The effects of families and ability on men's education and earnings in Britain

The paper estimates the returns to education for a cohort of men born in Britain in March 1958 who have been followed since birth until the age of 33. The data used has a wealth of information on family background including parental education, social class and interest shown in the child's education as well as measures of ability. These variables are typically missing in studies looking at the returns to schooling. In the paper, we find that the average return to an additional year of full-time education for the UK men is somewhere around 5 1/2% to 6% even after correcting for the effects of measurement error. The paper also presents evidence that the returns to an additional year of schooling in the UK are heterogeneous. In particular, the paper finds some evidence that men with lower tastes for education, have significantly higher marginal returns to education. The results of the paper suggest that recent IV estimates of the returns to schooling in the UK, which exceed typical OLS estimates, may overestimate the average marginal return for the population of men as a whole.     

Comparing Nonprofit Charter and Traditional Public School Board Member Perceptions of the Public,Conflict, and Financial Responsibility: Is there a difference and does it matter?

In this paper, survey data collected from nonprofit charter school board and elected public school board members in Minnesota is used to test three hypotheses relating to theories of New Public Management, democratic governance, and small group dynamics. We find that nonprofit charter school board members perceive lower levels of conflict, place less priority on the general public, and perceive a higher degree of governance responsibly in the area of financial management, than elected board members. We conclude that the increased use of nonprofit charter schools has potentially substantial implications on accountability and effectiveness in the delivery of public education.     

Retailing in the nonprofit sector: an exploratory analysis of church‐connected retailing ventures

American churches, like other nonprofits, are faced with diminishing financial support and have turned to alternative marketing strategies to raise needed funds. Retail stores form one of these alternative marketing strategies. This research explores the phenomenon of retail stores associated with Episcopal churches and provides dimensions to understanding the relationship of church membership, connection with history and/or tourist activities, and various marketing tools with performance. While the research offers managerial implications for those engaged in retailing associated with churches, this paper also offers additional insight into nonprofit marketing in general. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications     

Trade Union Responses to zero hours work in Ireland

This paper examines the strategies adopted by Irish unions in responding to zero hours work in four sectors. It concludes that rather than adopting either a passive or a uniform approach, unions have pragmatically varied their strategies to curtail zero‐hours work through actively combining both bargaining and regulatory approaches.     

MRO parts service in the machine tool industry

This article examines the post purchase Parts servicing of Machine Tools. Survey results outline the policies and criteria that influence the degree to which replacement parts will be provided for old machines. The survey indicates that the policies of some American manufacturers leave service gaps that can be exploited by foreign as well as domestic competitors.     

Similarities in industrial procurement across four countries

This article reports on a cross-sectional, longitudinal, and comparative study of industrial buyer behavior. The study points to clear similarities in industrial purchasing between buyers in two industries in four countries. It also shows similarities in results using the same instrument taken in studies several years apart and points to generalizations about the involvement of different departments in the purchase of a variety of product types in different international markets.     

Competition in business networks

Most of those who write about marketing or strategy appear to view competition as the overarching logic of business. Commentators have usually associated competition with improved economic efficiency and customer well-being: they have regarded it as “a good thing”, at least in the abstract or when it only affects others. In contrast to the widespread interest of other researchers and the preoccupations of managers with competition, researchers within the IMP tradition have devoted hardly any attention to the issue in over thirty years of research and the term occurs only infrequently in the IMP literature.     

Commitment: A mathematical model

The concept of commitment has received ever-increasing attention from social scientists during the past fifteen years. Its usage occurs in several seemingly disjoint problem areas, but it is typically introduced when available explanations fail to describe the tendency for individuals to persist on a given course of action, once started, without obvious motive for doing so. Until recently its theoretical status has been as a primitive term, often appearing in ad hoc explanations, and accepted without question. In sociology, the first major query into the nature of commitment was Howard Becker's “Notes on the Concept of Commitment” (1960), a particularly influential article in stimulating research on commitment. However, most subsequent empirical work has dealt with the correlates and effects of commitment rather than with its genesis. Regrettably, what was once a problem in ad hoc theorizing has come to be matched by ad hoc operationalization of the concept. The present paper is a response to a perceived need for a formal model of commitment whose features might make the concept amenable to uniform theoretical and empirical usage. The purpose of this paper is to present a mathematical model of a general commitment mechanism which complements some extant ideas about the formal role of commitment in explaining certain types of behavior. The first part of the paper concentrates on extracting ideas from sociological and social psychological literature which provide the foundation for the intuitions to be formalized later. The second part presents a mathematical model of commitment. The third part discusses commitment in the context of a turnover model, and in concluding suggests some possible revisions and extensions of the model.     

Relationships among levels of government support,marketing activities,and financial health of nonprofit performing arts organizations

• This exploratory study researches and analyzes the empirical effects of financial levels of government support and marketing practices on the financial health of nonprofit performing arts organizations. Declining government subsidies and increasing competition from non-traditional sources have presented these organizations with unique opportunities and challenges that call for a market-centered, as well as an art-centered approach. Financial health is critical for the long-term success of a nonprofit performing arts organization. Few empirical studies have examined the interrelationships between these key variables. This study analyzes a sample of 63 American professional symphony orchestras employing 20 years of data. The correlations among financial levels of government support and marketing activities were positive and significant, the correlations among levels of government support and financial health were negative and significant, and the correlations between levels of marketing activity and financial health were negative and varied in significance. Causal analyses were less conclusive, but significant causal relationships were found for large symphony orchestras, indicating that segmentation research may be warranted. Implications and opportunities for future research are presented which have potential application for government agencies, academic researchers, and arts organization managers, boards of directors, and donors.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Real-sector parameter instability and the optimal choice of monetary policy

In this paper we consider the effects of uncertainty upon the optimum choice of monetary policy instrument. Specifically we extend the work of Poole (1970), and others, to allow for the existence of multiplicative as well as additive stochastic coefficients in the structural equations of the standard IS-LM macroeconomic model. We demonstrate that the commonly accepted notion that money-stock control is superior to interest-rate control when the IS schedule is stochastic is not always valid.