by the customer. This impact is especially strong when the customer can easily replace the supplier or, in other words, when the supplier faces competition. The findings are discussed and the authors provide managerial implications for decision-makers from both buyer and supplier organizations.     

Soft versus hard targets for exchange rate intervention

Exchange rate intervention by monetary authorities should defend a band not for the spot exchange rate, but for a moving average of its recent values. This target zone is soft, in that it allows greater short-run flexibility, but also rigorous: it still precludes any sustained easing of monetary policy. In comparison with conventional hard target zones for the spot exchange rate, we find considerable advantages for the rule we propose. In particular, without compromising long-run discipline, it increases resilience against speculative attacks, especially when shocks to exchange rate fundamentals are transitory.     

Sequential estimation of shape parameters in multivariate dynamic models

Sequential maximum likelihood and GMM estimators of distributional parameters obtained from the standardised innovations of multivariate conditionally heteroskedastic dynamic regression models evaluated at Gaussian PML estimators preserve the consistency of mean and variance parameters while allowing for realistic distributions. We assess their efficiency, and obtain moment conditions leading to sequential estimators as efficient as their joint ML counterparts. We also obtain standard errors for VaR and CoVaR, and analyse the effects on these measures of distributional misspecification. Finally, we illustrate the small sample performance of these procedures through simulations and apply them to analyse the risk of large eurozone banks.     

How organizational support impacts affective commitment and turnover among Italian nurses: a multilevel mediation model

This study examines multilevel relationships between perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment and voluntary turnover among nurses. We explored the mediation role of affective commitment between POS and turnover behavior at both individual and work-unit levels. This cross-level study involved 945 Italian nurses from 60 work units. We hypothesized and showed that collective affective commitment fully mediated the impact of climate for POS on individual and collective turnover among nurses. This study helps explain the variance in turnover among nurses in healthcare organizations by analyzing the influence of unit-level climate on individual behavior. Results stress that social environments within wards are important in explaining the processes by which nurses decide to quit their work unit.     

Determinants of international university rankings scores

This article analyses the relationship between a university’s score in international university rankings, its expenditure per student and other factors such as university mission, size and productive inefficiency. We develop an economic model of rankings and universities and estimate this model with data on universities classified in the top 200 by the Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of 2007. We find that the elasticity of a university’s ranking score for the expenditure per student is between 4% and 9%, and that there are no clear signs of inefficiency in production among the top 200 universities. University mission and size are also significant predictors of ranking score. These results are especially interesting given the relevance attributed to rankings by government officials, university directors and students.     

Education and training in development

Education and training are playing an important role in the development process of the less developed countries. So far, however, the traditional systems of education have been primarily of service to the privileged strata. New systems must be found for the future which fit in with development conditions and bear upon the qualitative, as well as the quantitative, aspects of education.     

Effects of the New Basel Capital Accord on Bank Capital Requirements for SMEs

Using data from three countries (US, Italy and Australia) and surveying related studies from several other countries in Europe, we investigate the effects of the New Basel Capital Accord on bank capital requirements for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We find that, for all the countries, banks will have significant benefits, in terms of lower capital requirements, when considering small and medium sized firms as retail customers. But they will be obliged to use the Advanced IRB approach and to manage them on a pooled basis. For SMEs as corporate, however, capital requirements will be slightly greater than under the existing Basel I Capital Accord. We believe that most eligible banks will use a blended approach (considering some SMEs as retail and some as corporate). Through a breakeven analysis, we find that for all of our countries, banking organizations will be obliged to classify as retail at least 20% of their SME portfolio in order to maintain the current capital requirement (8%). JEL classification: G21, G28     

Firm age and liquidity ratio as predictors of firm growth: evidence from Indian firms

The result of the study shows that liquidity ratio and firm age increases the probability of firm becoming high growth or low growth. However, the result indicates that the chances of being high-growth firm are higher for young firms. Quantile results show that the coefficient of liquidity ratio switches from negative in lower quantiles to become positive in upper quantile with the strong positive effect and firm age coefficients are largest in the lower quantiles. These results also confirm the probit result as per which firm age is negatively significant with the growth of the firm. The present study considers an innovative approach that considers balance sheet issued the year prior to the observation of rapid growth as predictors of firm growth (similar to the credit scoring models, i.e. the Z-score model, to measure the probability of default).