Gender differences in proclivity for unethical behavior

This paper explores possible connections between gender and the willingness to engage in unethical business behavior. Two approaches to gender and ethics are presented: the structural approach and the socialization approach. Data from a sample of 213 business school students reveal that men are more than two times as likely as women to engage in actions regarded as unethical but it is also important to note that relatively few would engage in any of these actions with the exception of buying stock with inside information. Fifty percent of the males were willing to buy stock with insider information. Overall, the results support the gender socialization approach.Michael Betz is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has published articles on income inequality, accountability, gender and work, and job satisfaction. Currently he is working on the effect of gender on ethical decision making and accountability as a mechanism of social control.Lenahan O'Connell is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Carson-Newman College. His research focuses on gender differences in work experience. He is currently studying discrimination law enforcement in addition to continuing research with Michael Betz and Jon Shepard on ethics at work.Jon M. Shepard is currently Chairman of the Department of Management and Professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include comparative management (particularly Japanese and American), ethics in business, the social responsibility of business, and the accountability of institutions in industrial society.     

Scenario Analysis of Chinese Passenger Vehicle Growth

This article reports on a simulation and scenario analysis of Chinese passenger vehicle growth and resulting energy demand and CO₂ emissions. The model includes provincial level logistic growth functions with saturation levels representative of neighboring Asian economies, income growth measured in international dollars, and both estimated and literature-based income elasticities. Scenarios explore variation in key parameters, including income and population growth rates, elasticity income ranges, fuel economy, and vehicle saturation. Countrywide base case results estimate growth from 4.22 to 54.33 passenger vehicles per thousand people from 1995 to 2025. Resulting passenger vehicle oil demands and CO₂ emissions increase nearly 17-fold.     

Information technology and U.S. productivity growth: evidence from a prototype industry production account

The rapid productivity growth in the US during the Information Age, prior to the dot-com bust in 2000, and the large contribution of the IT producing sector, is well known. Less known are the sources of the surprisingly rapid TFP growth during the slow growth period after 2000. We construct an account of US economic growth by aggregating over detailed industries using a new data set based on the NAICS classification. We find that, post 2000, TFP originating from the IT-Producing sector decelerated relative to the IT boom, but still accounted for 40% of aggregate productivity growth. This deceleration was counterbalanced by the contribution from IT-Using sectors, which buoyed aggregate TFP growth to almost the same rate as the 1995–2000 period. For aggregate GDP, the contributions to the growth rate of 2.8% during 2000–2007 were: capital input (1.7% points), labor input (0.4) and TFP (0.7).     

An Empirical Comparison of "Frisch" and "Time Series" Demand price Elasticities for individual Commodities

In a classical article in 1959, Ragnar Frisch [8] developed a procedure, which, under the assumption of want independence¹ and given commodity budget shares, income elasticities, and one own-price elasticity, allows one to calculate a complete matrix of own and cross price elasticities. Between broad commodity groups such an assumption (want independence) has becme increasingly accepted and in fact under the label of separability has formed the basis for a family of demand models that are increasingly used to estimate demand elasticities for broad commodity groups (the linear expenditure system, the Rotterdam model, etc.). At the individual commodity level however, the assumption of want independence seems less viable, e.g., the utility one derives from pork is in general not considered independent from one's consumption of beef. However, it has become increasingly common (and apparently acceptable) to find the Frisch methodology utilized to develop demand price elasticity estimates for individual agricultural commodities [4, 7, 17].     

Environmental accidents under moral hazard and limited firm liability

We study optimal government policy when firms' operations involve a risk of a large environmental accident, firms do not have sufficient assets to cover such costs, and the risk is affected by firms' efforts which are unobservable to outsiders. When firms' profits and government revenues have equal weights in the social welfare function, a first best can be implemented and requires that the firm be subsidized heavily when operating with no accident, and all its assets confiscated in the event of an accident. With a lower weight on firm profits the solution is always second best, with lower subsidies to the firm, and a firm effort lower than at the first-best solution. When firm investments affect both the required accident-preventing effort for given risk and the work effort required for a given output, the first best never involves specific investment subsidies, while a second-best solution generally always does.The paper is part of the research project Environmental policy under asymmetric information', at the SNF Centre for research in economics and business administration, Department of Economics, University of Oslo. I thank, without implicating, Mikael Hoel, Jean-Charles Rochet, Jean Tirole, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on a preliminary version.     

Management turnover expectations: a variable to explain company readiness to engage in continuous management training

What makes companies give their support to Continuous Management Training (CMT) and why, on occasion, do they block its progress? If a company thinks its managers might leave in the near future, would there be reasons for it to provide continuous training of these professionals? Do companies interpret all likely resignations in the same way? We attempt to provide an answer to these questions, by analysing the behaviour of companies' vis-à-vis continuous management training in terms of their expectations of the appropriability of the benefits that stem from such training. Appropriability is in turn assessed with regard to firms' expectations that their managers will leave their organisation without it having had the chance to recover the outlay invested in training. The analysis of business behaviour also demands an understanding of how these turnover expectations are produced and, more specifically, of the variables on which turnover expectations depend or might depend. The empirical study we carried out with over 300 Spanish companies revealed that company projections for voluntary turnover of management employees are positively connected with earlier experiences of turnover, with markets prone to change, and with business risk situations, and negatively associated with developed social management networks, satisfied managers and their degree of specificity in relation to the company. Nevertheless, no significant relationship was observed between expected turnover and the intensity of continuous management training. In general, companies make their management training investment decisions independently of the overall turnover expectations they might have. Different causes might exist for this absence of a relationship, centred in particular on the need for management training and an associated sense of urgency, which takes precedence over the risk of not recovering the investment when the business decision is taken, and on the nature of the management turnover perceived by the company, which is more complex than a strictly economic one.     

The impact of functional integration on perceived risk and consumer-based brand equity

Consumers today have access to a wide span of corporate information and are increasingly aware of the degree to which the functional areas of marketing and supply chain activities are becoming more integrated. Functional integration involves coordinating supply- and demand-focused activities and is theorized to create two interrelated benefits for consumers: lower perceived purchase risk and, ultimately, higher consumer-based brand equity. Despite an emphasis on the important role of consumers in the functional integration literature, the consumers’ viewpoint is missing. This research addresses this gap using a survey and an experiment to investigate the impact of functional integration on consumers’ perceptions of risk and consumer-based brand equity. Findings suggest that when functional integration acts as a component of brand association, purchase risk decreases and consumer-based brand equity increases. The results can help scholars and practitioners better understand the role of functional integration by advancing the nomological net of brand associations as part of the standard marketing mix.     

Disproportionate sampling and recreation demand estimation with the 1980 national survey of fishing,hunting, and wildlife‐associated recreation

Abstract

Data on recreation activity often are obtained from national surveys using stratified, disproportionate sampling. One such survey is the 1980 National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife‐Associated Recreation (1980 Survey). This paper examines the effect of disproportionate sampling on estimates of recreational fishing demand with data from the 1980 Survey. Contrary to some expectations in the literature, disproportionate sampling appears to cause few problems for demand estimation with the 1980 Survey. The evidence suggests that household characteristics determining sampling ratios have little relation to the level of fishing by household members.     

Exotic or erotic – contrasting images for defining destinations

Sex and sexuality are powerful human emotions that have been exploited by the tourism industry to develop aspects of destination image. Where destinations have sought to exploit sex by use of the erotic as an appealing image, sex becomes a featured selling point and may inadvertently become more important than other elements of the destination's preferred image as a result of image capture where the preferred image is displaced by a less preferred image. This paper examines the potential for image confusion when the erotic is used alongside the exotic as part of destination image. In particular, Thailand's preferred image as an exotic destination and the nation's unofficial image as a location for erotic activities are considered. Marketing implications are examined, as are potential measures that may be implemented to soften or even eliminate potentially negative impacts that are presently associated with Thailand's reputation as a center for sex tourism.     

Quantifying the costs of a nationwide public safety wireless network

The existing US public safety wireless infrastructure consists of thousands of disparate systems built by separate local agencies. Problems with interoperability, cost, spectral efficiency, and limited functionality plague these systems but could be significantly reduced through the deployment of a single nationwide network that serves all public safety personnel. Two major efforts towards such a nationwide network are the federal-government-only Integrated Wireless Network (IWN) and an FCC-led effort to create a public-private partnership in the 700 MHz band; the future of both projects is uncertain due in part to concerns surrounding cost. This paper presents a model to estimate cost for two fundamental approaches to a nationwide network: a public-safety-only network and a public–private partnership which serves both public safety and commercial subscribers. We apply this general model to four network scenarios which differ in the amount and band of spectrum allocated as well as the number and type of subscribers (public-safety-only versus commercial and public safety) under three traffic scenarios: voice-only, data-only, and voice and data. We demonstrate that the nation's many small systems could be replaced with a single nationwide network with a small fraction of the tower sites and spectrum. The cost of building this new infrastructure is comparable to what is likely to be spent in just a few years on upgrading and maintaining the existing infrastructure. In addition, we show that these cost estimates are highly dependent on some key system design parameters including the public safety capacity required and signal coverage reliability, which must therefore be well-defined in advance.