Work absence in industrialised societies: the Australian case

In this paper, Bob Crawford and Sam Volard present an analysis of the causes for temporary non-approved work absence in which they isolate the extent of the ‘sickie’ in Australian industry. They suggest areas in which management can properly institute programmes which are likely to reduce the incidence of this largely avoidable and costly organisational problem.     

A happy “half way-house”? Medium term inflation targeting in New Zealand

The 2002 Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the government and central bank of New Zealand asks the central bank to target inflation “over the medium term” rather than over an annual target. Delegating such a medium term objective to the central bank shifts inflation targeting towards a “halfway-house” between inflation targeting and price level targeting. We show empirically that this helps time consistent policy approximate the first-best commitment policy even when the government asks the central bank to weight output stabilisation differently to society. We estimate the New Zealand economy with a small open economy DSGE model and show that the happiest halfway house is located around a two year averaging horizon at most, which leads to mild improvements in monetary policy efficiency.     

Which Service? How Industry Conditions Shape Firms’ Service‐Type Choices

This article studies the role of industry conditions as determinants of manufacturing and software firms’ decisions to offer services. It draws on the competence perspective on industry evolution and servitization to theorize and provide empirical evidence on how industry conditions affect firms’ choice to offer two distinct types of services—product‐oriented services and customer‐oriented services. It is argued that firms are likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments to address high technological uncertainty by leveraging and reinforcing capabilities in the existing technology. In contrast, firms are likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian industry environments to address value generation uncertainty by building competences in new technological or market areas. Based on longitudinal data on 410 public firms from manufacturing industries and the software industry, empirical evidence suggests that firms are indeed more likely to offer product‐oriented services in Schumpeterian industry environments, such as in the early stage of the industry life cycle and under conditions of high R&D intensity and competition, whereas they are more likely to offer customer‐oriented services in non‐Schumpeterian environments, such as in the later stages of the industry life cycle and in highly cyclical industries.     

Teledemocracy from the top

Teledemocracy, the use of new communications and information technology to widen the scope of the public's political participation, is a hot topic. Over the past few years a number of wide-scale teledemocratic experiments have taken place, for example in New Zealand, the State of Washington, and Hawaii, and the idea is being increasingly discussed in the scholarly as well as popular literature.¹ The reasoning behind, and justification for, teledemocracy has been expounded before.² This Comment, however, attacks the problem from a new perspective - where do politicians fit into such a system, and why should they nurture its development?