The Spillover Effects of Industrial Action on Firm Profitability

While it is generally accepted that strikes can have a negative impact on a firm's performance, the direct effects of a strike on the affected firm may be only one component of the total impact resulting from the action. The existence of indirect or spillover effects can also have important implications for the economic performance of competing firms. This paper uses a panel of firm-level financial and strikes data for a large sample of firms in Australian manufacturing to determine the extent of direct and spillover effects of industrial action.     

Tailored logistics: the next advantage

How many top executives have ever visited with managers who move materials from the factory to the store? How many still reduce the costs of logistics to the rent of warehouses and the fees charged by common carriers? To judge by hours of senior management attention, logistics problems do not rank high. But logistics have the potential to become the next governing element of strategy. Whether they know it or not, senior managers of every retail store and diversified manufacturing company compete in logistically distinct businesses. Customer needs vary, and companies can tailor their logistics systems to serve their customers better and more profitably. Companies do not create value for customers and sustainable advantage for themselves merely by offering varieties of goods. Rather, they offer goods in distinct ways. A particular can of Coca-Cola, for example, might be a can of Coca-Cola going to a vending machine, or a can of Coca-Cola that comes with billing services. There is a fortune buried in this distinction. The goal of logistics strategy is building distinct approaches to distinct groups of customers. The first step is organizing a cross-functional team to proceed through the following steps: segmenting customers according to purchase criteria, establishing different standards of service for different customer segments, tailoring logistics pipelines to support each segment, and creating economics of scale to determine which assets can be shared among various pipelines. The goal of establishing logistically distinct businesses is familiar: improved knowledge of customers and improved means of satisfying them.     

Healthy lifestyle and safety: An expected net benefit approach to seat belt use

This paper examines the relationship between motorist safety belt use and three lifestyle behaviors affecting health. A healthy lifestyle affects benefits of seat belt use because it indicates a greater value on safety. If individuals are rational in their behavior, we expect consistency across health and safety choices. Using a nationwide survey sample and logit analysis we find lifestyle has expected effects on belt use holding constant individual and vehicle characteristics. Illustrations for two different lifestyles are considered: (1) smoking 1 pack per day, 2 years between dental visits, and no regular exercise and (2) no smoking, 1 year between dental visits and regular exercise. Healtiher lifestyle increases the probability of seat belt use by more than 50% for typical individuals     

The Growing Localness of the Canadian City, or, On the Continued (Ir)relevance of Economic Base Theory

The past 50 years have brought massive changes in the patterns of economic activity around the world. Not only has global trade increased, but, precisely because of this, many scholars suggest that local (and regional) networks of production and exchange have become more prevalent and important. The nature of local economic development has, as a result, changed quite substantially. And yet theoretical approaches to it largely have not. Fifty years after Douglass North introduced economic base theory - asserting that economies grow only through increased exports - it remains the familiar refrain, if not the basis, of local economic development theory. We think it is about time to reassess the merits of base theory as an approach to, and explanation of, local economic development. Accordingly, in this article, we review briefly North's argument for base theory and the debate it stirred up early on. Then we present two evaluations of its current relevance. The first is theoretical: we consider whether changes in the patterns of economic activity in the global north, including the emergence of local/regional networks of production and exchange and the growth of consumer services, have made it possible to achieve economic growth without increasing exports. The second is empirical: using the minimum requirements method, we examine whether the economies of Canada's cities have become more locally oriented and, if so, whether they have grown. Both evaluations indicate that economic development is indeed possible through increased local activity (although exports remain important). We conclude that it is time to consider more nuanced models of local economic development that accommodate the multiple ways in which development can be achieved.     

Predictors for the first-order autoregressive process

The error made in predicting a first-order autoregressive process with unknown parameters is investigated. It is shown that the least squares predictor is unbiased for symmetric error distributions. Alternative predictors for stationary and non-stationary processes are studied using the Monte Carlo method. The ordinary least squares statistics perform reasonably well for one period predictions with samples as small as ten for both stationary and non-stationary processes. It is demonstrated that there is a considerable loss in efficiency when outdated estimators are used to construct predictors.     

The use of indicator variables in computing predictions

The use of indicator variables to construct predictions and to estimate the variances of prediction errors is illustrated for systems of equations, nonlinear regressions and autoregressions.