The Effect of Social Security Contributions on Coverage and Wages: A Gender Perspective Using a Natural Experiment from Colombia

This article investigates, from a gender and marital status perspective, the effects of pension and health care contributions on the employment and wages of workers covered by social security regulations. To do this, I use as a natural experiment a reform implemented in Colombia during the mid‐1990. In particular I employ a differences‐in‐differences estimation based on an endogenous switching‐regression model that accounts for self‐selection into coverage. My results indicate that, for females, a 10% increase in contributions reduces the relative wages of covered workers by 7.2%. On the other hand, for males, the reform increases the relative wages of covered workers by 7.1%. Among females, the effect is predominantly present in single women. Among men, divorced and widowed workers are the only group not to experience an effect on earnings. For most family groups, the social security reform has no significant effect on coverage.     

Imparting negative news to salespeople

Sales managers often are required to give negative information to their sales personnel. Perhaps the salespeople's territories will be reduced, their compensation or expense program decreased, or their positions realigned or eliminated. Although extensive research has examined delivering negative news to sales personnel, no empirical work has yet explored how that inimical information should be disseminated to sales subordinates. Scholars in organizational psychology argue that providing adverse news to employees using interpersonal sensitivity is advantageous for both the individual and the organization. To date, though, this issue has not been investigated in a selling context. Therefore, this article reports the results of an exploratory study that investigated factors that influence whether sales managers provide negative communication to salespeople in an interpersonally sensitive fashion. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Embedding consumer culture in health and social care education – a university office's perspective

Health and social care services are changing – and this change is radical. Service user and carer involvement has been a key aspect of health and social care policy for a number of years. In terms of the National Health Service (NHS), this has been significantly strengthened by the report ‘High Quality Care for All’. The NHS will no longer be a monolith dictating what services it offers. It is beginning to take seriously the views of its consumers: the patients, service users and carers. The NHS is starting to put the patient experience at the centre of everything it does, and its regulators are asking for evidence of public and patient involvement. This process may yet prove to be one of the NHS' greatest challenges as it transforms to prioritize the consumer viewpoint. Social care, though further down the line in relation to involvement, is now responding to the relatively new personalization agenda. This paper will consider what the university sector can do to embed the consumer and service culture within the education of health and social care professionals. It looks at the challenges of involvement and required culture change, highlighting the key points to address in the early and middle stages of involvement from a university office's perspective. It includes examples of consumer involvement in teaching, assessment and the selection of students and how their input is starting to make a difference. Finally, the paper outlines what is needed in a development office to establish and support effective service user and carer involvement on health and social care courses in higher education. The article concludes by acknowledging that there is much more work that needs to be done in this field to embed the work of a development office, but that early steps have been promising.     

Land Transport for Export: The Effects of Cost, Time, and Uncertainty in Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), inland export transport costs and time delays are much higher for landlocked countries, vary substantially between different geographic corridors, and exhibit substantial uncertainty. Unit costs and costs of time for land transport of exports are high for many agricultural products relative to metals and other high-value products. We illustrate systemic uncertainty in land and maritime transport for exporting by use of simulation. Relationships among uncertainty, infrastructure quality, and other features of logistics systems are highly non-linear, and can be potentially used to identify priorities for trade facilitation.     

Effects of Free Trade on Women and Immigrants: CAFTA and the Rural Dominican Republic

We construct a disaggregated rural economywide model with a focus on gender and immigration as well as on the allocation of time to wage work, household production activities, and housework (reproduction). We use this model to simulate the impacts of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) on rural incomes and welfare in the Dominican Republic. We find that elimination of agricultural import tariffs hurts both agricultural and non-agricultural households, via adverse factor-market effects, but impacts vary substantially by workers’ gender and country of origin. Females and Haitian immigrants tend to fare better than Dominican males, and there are ramifications for both market and non-market activities.     

The real puzzle of blackmail: An informational approach

The “puzzle” of blackmail is that threats to reveal private information that would be harmful to someone in exchange for money are illegal, but revelation is not. The resolution is that concealment of information about product quality impedes the efficient operation of markets, whereas revelation promotes it. The real puzzle is why possessors are not naturally inclined to sell to uninformed parties, who value the information more than would-be blackmail victims. The answer has to do with the public good qualities of information, which create an appropriability problem in transactions with uninformed parties. The paper also discusses incentives to acquire compromising information.     

Commitment and Trust as Drivers of Loyalty in Logistics Outsourcing Relationships: Cultural Differences Between the United States and Germany

This study examines differences in loyalty formation within logistics outsourcing relationships between Germany and the United States. A model of loyalty formation on the basis of commitment and trust is developed and differences between Germany and the United States are hypothesized. They are tested based on 795 logistics outsourcing relationships in the two countries using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that these relationships differ depending on cultural traits relating to trust and commitment. The findings are relevant for practitioners and academics as they paint a more globally informed picture of loyalty formation within logistics outsourcing relationships in which to base both managerial decisions and future research.