Is there a labor shortage?

Business Economics - A panel discusses ongoing and prospective developments in the US labor market. Michael Horrigan points out that job losses in the COVID recession were heavily concentrated...     

Does One Bad Apple(Juice) Spoil the Bunch? Implicit Attitudes Toward One Product Transfer to Other Products by the Same Brand

If people like a product, they will automatically like another product from the same brand even if they do not know anything about it (demonstrated in Study 1). In one sense, this may be a reasonable inference—brands that have one good product may be likely to have other good products. But what if people learn that the second product is actually not good? Explicitly, people act as expected—the second product is disliked based on its negative features. Implicitly, however, people's positive attitude toward the first product still influences their liking of the second (Study 2). This attitude transfer effect (Ranganath & Nosek, 2008) shows that people are able to avoid using the qualities of one product to judge another explicitly. But, implicitly, once an attitude is formed toward a brand's product, other products by that brand will inherit some of the original evaluation regardless of their unique qualities.     

Corporate social responsibility and gender equality: women as stakeholders and the European Union sustainability strategy

This paper examines how progress on gender equality in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) might contribute to broader EU gender and sustainability objectives. It focuses on corporations and citizenship, and on company stakeholder relations (SR) in particular. While the literature on SR has previously engaged with scholarship on feminist ethics, and in particular the 'ethics of care', this paper draws upon the feminist citizenship and feminist ethics literature, and upon gender mainstreaming strategy to suggest a more comprehensive approach to gender equality within SR. The aim is to extend our understanding of CSR as a potential policy instrument to advance gender equality.     

Same Work,Different Pay? Evidence from a US Public University

Abstract

This study examines detailed data for faculty at a typical public research university in the United States between 1995 and 2004 to explore whether gender wage differentials can be explained by productivity differences. The level of detail – including the number of courses taught, enrollment, grant dollars, and number and impact of publications – largely eliminates the problem of unmeasured productivity, and the restriction to one firm eliminates unmeasured work conditions that confound investigations of wider labor markets. The authors find that direct productivity measures reduce the gender wage penalty to about 3 percent, only 1 percentage point lower than estimates from national studies of many institutions and with fewer productivity controls. The wage structure for women faculty differs markedly from the wage structure for men. Interpreted against the institutional features of wage setting for this population, the paper concludes that penalties for women arise at the department level.     

Using photography to elicit grazier values and management practices relating to tree survival and recruitment

Integrating conservation and agricultural production is a major challenge globally. The upper Lachlan catchment of Australia is dominated by livestock grazing, and is threatened because most native woodland vegetation has been cleared. A third of all remaining tree cover occurs as scattered trees in grazing pastures. These scattered trees are dying from old age and are not regenerating due to grazing pressure. Previous work has revealed management strategies that are more likely to maintain tree cover, such as low-input rotational grazing. We asked graziers to photograph significant features on their properties, and used the images as prompts in later interviews. This elicited graziers’ landscape values and other drivers of their management practices related to tree cover. The targets that our 25 case landholders chose to photograph, and the ways they discussed them in later interviews, reflected the focus of past education and incentive programs, suggesting that well-designed policies, educational messages and incentives do seem to reach landholders and result in improved practices. For example, many landholders reported management activities related to the protection of large woodland patches or the maintenance of coarse woody debris. The maintenance of scattered tree cover has not been a focus of policy initiatives in the past. Despite this, the narratives elicited by photos of isolated and scattered trees showed graziers valued them and were aware of and concerned about their decline, yet lacked knowledge about how to protect and regenerate them. Graziers urgently need unambiguous advice and practical assistance to help them adapt their practices to maintain scattered trees in the long term.     

Literature,tourism and the city: writing and cultural change

Today national and regional tourism organizations look to sophisticated cultural tourism programmes to enhance the visitor experience for tourists of their particular city. Yet research indicates that a challenge exists in designing and implementing programmes that take full advantage of a city’s historical and emergent literary cultures. In this paper, we offer critical insights into how literary cultural heritage can foster the development of an integrated and dynamic approach and provide the experience sought by local and global tourists. International exemplars are cited together with an analysis of the Australian city of Brisbane that describes itself as a ‘new world city’. The findings of our research show that programmes that harness diverse literary cultures, rather than adhering to a single literary representation, are better equipped to build identity and thus extend cultural tourism potential.     

Ex-dividend Day Pricing in New Zealand

Controversy continues over the question of tax clientele effects in the pricing of shares that pay dividends. The empirical results remain inconclusive, with variations in testing methods and sample formation the probable causes of much of the variation in outcomes. This study focuses on testing for the presence of a tax clientele effect consistent with prior tests for the same effect using a sample from a particular tax regime period in New Zealand in which companies could pay either or both taxable and non-taxable dividends. The results are generally consistent with the presence of a tax clientele effect in the New Zealand market for the time period, while providing essentially no support for the short term trading hypothesis.
JEL classification: G10; G15