Television-Induced Tourism: Evidence from Croatia

Atlantic Economic Journal - This paper analyzes the extent to which the filming of the popular television show Game of Thrones affected tourism in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Using monthly data...     

Top management team incentive heterogeneity,strategic investment behavior,and performance: A contingency theory of incentive alignment

Research summary : We develop and test a contingency theory of the influence of top management team (TMT) performance‐contingent incentives on manager–shareholder interest alignment. Our results support our theory by showing that although TMTs engage in significantly higher levels of acquisition investment when their average incentive levels increase, investors' responses to those large investments are generally negative. More importantly, however, we further find that within‐TMT incentive heterogeneity conditions that effect, such that investors evaluate TMTs' large acquisition investments more positively as the variance in those top managers' incentive values increases. Thus, within‐TMT incentive heterogeneity appears to increase manager–shareholder interest alignment, in the context of large acquisition investments. Managerial summary : We find that as the average value of TMTs' incentives increase, relative to their total pay, they invest more in acquisitions and investors' respond negatively to the announcement of those deals. However, we further show that investors respond more positively to acquisitions announced by TMTs whose members' incentive values vary (some TMT members hold higher incentives and others hold lower). Results imply that when TMT members hold differing incentives levels, they approach investments from divergent perspectives, scrutinize those investments more heavily, and make better decisions, relative to TMTs with similar incentives. They also suggest that boards seeking tighter manager–shareholder interest alignment may benefit from introducing variance into TMT members' incentive structures, as doing so appears to create divergent preferences that can improve team decision making. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Managing transformational change: the role of human resource professionals

In the past decade human resource management issues featured prominently in debates over the competitiveness and human resource professionals were expected to ascend to positions of greater influence in corporate strategy making and implementation. Despite numerous calls for a paradigm shift towards a more ‘strategic’ focus for human resource management research, developments in both practice and research fell far short of expectations. Thus, the process of transforming human resource policy into a strategic asset for employees, individual firms or the American economy is not yet complete. The paper suggests that the ‘strategic’ human resource management models of the 1980s were too limited and reactive in character because they depended so heavily on the values, strategies and support of top executives and line managers. A model capable of achieving sustained and transformational change needs to incorporate more active roles of other stakeholders in the employment relationship, including government, employes and union representatives as well as line managers and top executives. The paper starts by reviewing the evidence on innovations in human resource management in the past decade and then outlines the implications of the change model for human resource management and industrial relations theory, policy and practice. Special emphasis is given to the role of human resource professionals as potential change agents or facilitators of the transformational process.     

Examining relationships between director leadership practices and manager worklife and burnout

Managers are subject to high stress and burnout in their demanding roles, so addressing their worklife and level of burnout is important to retain leadership in healthcare organizations. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the observed leadership style of directors and the worklife and burnout of healthcare managers. A secondary analysis of data from 176 leaders in five different managerial cohorts within a provincial cancer agency was conducted using multiple regression and MANCOVA analysis. The study used data collected from the Worklife Improvement and Leadership Development study in 2006, the Kouzes and Posner Leadership Practices Inventory, the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and the Areas of Worklife Survey. Findings indicate the importance of transformational leadership styles to empower managers. Directors may improve the worklife of managers by using transformational leadership practices to address the amount of control and appropriateness of rewards to positively influence the job satisfaction of managers.     

Implementation of Four Models for Outstanding Liabilities in Winbugs: A Discussion of a Paper by Ntzoufras and Dellaportas

Abstract

Ntzoufras and Dellaportas (2002) described four models for outstanding claim amounts of the “reported but not settled” variety. Two of the models incorporated claim-counts data in addition to the claim amounts themselves in order to add a hierarchical stage in the usual log-normal and state-space models. The purpose of this discussion is to describe how the models presented in Ntzoufras and Dellaportas may be implemented using WinBUGS. The use of WinBUGS to implement the Bayesian analysis of a number of other actuarial models was considered by Scollnik (2001).     

Endogenous hospital regulation and its effects on hospital and non-hospital expenditures

Past studies of hospital rate setting regulation conclude that mature programs have been effective in constraining hospital expenditures. However, if rate regulation is influenced by higher hospital expenditures the relationship between expenditures and rate setting is confounded. This study assesses the impact of rate setting on hospital and non-hospital expenditures using a simultaneous-equation model which separates the effects of hospital expenditures on the decision to regulate from the effects of regulation on expenditures. The simultaneous-equation results indicate that mature rate setting is associated with lower per capita health care expenditures, including hospital and non-hospital expenditures.