Pull the plug on stress

Stress is rampant, stress is growing, and stress hurts the bottom line. A 1999 study of 46,000 workers revealed that health care costs are 147% higher for those who are stressed or depressed, independent of other health issues. But what exactly is stress? It usually refers to our internal reaction to negative, threatening, or worrisome situations--a looming performance report, say, or interactions with a dismissive colleague. Accumulated over time, negative stress can depress you, burn you out, make you sick, or even kill you--because it's both an emotional and a physiological habit. Of course, many companies understand the negative impact of cumulative stress and offer programs to help employees counteract it. The problem is that employees in the greatest need of help often don't seek it. Since 1991, the authors have studied the physiological impact of stress on performance, at both the individual and organizational levels. Their goal largely has been to decode the underlying mechanics of stress. They've sought not only to understand how stress works on a person's mind, heart, and other bodily systems but also to discover the precise emotional, mental, and physiological levers that can counteract it. After working with more than 50,000 workers and managers in more than 100 organizations, the authors have found that learning to manage stress is easier than most people think. They have devised a scientifically based system of tools, techniques, and technologies that organizations can use to reduce employee stress and boost overall health and performance. In this article, they use the story of someone they call Nigel, a senior executive with whom they've worked, to describe how these techniques reduce stress in the real world.     

领先财富管理的运营思路——BCG中国财富管理市场研究报告摘要

波士顿咨询公司(BCG)发布的有关中国财富管理市场的最新报告探讨了在中国建立领先的财富管理业务的关键因素.BCG授权本刊撷取其精要,希望能给予致力于提升中国财富管理水平的机构和理财从业人员有益的启示.     

Income Tax Accounting Policy Choice: Exposure Draft Responses and the Early Adoption Decision by Canadian Companies*

We extend prior literature through a detailed examination of the relationship between lobbying behavior and subsequent accounting standard adoption timing, using changes to a Canadian accounting standard with a prolonged transition period. We develop a model linking lobbying and adoption timing. We test hypotheses based on recontracting costs, information production costs, efforts to manage investor perceptions, and corporate governance practices to assess the ability of these factors to explain corporations' choice of adoption timing. We examine responses to the Income Taxes exposure draft using content analysis to identify trends in lobbying behavior. We evaluate the accounting standard adoption decision for Toronto Stock Exchange (TSE) 300 firms using a LOGIT model. Our findings indicate that early adoption appears to be most prevalent for firms that benefit from improved financial statement performance. In contrast, late adopters tend to be firms that have lobbied standard‐setters regarding the out‐of‐pocket costs of the standard and that rate highly on certain corporate governance measures.     

The effect of deposit-rate ceilings on bank risk: A comment

In a recent issue of this journal, Mingo (1978) analyzed the effect of deposit-rate ceilings on bank risk. The analysis showed that deposit-rate ceilings increase a bank's total risk. The purpose of this note is to examine a different but related question: Is systematic risk affected by Regulation Q ceilings ceteris paribus? The results of our empirical test indicate that systematic risk is not affected by deposit-rate ceilings. Taken together then, Mingo's and the present results show that removal of deposit-rate ceilings would not increase bank risk.     

Economic Perspectives on Nutrition Policy Evaluation

Too much food energy intake (relative to expenditure) and unbalanced diets are implicated in a range of diseases that impose major burdens on healthcare systems and cause pain and suffering. Governments have responded by introducing a range of measures, mainly targeting information and education, largely to children. However, more interventionist measures have been advocated and, in the past year, various food taxes have been introduced in Denmark, Hungary and France. The Address discusses evaluation of policies, particularly in the light of alternative theories of diet choice (rational choice, systematically irrational, automatic). The public health approach uses quality adjusted life years but fails to distinguish between private and social benefits and takes no account of the drivers of food choice behaviour. The economic approach, based on informed choice, makes the distinction between private and social benefits (if not always explicitly) but struggles to evaluate policies that change utility functions and with behavioural assumptions other than traditional rationality. Alternative assumptions and approaches could put the cost of unhealthy eating anywhere between £10 billion and £100 billion per annum in the UK. Evidence suggests that information measures (to perform or persuade) do not much change diets, nor do they tackle the externality element of unhealthy eating. They may, however, help change long‐term social norms. More interventionist measures like taxes improve social welfare (according to the compensation principle) and reduce health inequalities but are regressive, like all sin taxes. Almost all interventions pass cost‐effectiveness tests.     

Tipped out: How do gratuities affect restaurant operations?

Tipping is a well-established social norm in North American restaurants. Researchers have given considerable attention to the interaction between consumers and servers, but less so to the relationships within a restaurant and even less so to restaurant managers’ perspectives. Our study, the first of its kind, used interviews and a survey to explore the perspectives of both restaurant managers and servers in identifying operational issues arising from tipping. Inequity and unfairness, loss of control of service quality, and difficulties in succession planning and promotion were identified. There is clearly a need to investigate strategies to mitigate some of these impacts.     

An alternative approach to community-based ecotourism: a bottom-up locally initiated non-monetised project in Papua New Guinea

Community-based ecotourism (CBET) is presented as a tool for conservation and sustainable development by conservation practitioners and development agencies, but is reported to have achieved little. Several scholars argue that many problems stem from inadequate power relationships between external actors and local communities, leading to low community participation. This study opens a debate on governance and social enterprise in CBET by examining a bottom-up approach to community-based ecotourism based on a small-scale CBET initiative in an amenity-poor remote indigenous community in Papua New Guinea. This initiative is unique in the following aspects: it was initiated by a community member; external assistance was advisory only; no external financial assistance was given; and it has taken place in a non-monetised economy. Participant observation and in-depth interviews with local key informants were used to identify community-defined positive/negative impacts and community participation processes. Overall, there was substantial support for the project; it contributed to community welfare, generated economic benefit, had positive conservation outcomes and from the viewpoint of the community had no adverse cultural impacts. One of the keys for success was the development of a strong community agency that led to high community participation and individual rather than the community ownership.     

Are tourism impacts low on personal environmental agendas?

This paper examines if tourism is an environmental priority for tourism and hospitality students. It is framed within the context of information and choice overload that may result in the need to prioritize issues and make less effective decisions. A series of open-ended questions identified the most important community and global environmental issues, the single greatest cause of climate change and whether students had changed their behaviour in general, or their travel behaviour in particular, to reduce their environmental impact. A total of 2968 useable surveys were returned from students at 63 institutions in 22 economies. Tourism emerged as a low priority issue, which explains why only a small proportion of students had changed their travel behaviour. Moreover, the study noted high knowledge variability, which in turn was closely associated with the type of actions undertaken. Students with specific knowledge were far more likely to adopt specific change actions than those who had less precise knowledge. They, in turn, were more likely to identify generic and less effective actions. The study concludes that the main challenge involved in changing tourism behaviour rests primarily with raising its status to a higher priority, a difficult task given the environmental issue overload that most people face.     

Political travel constraint: The role of Chinese popular nationalism

This study extends the leisure constraint model by examining the role that popular nationalism has in Chinese outbound travel. Using a case study approach based on the 2012 Diaoyu/Senkaku Island Incident between China and Japan, the study demonstrates how Chinese popular nationalism has the potential to shape the geopolitical environment of all outbound Chinese tourism. The study proposes a new model that can be used to illustrate how popular nationalism may affect bilateral tourism in other settings. Findings of this study offer important insights for both scholars and practitioners contributing to the understanding of the impact of Chinese popular nationalism on bilateral tourism flows.