Is Competition Engaging? Examining the Interactive Effects of Goal Orientation and Competitive Work Environment on Engagement

Contemporary work environments are growing increasingly competitive. However, some employees may “fit” with such environments better than others. This study examined how the relationship between employees’ goal orientations (learning, proving, and avoidance) and engagement is influenced by the competitive environment of their workplace. By investigating the interactive effect of goal orientation and competitive work environment, this research expands our understanding of factors leading to engagement. We tested our model using a sample of 345 working adults from a variety of organizations across several different industries. Results indicate that learning goal orientation was positively related to engagement while avoidance goal orientation was negatively related to engagement. Competitive work environment (CWE) interacted with learning orientation and proving orientation to predict engagement. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our results for human resource management. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Economic Integration,Monopoly Power and Productivity Growth without Scale Effects

This paper considers how monopoly power affects the relationship between economic integration and economic growth that is not biased by a scale effect. In a two‐country model of trade, productivity growth is generated by firm‐level investment in process innovation, and the location of economic activity is determined by relative market size, trade costs and imperfect knowledge diffusion. Equilibrium features the partial concentration of manufacturing and the full concentration of innovation in the larger country. Increased economic integration raises the concentration of manufacturing in the larger country, and when monopoly power is strong, leads to decreased product variety, accelerated productivity growth and greater national welfare. With weak monopoly power, however, it raises product variety and dampens productivity growth, but may benefit or hurt welfare.     

ETF Competition and Market Quality

This paper examines competition between exchange traded funds (ETFs) that hold nearly identical portfolios of securities. We provide evidence that incumbent‐fund liquidity is negatively affected when a new ETF is added to an asset class. The degradation in liquidity is even more severe whenever both funds follow the same benchmark. We also document a decline in primary‐market activity for the incumbent ETFs after the arrival of new competitors. Furthermore, increasing the number of funds in an asset class does not put downward pressure on fund management fees. Thus, the deterioration in market quality may not be offset by decreasing costs of fund ownership.     

Conspiracies and Secret Discounts in Laboratory Markets

This paper uses laboratory methods to evaluate whether price-fixing conspiracies break down in the presence of opportunities to offer secret discounts. The primary treatment difference is whether or not buyer-specific discounts from the posted list price are permitted. In standard posted-offer markets, conspiring sellers almost uniformly find and maintain near-monopoly prices. But when the possibility of offering secret discounts is introd uced, sellers find sustaining collusive agreements much more difficult, and transactions prices tend to fall toward competitive levels. Secret discounts yield competitive outcomes less consistently, however, when sellers are provided ex post information about sales quantities     

The performance of reverse leveraged buyouts

Reverse leveraged buyouts (RLBOs) have received increased public scrutiny but attracted little systematic study. We collect a comprehensive sample of 526 RLBOs between 1981 and 2003 and examine the three-year and five-year stock performance of these offerings. RLBOs appear to perform as well as or better than other initial public offerings and the stock market as a whole, depending on the specification. Evidence exists of a deterioration of returns over time.     

Accountants’ cognitive styles and ethical reasoning: A comparison across 15 years

Recent attention to accountants’ ethics in the news, in professional practice, and by academia leads to questions about the ethical and cognitive characterization of students selecting accounting careers. We employ the Myers/Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for assessing cognitive styles, and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) for assessing ethical reasoning to study differences between two groups of accounting graduates and new hires entering the accounting profession across a period of 15 years. We show that the dominant cognitive make-up of accountants has not changed significantly over the study period, which is consistent with prior research. Also, we hypothesize and provide evidence that this dominant style is associated with lower levels of ethical reasoning (as measured by the DIT) than other cognitive styles. The ethical reasoning scores are lower for the 2005 sample than for the 1990 sample. This result may be attributable to age, gender, grade point average, or political orientation; however, incomplete data in our sample does not allow us to make definitive conclusions regarding these control variables. We discuss the implications of these findings for curriculum development and professional practice.     

Early Birds versus Just-in-Timers: The effect of procrastination on academic performance of accounting students

This study investigates the effect of procrastination on academic performance. Prior research has often relied upon self-reported measures of procrastination, which are only weakly correlated with actual procrastination. We use the start and submission of a set of online homework problems as two objective, direct measures of student procrastination and the grade on the assignments as a measure of performance. In our study, there were a number of potential benefits to submitting online assignments ‘just-in-time’. Thus, there was a direct benefit to procrastination, which students had to weigh against potential drawbacks. With a sample size larger than those previously reported in the literature, we find that for both procrastination measures, task procrastination is associated with lower task performance. To ensure that our results are not just an association between performance and student quality, we test for the association between task procrastination and task performance, while controlling for student quality. We find that even after controlling for student quality, task procrastination is associated with lower task performance.     

Are financial spreads useful indicators of future inflation and output growth in EU countries?

This paper seeks to address the policy issue of the usefulness of financial spreads as indicators of future inflation and output growth in the countries of the European Union, placing a particular focus on out-of-sample forecasting performance. Such analysis is of considerable relevance to monetary authorities, given the breakdown of the money/income relation in a number of countries and following increased emphasis of domestic monetary policy on control of inflation following the broadening of the ERM bands. The results confirm that for some countries, financial spread variables do contain some information about future output growth and inflation, with the yield curve and the reverse yield gap performing best. However, the relatively poor out-of-sample forecasting performance and/or parameter instability suggests that the need for caution in using spread variables for forecasting in EU countries. Only a small number of spreads contain information, and improve forecasting in a manner which is stable over time. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cost–consequence analysis of a hemostatic matrix alone or in combination for spine surgery patients

Background: A five-year retrospective database analysis comparing the use of Floseal¹ flowable topical hemostat alone (F) and in combination with gelatin/thrombin (F?+?G/T) to achieve hemostasis and control surgical bleeding showed higher resource utilization for F?+?G/T cases relative to F matched pairs during spinal surgery. Lower resource use in the F group was characterized by shorter hospital length of stay and surgical time as well as fewer blood transfusions and less hemostat agent used per surgery.

Objective: To evaluate the cost–consequence of using F compared to F?+?G/T in minor, major and severe spinal surgery from the US hospital perspective.

Methods: A cost–consequence model was developed using the US hospital perspective. Model inputs include clinical inputs from the literature, cost inputs (hemostatic matrices, blood product transfusion, hospital stay and operating room time) from the literature, and an analysis of annual spine surgery volume (minor, major and severe) using the 2012 National Inpatient Sample (NIS) database. Costs are reported in 2017?US dollars. One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses address sources of variability in the results.

Results: A medium-volume hospital (130 spine surgeries per year) using F versus F?+?G/T for spine surgeries is expected to require 85 less hours of surgical time, 58 fewer hospital days and 7 fewer blood transfusions in addition to hemostat volume savings (F: 1?mL, thrombin: 1994?mL). The cost savings associated with the hospital resources for a medium-volume hospital are expected to be $317,959 (surgical hours?=?$154,746, hospital days?=?$125,237, blood transfusions?=?$19,023, hemostatic agents?=?$18,953) or $2445 per spine surgery.

Conclusions: The use of F versus F?+?G/T could lead to annual cost savings for US hospitals performing a low to high volume of spinal surgeries per year.     

The future of public efforts to boost entrepreneurship and venture capital

The promotion of new high-potential business ventures and venture capital is of critical importance to economic growth. Well-considered policies can profoundly influence such opportunities, but many public initiatives are misguided. This article reviews the evidence behind these claims, as well as the criteria that can delineate appropriate and inappropriate policies towards the promotion of venture capital and high-potential entrepreneurship.