Household Composition, Equivalence Scales and the Reliability of Income Distributions: Some Evidence for Indigenous and Other Australians

Indigenous families experience substantial and multiple forms of economic burden arising from the size and structure of their families and households. Indigenous households are more likely to have more than one family in residence than other Australian households and are more likely to be multigenerational with older Indigenous people living with younger people in extended family households. This paper seeks to characterise the economies of household size in Indigenous and other Australian households using equivalence scales that cover the range of feasible values and 1995 National Health Survey data.     

Profit and Price Effects of Multi‐species Individual Transferable Quotas

Regulators in many countries have adopted individual transferable quotas as a means of dealing with the open access problem inherent in fisheries. Using individual vessel data prior to and after the introduction of ITQs in Canada's multi‐species Scotia‐Fundy mobile gear fishery, the paper uses an index number profit decomposition to compare vessel performance over time and across individual vessels. The approach allows us to undertake both an ex post evaluation of short‐term impacts of ITQs and an ex ante evaluation of longer term impacts. With respect to short‐term impacts, the results suggest that larger vessels have benefited the most from the introduction of ITQs, but that all vessels have enjoyed increases in the prices received for those fish species that are included in the quota program. With respect to longer‐term impacts, the transferability provisions of the ITQ program have encouraged exit and more efficient operations to prevail.     

Time to Eat: Household Production under Increasing Income Inequality

Using time diaries and expenditure data for the United States for 1985 and 2003, I examine how income and time prices affect time and goods inputs into eating. Both inputs increase with income, and higher time prices reduce time inputs. Between 1985 and 2003 the goods intensity of eating increased, especially lower in the income distribution, and average time inputs dropped, particularly time spent shopping, preparing, and cleaning up after meals. The results are consistent with relatively difficult goods-time substitution in eating that becomes more difficult as household production expands.     

Employee attitudes,customer satisfaction,and sales performance: assessing the linkages in US grocery stores

Using store‐level panel data for a major supermarket company, we investigate the linkages between employee attitudes, customer satisfaction, and sales performance, while controlling for observed and unobserved differences across stores. We find that employee attitudes positively affect customer satisfaction with service but do not affect customer satisfaction with quality or value. Additionally, we find that customer satisfaction with service positively affects sales performance. Our results suggest that employee attitudes affect sales performance through their impact on customer service. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Changes in the distribution of house prices over time: Structural characteristics,neighborhood, or coefficients?

Quantile hedonic house price function estimates imply that appreciation rates were higher between 1995 and 2005 for high-priced homes in Chicago. Decompositions of temporal changes in the house price distribution suggest that the types of homes sold and their location do not account for the change in the price distribution. Rather, higher appreciation rates for high-priced homes are explained by differences in the quantile regression coefficients over time.     

Business model schema: business model innovation tool based on direct causal mechanisms of profit

ABSTRACT

Defining business model as the logic/mode/way/framework to seek profit/money and glancing at the evolution of concept business, this paper develops a business model schema (BMS) as a holistic two-dimensions multi-level tool/method for business model innovation (BMI) based on the direct causal mechanisms of profit (DCMP). First, this paper takes DCMP as the logical/theoretical framework by which business model innovation process is identified and specified. And according to that process, it develops a BMS, illustrates an example of BMS to show up its practical usefulness, compares the similarities and differences between BMS and the existing powerful one business model canvas (BMC), and finally asserts that BMS must be a good and useful method in theory and practice because it stands on DCMP that ensures the genuine causality of profit and also it turns out practically useful, recalling the Kurt Lewin’s maxim (1945), “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.     

Associational versus correlational research study design and data analysis

Scientific human psychology (SHP) is an international public enterprise responsible for promoting the optimization of humanity’s experienced quality of life by means of the various psychological crafts, such as parenting, teaching, supervising; winning a debate or election, achieving a good enough sale or purchase, benefitting oneself by threatening, taunting, seducing or by protecting oneself through avoiding, escaping, or counteracting threats, taunts, seduction, entrapment; meditating, praying, exercising. Etc. Optimizing their practice for achieving this requires a research methodology that most cost-effectively facilitates doing so and therefore requires centrally coordinated programmatic research devoted to fully enough dimensionally specifying each of these crafts and their effects and to validly measuring on all these dimensions. Linear model (covariational) statistics presume too much about how causes and effects are inter-related to rely on for adequately informing such research, so SHP needs a less presumptive and more data sensitive form of study design and data analysis, the associational model.     

USING EL NIÑO-SOUTHERN OSCILLATION CLIMATE DATA TO IMPROVE FOOD POLICY PLANNING IN INDONESIA

Despite the impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events on climate in the Indo-Pacific region, models linking ENSO-based climate variability to Indonesian cereal production are not well developed. This study measures connections among sea-surface temperature anomalies (SSTAs), rainfall, and Indonesian rice and corn production from 1971 to 1998. Year-to-year August SSTA fluctuations explain about half the interannual variance in paddy production during the main (wet) season. These effects are cumulative for rice: during strong El Niño years, wet season production shortfalls are not made up subsequently. For corn, the cumulative area sown is actually higher in El Niño years than La Niña years. Indonesia's paddy production varies on average by 1.4 million tons for every 1°C change in August SSTAs. The paper illustrates how an SSTA model might assist policy makers with budgetary processes, and private sector cereal traders with framing production expectations.     

A simple model of credit contagion

We propose a simple model of credit contagion in which we include macro- and microstructural interdependencies among the debtors within a credit portfolio. The microstructure captures interdependencies between debtors that go beyond their exposure to common factors, e.g., business or legal interdependencies. We show that even for diversified portfolios, moderate microstructural interdependencies have a significant impact on the tails of the loss distribution. This impact increases dramatically for less diversified microstructures.