A Contingency Approach to the Employment Relationship: Form, Function, and Effectiveness Implications

In the United States, the at-will doctrine purports to give employers the right to terminate employees with or without notice or good cause. However, numerous exceptions have made protection afforded by the doctrine illusory, and wrongful termination litigation often results. Other countries such as Canada and New Zealand legally prohibit at-will employment, and require reasonable notice or justification when terminating employees. On the basis of comparison of nonunion employment in those countries with that typical in the United States, we examine alternative approaches to employment relationships (independent contractor, employee rights, and at-will), and offer suggestions for choosing among them strategically based on environmental contingencies, work characteristics, and outcomes valued by a given firm. Although the choice may be limited by law in some jurisdictions, we offer a more systematic approach for U.S. firms wishing to deal with the consequences of terminations proactively as part of their overall strategic planning process.     

Measuring Core Inflation in South Africa

Measures of core inflation convey critical information about an economy. They have a direct effect on the policymaking process, particularly in inflation‐targeting countries, and are utilised in forecasting and modelling exercises. In South Africa, the price indices on which inflation is based have been subject to important structural breaks following changes to the underlying basket of goods and the methodology for constructing price indices. This paper seeks to identify a consistent measure of core inflation for South Africa using trimmed means estimates, measures that exclude changes in food and energy prices, dynamic factor models, and wavelet decompositions. After considering the forecasting ability of these measures, which provide an indication of expected second‐round inflationary effects, traditional in‐sample criteria were used for further comparative purposes. The results suggest that wavelet decompositions provide a useful measure of this critical variable.     

Agglomeration and clustering over the industry life cycle: Toward a dynamic model of geographic concentration

Research on agglomeration finds that either a higher survival rate of incumbent firms or a higher founding rate of new entrants, or both, can sustain an industry cluster. The conditioning effects of time on the two distinct mechanisms of survival and founding are, however, rarely examined. We argue that the forces driving geographic concentration vary across the industry life cycle. Data from Ontario's winery industry from 1865 to 1974 demonstrates a dynamic model of geographic concentration: agglomeration attracts more new entry in the growth stage only, whereas it contributes to firm survival in the mature stage only. The results not only establish the importance of understanding the temporal dynamics underlying agglomeration externalities, but also provide a possible explanation for the mixed empirical results found in previous studies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A heuristic analysis of highly fractionated 2n factorial experiments

Fractional factorial experiments are very useful in identifying active factors and the conventional method of analysis may not always detect these active factors. Box and Meyer (1993) provided a Bayesian method to compute the posterior probability that a factor is active. Their method does not indicate whether main effects or interactions are active. Following their approach in a non-Bayesian way, we will present a heuristic analysis which determines the active main effects and small order interactions in any 2ⁿ fractional factorial design. It may be noted that the method given by Box and Meyer has greater flexibility and wider applicability over the method given in this paper; however, our method is a simpler alternative for 2ⁿ experiments that determines active main effects and small order interactions. No SimplePara     

Building a Sustainable Bank: The Case of GTBank of Nigeria

GTBank of Nigeria has, in just 20 years, developed into one of the most profitable and sustainable financial institutions in Africa. The case identifies the choices that helped the bank emerge successful from several shocks to the Nigerian financial sector and has implications for other financial institutions trying to balance sustainability and profitability. On the basis of eight years of research on the bank, we illustrate six factors that have characterized its success: (1) effective leadership, (2) a focus on people rather than strategy, (3) adopting a simple and focused strategy, (4) a culture of sustainable banking, (5) confronting effectively the external environment, and (6) exploitation of technology to accelerate the business. GTBank’s story raises questions about what makes a company sustainable and analyzes the decisions that executives need to make, often in challenging external circumstances, in order to preserve the long‐term sustainability of an organization. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Standard deviations implied in option prices as predictors of future stock price variability

Standard deviations implied in option prices have recently been introduced as being better than average predictors of future stock price variability. This article specifically studies the predictive ability of implicit standard deviations, taking into account the dividend problem and the problem of optimal weighting schemes of the standard deviations when there are several options on the same stock. Transaction data information was used to study the importance of non-simultaneities in observing stock and option prices.