Demographic changes, saving, and current account: An analysis based on a panel VAR model

This paper empirically investigates the macroeconomic effects of demographic changes, focusing on saving rates and current account balances. The econometric investigation based on the panel VAR model shows substantial demographic effects on national saving rates and current account balances in the major advanced (G-7) countries. An increase in the dependency rate significantly lowers saving rates, especially public saving rates. Further, a higher dependency rate significantly worsens current account balances.     

The Timing of Opening Trades and Pricing Errors

After demonstrating that a zero investment trading strategy that buys stocks with overnight returns below the market average and sells stocks with overnight returns above the market average earns more than 1% monthly profit, I demonstrate that this profit is greater for stocks that start trading more quickly than for other stocks. These results control for trading costs. The resulting pricing errors are a material portion of stock price volatility and suggest that a quick response to overnight information adds non‐information‐based stock volatility to stock prices.     

A century of purchasing power parity confirmed: The role of nonlinearity

Taylor (2002) claims that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has held over the 20th century based on strong evidence of stationary for century-long real exchange rates for 20 countries. Lopez et al. (2005), however, found much weaker evidence of PPP with alternative lag selection methods. We reevaluate Taylor’s claim by implementing a recently developed nonlinear unit root test by Park and Shintani (2005). We find strong evidence of nonlinear mean-reversion in real exchange rates that confirms Taylor’s claim. We also find a possible misspecification problem in using the ESTAR model that may not be detected with Taylor-approximation based tests.     

The impact of corporate governance on employment relations in South Korea: the shareholder versus stakeholder perspectives

This study empirically examined the impact of corporate governance on employment relations outcomes utilizing a comprehensive data set drawn from 214 Korean firms. The study contrasted the stakeholder and shareholder perspectives of corporate governance in investigating the impact of corporate governance on employment relations outcomes. The results showed that the stakeholder corporate governance orientation (as compared to the shareholder orientation) had positive relationships with education/training expense, the level of average employee tenure and industrial relations climate, and had a negative association with number of strikes. Overall, the results implied that the stakeholder orientation of firms led to more beneficial effects for employees and more consensual relations with labor unions than the shareholder orientation did.     

Sources of family income and expenditure on children's private,after‐school education in Korea

This paper examines the relationship between sources of family income and household expenditure on private, after‐school education for children in secondary schools in Korea in the context of educational ‘credentialism’, which values evidence of college education highly. Data from a survey of 514 parents of secondary school students are used. Estimated ordinary least squares coefficients indicate that the wife's income, but not the husband's, was positively associated with the amount of spending on children's education at private, after‐school programmes. This finding suggests that some married women with children in Korea seek employment in order to earn the money needed for their children's private, after‐school education.     

The Sophisticated and the Simple: the Profitability of Contrarian Strategies

A variety of variables have been used to form contrarian portfolios, ranging from relatively simple measures, like book‐to‐market, cash flow‐to‐price, earnings‐to‐price and past returns, to more sophisticated measures based on the Ohlson model and residual income model (RIM). This paper investigates whether: (i) contrarian strategies based on RIM perform better or worse than those based on the Ohlson model; (ii) contrarian strategies based on more sophisticated valuation models (e.g. Ohlson and RIM) perform much better than the relatively simpler ranking variables that have been used so extensively in the finance literature. Given that the RIM and Ohlson models require greater information inputs and technical know‐how, and make different implicit assumptions on future abnormal earnings, it is important to ascertain if they offer significantly greater contrarian profits to outweigh the increased costs that they entail. Indeed, our surprising finding is that simple cash flow‐to‐price measures appear to do almost as well as the more sophisticated alternatives. One would have expected the sophisticated models to significantly outperform the simple cash flow to price model for the reasons given by Penman (2007) .     

A promotion mix budgeting model for retailing

Our two-equation model of retail promotion provides a well-balanced explanation of both retailers' perceptions of promotion tools and their budget allocation across the promotion mix. While previous studies have examined each of these two components separately, few have integrated both in the one study. Factor analysis was used to simplify the choices of promotion tools. This reduced the number of promotion tools to four, namely mass media, in-store promotion, sales promotion/direct mail and personal selling. We support earlier studies which link budget promotion mix spending (behaviour) to perceptions about the effectiveness of each medium (attitude). The range of determinants of perceptions has been extended by incorporating the roles of retail strategy, store ownership, culture and promotion intensity. We have estimated the budget promotion mix equation using a production function theoretical framework. Although this makes little difference to the strong relationship between retailers' perceptions of promotion tools and budget allocations, the theoretical framework does enable formal estimation of cross-media substitution. We find that the two short-term oriented promotion media are substitutes. Our model has been applied to apparel retailing in Australia, with considerable scope for applications to other retail categories and to other countries.     

The impact of Investors in People on employer‐provided training,the equality of training provision and the ‘training apartheid’ phenomenon

This article draws on data from WERS 2004 to provide a follow‐up to previous research using WERS 98, which evaluated the relationship between Investors in People (IiP) and training. This follow‐up is undertaken in order to consider whether the Standard, which was revised in 2000, is now more effective in ensuring that recognised workplaces genuinely engage in training activity. An evaluation is also undertaken of the Standard's new aim of ensuring equal opportunities with regard to training provision. In the event, the analysis demonstrates that the proportion of employees in IiP workplaces that have not received formal training did not change between 1998 and 2004, but employees were now less likely to disagree that managers at their workplaces encourage people to develop their skills. However, the analysis finds greater evidence of inequality of training provision in IiP workplaces than in non‐IiP workplaces and that the Standard neither boosts training levels for typically disadvantaged employee groups, nor overcomes the ‘training apartheid’ phenomenon.     

Nile perch and the hungry of Lake Victoria: Gender,status and food in an East African fishery

Lake Victoria supports Africa’s largest inland fishery, and its most valuable product is the Nile perch, much of which is exported. This has given rise to arguments claiming a direct linear relationship between perch exports and disturbingly high rates of malnutrition along the lake’s shores. In this paper, we argue that this argument is seriously flawed for it is unable to explain how it is that the income from the Nile perch fishery fails to translate into a well-fed riparian population. We draw on field work carried out in 2001 that (a) set out to establish exactly how much malnutrition there was on the lake’s shores; and (b) sought to identify what happened to the income the fishery generates. We argue that because men control much of the fishery, and women are held responsible for the upkeep of their families, little of this income makes its way back into the households of the region, giving rise to the levels of malnutrition we observed.