Personal bank account access and awareness: an analysis of the technological and informational constraints of Australian consumers

Logit models are used to predict access and awareness of personal bank accounts. Access is defined as the ability and willingness to use automated teller machines, electronic funds transfer point of sale, telephone and internet banking. Awareness relates to the understanding of bank statements, fee and charges, account shopping around and internet calculators. Newer ways of accessing bank accounts are confined to young, urban, well educated, white‐collar occupations. Awareness is lower for respondents with less education, non‐workers, farm workers, unskilled and renting households, and higher for white‐collar occupations, couples and those with higher incomes and savings.     

Learning asymmetries and the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities

Discovering entrepreneurial opportunities requires that individuals not only possess some form of prior knowledge, but that they also have the cognitive abilities that allow them to value and exploit that knowledge. This article builds upon and extends this line of inquiry by examining the relationship between opportunity identification and learning. Based upon an experimental task and other data collected from 380 technology professionals, the article defines a relationship between how individuals acquire and transform information and experience (i.e., learning) in order to identify opportunities. After analyzing the empirical data, the article develops the concept of learning asymmetries and explains how the manner in which people learn may affect their ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunities.     

Pension Fund Manager Tournaments and Attitudes Towards Corporate Characteristics

Abstract:  This paper explores the relationship between the tournament incentives of pension fund managers and the characteristics of equities they choose to hold. Using a comprehensive data set on pension fund portfolio holdings, we determine the intensity of fund manager tournaments by sorting pension funds into portfolios based on the number of concurrent managers each pension fund employs. We then investigate which corporate characteristics are preferred by each of these portfolios by estimating share selection models that include a range of corporate characteristics that are expected to shape the returns to investment in stocks over the short and long run. We find that the intensity of the tournament faced by fund managers plays a significant role in shaping preferences over corporate characteristics. Managers facing more intense tournaments exhibit significantly weaker preferences for attributes associated with long run payoffs, such as social performance and growth potential, and significantly stronger preferences for short term attributes, such as operational efficiency, when compared to managers that face weak or no tournament incentives.     

A materialist development of some recent contributions to the labour theory of value

The paper offers a novel interpretation and affirmation of theopening arguments of Capital, answering the fundamental butneglected question of why labour is the substance of value.Marx's arguments require that two philosophical threads, oftenseparated in the literature on value, be woven together. Theargument that value is the intrinsic ‘content’ makingcommodities exchangeable employs the thread of realism. Theargument that abstract labour is the emergent ‘socialsubstance’ of value employs the thread of dialectics.This interpretation develops the materialist and dialecticalphilosophy of E.V. Ilyenkov and deepens the approach to valuetheory initiated by Ben Fine.     

Trade Integration and Business Cycle Convergence: Is the Relation Robust across Time and Space?*

In this paper we investigate the relationship between trade intensity and the business cycle correlation using a panel data set taken from 24 countries over the period 1959–2003. Most previous studies did not account for the possibility that the business cycle correlation may be influenced by unobservable country‐pair specific effects. Our estimates, using both fixed‐ and random‐effects methodologies, suggest that trade intensity and the business cycle correlation are positively related to one another. However, detailed investigation shows that this relationship exists mainly for the European countries.     

Radius Restrictions on Retail Chains and the Similarity of Neighboring Shopping Centers

In Canada and the US, shopping center developers may impose ‘radius restrictions’ on tenants in their shopping centers, prohibiting tenants in a particular shopping center from opening another store within a certain radius. Whether a radius restriction is imposed on a chain will depend upon the relative bargaining positions of the chain and the developer. This paper presents an empirical analysis of regional shopping center composition in Canada, using variables that reflect the bargaining power of retail chains and shopping center developers. We find that large, well established, and growing chains are more likely to enter neighboring malls, consistent with the hypothesis that whether a chain enters neighboring malls depends upon its bargaining power. As well, we find that a chain is more likely to enter neighboring malls owned by large developers, consistent with large developers trying to keep retail chains out of the malls of small developers.     

Collective and individual forms of resistance in a public–private partnership: a case study of National Savings and Investments

This paper examines resistance at National Savings, which operates on two levels: firstly, the collective actions of the trade unions and their members, and, secondly, individual recalcitrance on the shop‐floor. It is argued that imposed organisational culture change has created more acrimonious employment relations.     

On the curvature of the reporting function from objective reality to subjective feelings

I suggest the idea of a reporting function, r(.), from reality to feelings. The ‘happiness’ literature claims we have demonstrated diminishing marginal utility of income. I show not, and that knowing r(.)'s curvature is crucial. A quasi-experiment on heights is studied.     

International diversification,subsidiary performance,and the mobility of knowledge resources

We examine the link between international diversification, organizational knowledge resources, and subsidiary performance. The success of international corporate diversification depends on a firm's capability to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries, and how its local subsidiaries effectively utilize that knowledge. As knowledge resources are imperfectly mobile, a firm may find it difficult to transfer knowledge to its subsidiaries. In our analysis of 4964 Japanese subsidiaries over a 14‐year period, we find that knowledge that is valuable, but not rare, positively affects subsidiary performance in the short term, but not the long term. In contrast, knowledge that is both valuable and rare affects subsidiary performance in the long term, but not the short term. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.