Future skills and current realities: How the psychological (Jungian) type of European business leaders relates to the needs of the future

How ready for the future are our business leaders? This paper addresses this question by drawing on two pieces of research. An international skills audit was carried out to ascertain if the skills needed by future business leaders would be different from the skills needed today; the results from 340 respondents are presented. These are compared with data on the Jungian type of over 8000 senior managers and executives taken from nine different European countries. Type was measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^® (MBTI^®) instrument. The findings are used to identify challenges for the future. For example, although the audit suggested that skills such as the ability to empower others are likely to become increasingly important, people with the most common type preference amongst European senior managers (ESTJ) may, especially when under stress, have a particular tendency to want to make all the decisions themselves, without any input from others. The ways in which organisational psychologists and HR practitioners can employ psychological type to help leaders meet these challenges are briefly discussed.     

Racial gaps in the transition to first-time homeownership: The role of residential location

Evidence suggests that African Americans wait longer to transition into first-time homeownership than white households with similar endowments. This paper relies on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the contribution of residential location toward the black–white gap in first-time homeownership transitions. For a sample of young renters who first left their parents' home during the period 1978 through 1987, I estimate continuous time duration models that explain racial gaps in rental tenure durations prior to first-time homeownership as a function of individual, household, and location-specific covariates. I find that while several residential location characteristics, particularly those associated with the supply of affordable owner-occupied housing, impinge upon racial gaps in first-time homeownership transitions, most of the racial gap in homeownership transitions would be eliminated if blacks and whites had similar individual and household characteristics.     

Targeting Teaching: The Welfare Costs of Market Restrictions

In most introductory and intermediate microeconomics textbooks, the measurable welfare effects of price controls, quantitative restrictions, and market restrictions more generally, are depicted as a Harberger triangle. This depiction understates these restrictions' inefficiency costs because it captures only the “top‐down” distortion caused by the wedge these restrictions drive between market‐wide quantity demanded and quantity supplied. It ignores the “bottom‐up” distortions caused by allocative inefficiencies on the constrained side of the market. In this article we describe a simple graphical exposition of these bottom‐up distortions. We argue that this graph can provide students with a picture of both the top‐down and bottom‐up inefficiencies. Moreover, it can be used for simple back‐of‐the‐envelope estimates of the magnitudes of the two inefficiencies.     

Liberalising the German model: institutional change,organisational restructuring and workplace effects

Institutional change at supranational, European Union level affects national and firm level institutions in various ways. This article traces effects of liberalisation measures in the airport industry enacted in two airport firms in Germany. The study, based on qualitative empirical research, found that EU liberalisation facilitated company creation of subsidiaries (subsidiarisation) and elevated shareholder interest in corporate governance. These factors affected institutional practices and cultural norms within the German industrial context that in turn influenced significant alterations in employment and workplace relations. Considerable disruption of the German social partnership model of corporate governance and industrial relations was observed. However, in addition to patterns of convergence towards neoliberal practices and outcomes frequently observed in Anglo‐Saxon systems, the study found some elements of effective retention of cultural institutional resources of the German model. Both ‘path departure’ and social embeddedness appear to coexist.     

What Drives Housing Markets: Fundamentals or Bubbles?

This study applies the dynamic Gordon growth model which is in the circumstance of rational bubbles to decompose log price-rent ratio into three parts, i.e., rational bubbles, discounted expected future rent growth rates and discounted expected future returns. The latter two terms represent housing fundamentals. The magnitudes of the components of price-rent ratio’s variance are estimated to distinguish the relative impact of the three parts on housing prices. Using time series data from the housing markets in the four largest cities in China (1991:Q1–2011:Q1 for Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen; 1993:Q2–2011:Q1 for Beijing), this paper presents a number of empirical findings: (a) the variance of rational bubbles is much larger than the variance of price-rent ratio, and rational bubbles contribute more fluctuations directly to price-rent ratio than the expected returns or the expected rent growth rates do; (b) the covariance between rational bubbles and expected returns or expected rent growth rates is also large; (c) the positive covariance of rational bubbles and expected returns implies that high expected returns coexist with bubbles, which differs from previous findings that lower expected returns drive asset prices; (d) the negative covariance of rational bubbles and expected rent growth rates indicates that the larger the bubbles are, the lower the expected rent growth rates are; (e) the positive covariance of expected returns and expected rent growth rates reveals under-reaction of the housing markets to rents.     

擦亮你的"水晶球"

又到了拟定下一年度计划的时节，你对明年市场状况预测的依据是什么？数据？模式？历史？直觉？或者，只是良好的愿望？     

Immigrants' Identity, Economic Outcomes and the Transmission of Identity across Generations

In this article we address three issues relating to immigrants' identity, measured as the feeling of belonging to particular ethnic groups. We study the formation of identity with home and host countries. We investigate how identity with either country relates to immigrants' and their children's labour market outcomes. Finally, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of identity. Our analysis is based on a unique longitudinal dataset on immigrants and their children. We find that identity with either country is only weakly related to labour market outcomes. However, there is strong intergenerational transmission of identity from one generation to the next.     

MEDDLING IN OTHER MEN'S AFFAIRS: THE CASE FOR ANARCHY

This paper calls into question the foundational myth of political theory, the myth of the necessity of the state. The anarchic counterposition is briefly sketched before some central anti-anarchic arguments are considered and rejected.     

Redundancy and Early Retirement: The Interaction of Public and Private Policy in Britain, Germany and the USA

Labour force reductions have been a major issue in industrial relations in Western countries since the mid-1970s. Early retirement has enabled employers to structure these reductions better to suit their interests, and to reduce the damage to industrial peace which would otherwise occur. This paper looks at the role and nature of early retirement in cases of redundancy in three countries with different industrial relations and social insurance systems. Attention is given to how compensatory policies undermine protective policies; how the costs of early retirement are shared between the state and enterprises; the adequacy of early retirement benefits and their impact upon post-retirement income; and whether the state can be said to encourage early retirement.     

A Guide for “JEE Content” Submissions

This is an update of a guide to the thinking of the editorial collective for the Content section of the Journal of Economic Education (JEE). The authors discuss the type of papers they are looking for, what in their view constitutes a good paper, and how their review process works. They specifically discuss their reviewing process, the content they are looking for, and their view of the structure of a good paper. Although they focus specifically on Content articles for the JEE, many of the general issues discussed may carry over to other sections of the JEE and to journals more generally.