Measuring Fair Employment Practices: The Search for a "Figure of Merit"

Quantitative measures of equal employment opportunity in the bureaucracy are of quite recent vintage, even though data have been collected on minority employment since the early 1960s. Such measures as have been developed are useful in the sense that they are simple and easy to comprehend. Concentrating as they do on integration alone, however, they do not capture a sufficiently wide variety of personnel practices to truly assess equal employment opportunity. This paper presents a new measure which retains the basic simplicity required of a figure of merit but expands the dimensions of former measures to include an index of the occupational distribution of minorities within an organization. The measure presented implies a policy goal of income parity for minority groups within the bureaucracy and assesses progress toward that goal. It is argued that a worthy figure of merit can promote cost-effective implementation of public policy with regard to fair employment within the civil service.     

Licensing and technology dependence in the Andean group

This paper explores the extent to which licensing promotes technology transfer and future technological self-reliance in 47 metalworking and 43 chemical firms located in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, a set of factors which, it has been suggested, influence the choice of licensing as opposed to other means of acquiring technology were examined. Second, the relationship between licensing and future ‘technology dependency’ was explored statistically. Finally, an effort was made to explain these findings in terms of a ‘technological dependence syndrome’ in which opportunities for ‘learning by doing’ are consistently missed.     

Abnormal Returns from Predicting Earnings Thresholds

This study examines the performance of a trading strategy based on the prediction of firms concurrently reporting a positive earnings change and meeting analysts’ earnings forecasts. The evidence indicates that a model predicting both earnings thresholds concurrently can yield excess returns that are incremental to predicting only one earnings threshold. Further, I find that the prediction of forecast errors is relatively more important than predicting earnings changes as the incremental benefit from predicting earnings changes concurrently with forecast errors is small relative to a model that predicts only forecast errors. The results hold while controlling for various risk factors and known anomalies.     

Are Investors the Bad Guys? Tenure and Neighborhood Stability in Chelsea,Massachusetts

In this article, we examine the role of investors and occupant‐owners in an urban context during the recent housing crisis. We focus on Chelsea, Massachusetts, because it is a dense city, dominated by multifamily housing structures with high rates of foreclosure for which we have particularly good data. We distinguish between occupant‐owners and investors using local data, and we find that many investors are misclassified as occupant‐owners in the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Then, employing a competing risks framework to study ownerships during the period 1998 through mid‐2010, we find that local investors, who tend to invest more in relation to purchase prices and sell more quickly, experienced approximately 1.8 times the mortgage foreclosure risk of occupant‐owners, conditional on financing. Nonlocal investors have no statistically significant difference in foreclosure risk from occupant‐owners. Nonetheless, those owners with subprime purchase mortgages (most of whom are occupant‐owners) faced the highest foreclosure risk when house prices fell.     

Minimum nurse staffing ratios for nursing homes

The authors explored minimum nurse staffing ratios for nursing homes using production function simulations. Minimum levels of registered nurse hours per resident day were 0.31, 1.83, and 3.3 at 50%, 75%, and 90% levels of quality respectively. These results suggest that efficiency-oriented minimum nurse staffing points exist, and could be used to inform policymakers and nursing home administrators on better resource allocation and health care delivery.     

Incorporating price elasticity in financial forecasting models: From theory to practice and implementation

The authors use a capital budgeting example to show students how to incorporate price elasticity into financial analysis as an application of what students learn in their microeconomics course. They present simple as well as more advanced price-quantity relationships, and using various “what-if” scenarios; the authors show how risk analysis can be used to improve revenue projections and valuation models. A project analysis example is employed to illustrate results for negative predictive value and IRR based on three models of price elasticities across a range of potential product pricing. Students are then encouraged to replicate and create similar models, helping them improve their vital Excel and financial modeling skills.     

2015 will See Great Opportunities in Segment Market of Tablet PCs

【正】According to the latest Quarterly Report on the Chinese Tablet PC Market(Nov,2014)released by IDC,the Chinese tablet PC market will have a product delivery o...