Firm-employee relationship strength—A conceptual model

This paper posits a model of firm-employee relationship strength that permits the future measurement of an index of the strength of intra-firm relationships between the firm and the employees of that firm. The relationship marketing literature currently provides no clear direction as to how to represent and measure the strength of firm-employee relationships. The proposed model emerges from an examination of previous marketing and non-marketing literature through exploration of possible concepts to represent measuring strong and productive work relationships, focusing on relationship strength as the construct of interest. The review of the literature on the concept of relationship strength results in the development of an index model of firm-employee relationship strength predicted by cooperation, balanced power, communication, attachment, shared goals and values, trust and the absence of damaging conflict. The article concludes with a list of contributions that the model provides to the relationship marketing literature, as well as suggestions for future research. This includes examination of the impact of the relationship that a firm has with employees on external firm relationships, most particularly with customers.     

Audit committee financial expertise and properties of analyst earnings forecasts

An important role of financial accounting information is to aid financial statement users in forming expectations about the firm's future earnings. Prior research finds that accounting financial expertise of the audit committee is associated with higher financial reporting quality. We extend this literature by examining the association between audit committee financial expertise and analysts' ability to anticipate future earnings. We find a significant association between accounting financial expertise on the audit committee and analyst earnings forecasts that are more accurate and less dispersed. In contrast, we do not find a significant association between non-accounting financial expertise (i.e., supervisory expertise) and forecast accuracy or forecast dispersion. These findings contribute to our understanding of the benefits of accounting expertise in audit committees by demonstrating an association between accounting financial expertise and improvements in analyst earnings forecasts.     

Using Estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life in Evaluating Consumer Policy Regulations

This paper is a critical review of current practice for the economic evaluation of the life-saving benefits of U.S. consumer policy regulations. Selected evaluations conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are briefly reviewed. The standard approach to placing a dollar value on the life-saving benefits of regulations is based on societal willingness to pay for mortality risk reductions, conveniently summarized as the value of a statistical life (VSL). The paper proposes a common-sense rule for improving current practice: Different agencies reducing similar health risks for similar populations should use consistent estimates of the VSL, but each agency should use VSL estimates that are specific to the health risk and population affected by its regulations. Developing VSL estimates that vary by cause of death and that reflect differences in willingness to pay due to age, income, and risk preferences poses a challenge for both the research community that generates VSL estimates and policymakers.     

Developing country debt: implications for agricultural trade

There has been a sharp decline in the rate of economic growth in many developing countries in the 1980s compared with the 1970s. Reduced availability of external finance following the international debt crisis has been identified as one of the most important factors responsible for this decline. At the same time there has been a slowdown in the rate of growth of food imports to these countries, particularly to the highly indepted ones. The focus in the paper is on the implications for international agricultural commodity markets of a dept write-off in developing countries. To analyse these implications a world agricultural trade model is used. Specifically, the analysis covers the effect of existing debt on the permanent incomes of developing debtor countries and developed creditor countries, and hence the effect on agricultural commodity markets. The results indicate that, if the debts of the developing countries were written off, prices would improve in consequence of the resulting rise in their permanent incomes. If the debt write-off also led to growth in developing countries returning to the levels prevalent before the debt crisis, the improvements in world prices would be likely to be much larger.     

The immigration of Third World professionals to Canada: 1968–1973

In this paper we estimate a reduced form equation for highly skilled immigration to Canada during the period 1968–1973. The purported open immigration policy during this period implied that a relatively unregulated flow of immigrants came to Canada. We found to the contrary that the Third World immigrant flow was carefully regulated and responded significantly to four principal variables: the number of job vacancies by occupation, competing opportunities in the United States, the total flow of Third World immigrants and the number of movers from the country under consideration. The income variable never proved significant.     

How Econometric Models help Policy Makers: Theory and Practice

Frisch and Tinbergen founded the standard framework for finding the optimal economic policy by maximizing the welfare function under constraints supplied by the econometric model. Frisch worried about the reliability of the model and Tinbergen thought that it would be too difficult to specify the welfare function. Looking at current practice in Dutch policy making, both worries are relevant but the solutions proposed by the founders are not very helpful. Rather, the solution is found in applying an iterative trial-and-error procedure interfacing between the policy maker and the model-cum-expert system. The main contributions of the standard framework are its useful set of concepts, the famous order condition for a feasible solution, and the clear definition of role models for the two parties in the interaction.