Action Teams That Work

A growing awareness of workplace hazards and identification of airborne contaminants, coupled with a changing safety and health regulatory environment, created an unexpected demand for new and innovative respirators in the early 1980s. 3M's Occupational Health and Environmental Safety Division broke new ground by taking the team concept further than ever before in the company. The division's Action Teams successfully designed, built and introduced products in less than half the time it would have taken previously. Robert Hershock, Charles Cowman and Douglas Peters describe how 3M learned important lessons about team selection, training, performance and motivation, the importance of project sponsors, and the role of middle management.     

Capital Markets and Capital Formation in Australia 1890–1945

This survey article examines the interaction between the domestic capital markets and capital formation in Australia from the 1890s up to the end of World War II. The disenchantment of the City of London with Australian securities in the 1890s opened a window for the development of domestic capital markets. It was the demands of the government for funds, especially during both wars, that transformed the scale and character of local markets. Local deposit taking institutions and stock exchanges handled a sufficient volume of domestic savings to fund the lion's share of both public and private sector capital formation.     

Designing Optimal Crop Revenue Insurance

When the indemnity schedule is contingent on the farmer's price and individual yield, an optimal crop revenue insurance contract depends only on the farmer's gross revenue. However, this design is not efficient if, as is the case with available contracts, the coverage function is based on imperfect estimators of individual yield and/or price. The producer's degree of prudence and the extent of basis risks have important influences on the optimal indemnity schedule. In this broader context, optimal protection is not provided by available U.S. crop insurance contracts and may include combinations of revenue insurance, yield insurance, futures, and options contracts.     

Protection versus Promotion: An Empirical Investigation

Using Turkish industry-level data from 1983 to 1990, we find that politically organized industries receive both higher protection and promotion than unorganized ones. Tariff rates are decreasing (increasing) in the import-penetration ratio and the absolute value of the import-demandelasticity for organized (unorganized) industries. Subsidy rates are decreasing (increasing) in the output-supply elasticity for organized (unorganized) industries. The results are consistent with the predictions of the Grossman–Helpman model and its extension in this paper. The mix of protection and promotion is inversely related to the ratio of their respective marginal deadweight cost measures.     

Finding Pareto Optimal Insurance Contracts

This paper deals with on-line computation—or step-wise learning—of Pareto optimal insurance contracts. Our approach tolerates that the loss distribution might be unknown, intractable, or not well specified. Thus we accommodate fairly inexperienced parties. Losses are here simulated or observed, one at a time, and they cause iterated revisions of the premium. The mechanical and global nature of probability calculus thereby yields to more tentative, myopic procedures, possibly closer to how humans operate or reason in face of risk. Sequential revisions may also reduce the expense of insurers' time and money in seeking sufficient statistics. Emphasized below is the remarkable simplicity and stability of the resulting adaptive procedures. Special attention goes to catastrophic risks, and to subsidized or competitive insurance.