Expert labour as a differentiated category: power,knowledge and organisation

The idea of ‘expert labour’ as a category uniting many kinds of knowledge‐based work has long been of interest. At the same time, existing models often do not differentiate between the many forms of ‘new’ expertise in the main business and technological groups. These tend to be consolidated in single categories of ‘entrepreneurial’, ‘organisational’ or ‘commercial’ professions. This paper built on Reed's seminal account of the expert division of labour. It used his analytic dimensions of power, knowledge and organisation to develop a new framework comparing clusters of expert labour in professional services, business services and knowledge work. It offered a more detailed classification and a comparative view that throws fresh light on key debates around new professionalism and emergent technologically defined occupations.     

High Stakes Decision Making: Normative,Descriptive and Prescriptive Considerations

This paper reviews the state of the art of research on individual decision-making in high-stakes, low-probability settings. A central theme is that resolving high-stakes decisions optimally poses a formidable challenge not only to naïve decision makers, but also to users of more sophisticated tools, such as decision analysis. Such decisions are difficult to make because precise information about probabilities is not available, and the dynamics of the decision are complex. When faced with such problems, naïve decision-makers fall prey to a wide range of potentially harmful biases, such as failing to recognize a high-stakes problem, ignoring the information about probabilities that does exist, and responding to complexity by accepting the status quo. A proposed agenda for future research focuses on how the process and outcomes of high-stakes decision making might be improved.     

A Model of the Effects of Self-efficacy on the Perceived Ethicality and Performance of Fear Appeals in Advertising

The primary purpose of this study was to better understand the effects of consumers' perceived self-efficacy on their perceptions of the ethicality of a fear appeal and subsequent attitudes towards the ad, the brand, and purchase intentions. In this study, a total of 305 consumer responses were investigated to determine attitudes toward a fear appeal ad. The results suggest that the use of strong fear appeals may not be perceived as unethical if consumers feel they can use the recommended product to effectively eliminate the threat posed by the ad.     

Firm-Level Evidence on International Stock Market Comovement *

We explore the link between international stock market comovement and the extent to which firms operate globally. Using stock returns and balance sheet data for companies in 20 countries, we estimate a factor model that decomposes stock returns into global, country-and industry-specific shocks. We find a large and statistically significant link for global shocks. A firm raising its international sales by 10 percent raises the exposure of its stock return to global shocks by two percent. This link has grown stronger over time since the mid-1980s. We find no similarly robust link between international sales and exposure to country-specific shocks. * We are grateful to Marcelle Chauvet, Kathryn Dominguez, Kristin Forbes, Geert Rouwenhorst, Dan Waggoner, participants in the Atlanta Fed Finance Brown Bag, the IMF conference on “Global Linkages”, and the Kiel Institute for World Economics workshop on multinationals for their suggestions. We are especially grateful to Franklin Allen, Marco Pagano, and two anonymous referees for extensive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, we wish to thank Menzie Chinn for sharing his capital account liberalization measure, Iskander Karibzhanov for translating some of our code into C and Young Kim for excellent research assistance.     

An Empirical Assessment of the Contract Based Exception to the Employment-At-Will Rule

While extensive, the existing literature on the employment-at-will doctrine and its various exceptions has been remarkably uniform. By relying on a discussion of selected court opinions on specific aspects of the doctrine, scholars have focused primarily on normative issues such as what the courts should do when deciding job security disputes, or what plaintiffs/employees and defendants/employers should argue when litigating employment disputes. Our approach and focus are different. Instead of relying on a discussion of selected cases, we rely on a more comprehensive sample of cases. Instead of focusing on normative issues, our goal is to provide a more complete picture of the state of the at-will doctrine as reflected in those cases. Our data should be of interest to legal scholars interested in understanding the characteristics and outcomes of litigated employment-at-will cases. Our data should also be relevant to the current debate among management scholars regarding conflicts that might arise due to aggressive recruitment practices which highlight long term employment opportunities and the realities associated with at-will employment.     

Semiparametric efficient estimation of dynamic panel data models

This paper extends the semiparametric efficient treatment of panel data models pursued by Park and Simar [Park, B.U., Simar, L., 1994. Efficient semiparametric estimation in stochastic frontier models. Journal of the American Statistical Association 89, 929–936] and Park et al. [Park, B.U., Sickles, R.C., Simar, L., 1998. Stochastic frontiers: a semiparametric approach. Journal of Econometrics 84, 273–301; Park, B.U., Sickles, R.C., Simar, L., 2003. Semiparametric efficient estimation of AR(1) panel data models. Journal of Econometrics 117, 279–309] to a dynamic panel setting. We develop a semiparametric efficient estimator under minimal assumptions when the panel model contains a lagged dependent variable. We apply this new estimator to analyze the structure of demand between city pairs for selected U.S. airlines during the period 1979 I–1992 IV.     

Toward an Applied Meaning for Ethics in Business

The field of business ethics has been active for several decades, but it has yet to develop a generally agreed upon applied ethical perspective for the discipline. Academics in business disciplines have developed useful science-based models explaining why business people behave ethically but without a generally accepted definition of ethical behavior. Academics in moral philosophy have attempted to formulate what they believe ethical behavior is, but many seem to ignore or reject the basic mission of business. The purpose of this article is to offer one view of ethics in business that accommodates the mission of business. This purpose is achieved by reviewing the mission of ethics in applied disciplines like business and melding it into the mission of business in capitalistic societies.