Managerial time constraints and young worker productivity: Natural experiments with NFL rookies

The 2011 National Football League lockout and movement of the 2014 draft to a later date compressed the off‐seasons preceding the 2011 and 2014 seasons, exogenously tightening time constraints within which managers—head coaches and their staffs—engage in short‐run training of players. We exploit these natural experiments to investigate how this impacted the productivity of young workers (National Football League rookies). Results estimated for a sample of over 1,500 rookies support hypotheses emanating from an economic model of worker training time allocation and indicate reduced productivity along several dimensions. Survival analysis shows evidence of shorter player career durations along certain lines, suggesting longer term consequences.     

Empirical evidence of advances in scrubber technology

Flue gas desulfurization (FGD) units have been employed at US power plants for approximately 25 years to control sulfur dioxide emissions. Although it might be hoped that FGD technology would have improved over that period, theoretical work (e.g., Downing and White [Downing, P.B., White, L.J., 1986, Innovation in pollution control, J. Environ. Econ. Manage., 13, 18–29], and Milliman and Prince [Milliman, S.R., Prince, R., 1989, Firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control, J. Environ. Econ. Manage., 17, 247–265]) has shown that the type of regulation generally favored in the US (direct regulation of emissions levels) provides poor incentives for technological improvements. Data on the design, performance and costs of FGD units at coal burning plants in the US are used to estimate a model of FGD costs and tests are performed in an attempt to determine whether progress has occurred. Results suggest that no significant progress has occurred in abatement technology, although costs of operating particular units at plants to tend to decrease over the lifetime of the unit.     

Bank ownership and efficiency in China: What will happen in the world’s largest nation?

China is reforming its banking system, partially privatizing and taking on minority foreign ownership of three of its dominant “Big Four” state-owned banks. This paper helps predict the effects by analyzing the efficiency of Chinese banks over 1994–2003. Findings suggest that Big Four banks are by far the least efficient; foreign banks are most efficient; and minority foreign ownership is associated with significantly improved efficiency. We present corroborating robustness checks and offer several credible mechanisms through which minority foreign owners may increase Chinese bank efficiency. These findings suggest that minority foreign ownership of the Big Four will likely improve performance significantly.     

Bank Competition and Financial Stability

Under the traditional “competition-fragility” view, more bank competition erodes market power, decreases profit margins, and results in reduced franchise value that encourages bank risk taking. Under the alternative “competition-stability” view, more market power in the loan market may result in higher bank risk as the higher interest rates charged to loan customers make it harder to repay loans, and exacerbate moral hazard and adverse selection problems. The two strands of the literature need not necessarily yield opposing predictions regarding the effects of competition and market power on stability in banking. Even if market power in the loan market results in riskier loan portfolios, the overall risks of banks need not increase if banks protect their franchise values by increasing their equity capital or engaging in other risk-mitigating techniques. We test these theories by regressing measures of loan risk, bank risk, and bank equity capital on several measures of market power, as well as indicators of the business environment, using data for 8,235 banks in 23 developed nations. Our results suggest that—consistent with the traditional “competition-fragility” view—banks with a higher degree of market power also have less overall risk exposure. The data also provides some support for one element of the “competition-stability” view—that market power increases loan portfolio risk. We show that this risk may be offset in part by higher equity capital ratios.

Integrity and Global Leadership

This paper addresses the role of integrity in global leadership. It reviews the philosophy of ethics and suggests that both contractarianism and pluralism are particularly helpful in understanding ethics from a global leadership perspective. It also reviews the challenges to integrity that come through interactions that are both external and internal to the company. Finally, the paper provides helpful suggestions on how global leaders can define appropriate ethical standards for themselves and their organizations.     

The Nature of Cities: The Scope and Limits of Urban Theory

There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the global North. This article offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.     

Interactivity and Soft Computing in Portfolio Management: Should Farmers Own Food and Agribusiness Stocks?

This article proposes a fully integrated and interactive elicitation-optimization procedure for portfolio management. A soft computing approach based on fuzzy logic is developed as an alternative to the traditional mean variance model and compromise programming approach. The models are applied to farmers to examine whether they should buy publicly traded food and agribusiness firms stocks rather than invest in a broader market stock portfolio. Results suggest that investments in publicly traded food and agribusiness stocks allow farmers to capture additional benefits beyond those of simply diversifying in the broader market.