An analysis of efficiency in the delivery of financial services: The case of life insurance agencies

Scale and scope economies are examined for life insurance agencies that distribute multiple financial products. The results of this study suggest that there are significant administrative returns to scale for firms that sell a mix of financial products. The findings for scope estimates are inconsistent, suggesting that there are positive and negative cost complementaries for pairs of products. Subadditivity can be rejected, suggesting that joint distribution of financial products is not necessarily more efficient than specialization and that different-sized agencies are not necessarily at a cost disadvantage.     

Collectively bargained public health benefit plans

The marketplace for health benefits for public sector employees is large and complex with a great variety of approaches for providing care and a difficult patchwork of regulatory and collective bargaining regulation to deal with in designing a plan. Public sector workers' plans are subject to an additional constraint provided by the political nature of the process. The products sold to public sector plans are not regulated as ERISA plans, given the exclusion of government plans and the differential regulation of collectively bargained plans under the HMO act. This article attempts to guide the reader through some of the difficulties of this marketplace, pointing out pitfalls and opportunities where they appear.     

Changing Labor Market Conditions and Economic Development in Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, China

In the newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong,the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China), the entireworking population has benefited from labor market institutions.The East Asian NIEs attained and maintained generally full employment,improved their job mixes, raised real earnings, and loweredtheir rates of poverty. This article reaches two principal conclusions. First, labormarket conditions continued to improve in all four economiesin the 1980s at rates remarkably similar to their rates of aggregateeconomic growth. Second, labor market repression was not a majorfactor in the growth experiences of these economies in the 1980s.It thus appears that labor market repression is neither necessarynor desirable for outward-oriented economic development.     

Unwilling Subjects of Financialization

This article seeks to advance debates about the financialization of housing by focusing on the emergence of rental housing as a frontier for financialization, a dynamic that is increasingly relevant since the global financial crisis. Situated in New York City, the research focuses on an aggressive wave of investment in affordable rent‐stabilized properties by private equity firms, their efforts to release value from these properties, and the implications of the 2008 financial crisis for their investment strategies and thus for tenants’ experience of home. Through detailed empirical analysis tracing the connections between how rental housing has been constituted as a new site for private equity investment globally, the local conditions facilitating this process in New York and how it reshaped everyday life for tenants, the article theorizes tenants as unwilling subjects of financialization. Yet unwillingness does not necessarily translate into being overtaken; it also connotes reluctance and indeed struggle. This novel conceptualization highlights the ways in which financialization meets with dissent, and its necessarily contingent and incomplete nature. The article therefore develops the wider intellectual project of understanding financialization not as a monolithic and inevitable process, but as one characterized by resistance from without and contradiction from within.     

An empirical study of human resource management policies and practices in foreign-invested enterprises in China: the case of Shenzen Special Economic Zone

Information about human resource management (HRM) practices in foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) in China has been limited to studies involving a small number of cases. This study provides an empirical assessment of HRM practices used in 158 FIEs operating in Shenzen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of the Guangdong Province in southern China. Results suggest that FIEs have moved away from centrally planned job allocation, life-time employment and egalitarian pay towards open job markets at management and non-management levels, contractual employment where pay and longevity are based on individual worker and company performance and compensation plans that recognize differences in skills, training and job demands. These practices seem to reflect the influence of the economic reform in China. Other aspects of HRM practices used by FIEs, such as approximate equality of pay for men and women, limited differences between management and non-management salaries and widespread provision of housing and other benefits for employees, seem to reflect the influence of the Chinese socialist ideology.     

Organizational context and human resource management strategy: a structural equation analysis of Hong Kong firms

Previous studies to explain why companies utilize particular human resource management (HRM) strategies have not adequately addressed the influence of contextual variables such as size, location, ownership, competitive pressure, technological change, age and growth. In this study, we investigate the extent to which these contextual variables are related to HRM strategy in seventy-six private-sector firms located in Hong Kong. Our analysis uses structural equations to examine the relationships among contextual variables and HRM strategy to develop and retain managers. The results show that contextual variables have both direct and indirect effects on an organization's HRM strategy. The indirect effects occur through the top management involvement of the HR function within an organization. Use of a human capital development HRM strategy reduces organizational uncertainty about having an adequate supply of managers to meet firm objectives. Contrary to our expectation, in Hong Kong firms, greater reliance on internal development and promotion tends to increase uncertainty and greater competition tends to reduce training investment. Both of these unanticipated relationships may reflect the high mobility of managers peculiar to the Hong Kong labour market.     

Labor market analysis for developing countries

This paper is about analyzing labor markets in developing countries, searching for both improved understanding and greater policy relevance. Following a five-part policy evaluation framework, the highlights of labor markets in developing countries are presented. Theoretical models with multiple sectors and segments and empirical analysis using different kinds of data are then reviewed. A brief concluding section addresses some priority research needs.