Retention of talented academic researchers: Evidence from a government intervention

The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program is designed primarily to retain academic talent in Canadian universities by providing targeted grants to outstanding researchers. Once awarded a chair at her home university, a researcher's compensation increases by 6.3% on average, with a significant decline over CRC tenure. Furthermore, the chance of the researcher changing jobs does not decrease. Although universities report spending more than half of the grant on compensation, only a small portion of the grant can be accounted for as a compensation increase. This demonstrates the difficulty in designing government interventions to have an impact on academic retention.     

The mistreatment of public service workers: identifying key risk and protective factors

This paper investigates the dynamics of worker mistreatment in a new public management (NPM) environment. It explores the combination of organizational and individual risk and protective factors. It reveals that the cumulative effects of organizational and individual factors radically increase the likelihood of mistreatment. Implications of these findings are outlined.     

A note on the ‘Linsanity’ of measuring the relative efficiency of National Basketball Association guards

This note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011/12 National Basketball Association (NBA) season. This period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of New York Knicks’ starting point guard Jeremy Lin and the attendant public and media hype known as Linsanity. We employ a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach that includes allowance for an undesirable output, here turnovers per game, with the desirable outputs of points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game and an input of minutes per game. The results indicate that depending upon the specification, between 29% and 42% of NBA guards are fully efficient, including Jeremy Lin, with a mean inefficiency of 3.7% and 19.2%. However, while Jeremy Lin is technically efficient, he seldom serves as a benchmark for inefficient players, at least when compared with established players such as Chris Paul and Dwayne Wade. This suggests the uniqueness of Jeremy Lin's productive solution and may explain why his unique style of play, encompassing individual brilliance, unselfish play and team leadership, is of such broad public appeal.     

Market Behavior of Institutional Investors around Bankruptcy Announcements

This paper examines, using proprietary ASX data containing institutional holdings, if institutional investors exit en mass prior to announcements of financial distress. Evidence indicates that while some institutional investors exit the stock, the withdrawal is gradual, commencing approximately 115 days prior to event. This is driven by active institutional investors reacting to the release of the financially distressed companies’ last publicly released financial reports. There is no significant decline in institutional holdings before announcements; most institutional investors hold financially distressed shares through to failure. There is evidence that the lack of disclosure drives the increase in information asymmetry prior to company failure.     

Output and productivity comparisons of the Singapore and Hong Kong wholesale and retail trade sectors, 2001–2008

This paper employs the industry of origin approach to compare value‐added and labour productivity of Singapore and Hong Kong's wholesale and retail sectors for the period 2001–08. The direct comparison between these two economies was motivated by the statement of the Singapore Government that its services sector, especially the retail sector, lagged behind Hong Kong's productivity levels. The results show that since 2005, Singapore's wholesale and retail sector performance in terms of labour productivity has been below Hong Kong's level, largely due to the poor performance of its retail sector arising from an influx of foreign workers. Results from total factor productivity analysis of these two economies also suggest that Hong Kong's better performance (since 2005) was largely due to its ability to employ more educated and trained workers with limited use of capital. The results suggest that polices that have worked in Hong Kong may not work in Singapore because its population is more diverse, which poses a challenge to policymakers in raising its productivity level.     

Start-up Factors for Small and Medium-sized Accommodation Businesses in Sabah,Malaysia: Push and Pull Factors

This article identifies start-up factors for small and medium-sized accommodation (SMSA) businesses. Using the Heider theory, it explains the push and pull factor start-up motives in SMSA businesses. The purpose of this research was to indentify the underlying motivational factors and the primary motivational factors of SMSA operators. This topic was chosen owing to the fact that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play an important role as key drivers of employment and economic growth in most countries, especially in Malaysia. The results show there is a wide range of these start-up factors related to the tradition of business operation, resources, location, market opportunities and the desires of individuals. The findings show that key start-up factors are driven by pull factors – namely, family business, availability and readiness of resources (land, building), market potential and opportunity of accommodation business, strategic location, the influence of friends and family, and profitability. Conversely, the key start-up factors related to push factors that emerged in this study include personal attitude, previous working experience in the accommodation business, personal interest and retirement. The findings provide an insight into the understanding of the start-up factors for small and medium-sized accommodation businesses, and add to the existing literature on start-up factors for small and medium-sized accommodation businesses from pull and push factors. They implicate the growth of small and medium-sized accommodation businesses in Sabah and, subsequently, may affect the SMEs' development policies in accommodation businesses.     

Exploring manager’s perspective of service quality strategies in Malaysian Banking Industry

In service industry, the subject of service quality remains crucial as business strive to maintain a comparative advantage in the marketplace. In aftermath of globalization, the operating environment for banking industry has become more dynamic and competitive. Banks have evolved to become diversified financial providers instead of traditional banking-only service providers. With bank placing emphasis on a mutually beneficial bank–customer relationship, customer loyalty must be pursued through repeat purchases. Central to achieving this is often the quality of services offered by the bank should satisfy the customer’s needs. This article attempts to identify any service gaps in Malaysian banking industry and to recommend effective strategies to close these service gaps from bank mangers’ and executives perspectives based on GAPs Model of Service Quality (GAPs Model). Using qualitative data collected from interviews with 30 bank managers and executives, this article provides effectives strategies to close each of the gaps in GAPs Model. It is hoped that the empirical evidences and recommendations provided in this article shed some light to management of banks to improve upon their customer service quality in order to benefit from customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and other behavioural outcomes which will lead to greater competitive advantage and profitability to the banks concerned.