Telecommunications divestiture in the UK: a crossed line?

Using data drawn from the Post Office accounts prior to 1981 the question of joint production in the postal and telecommunications industry in the UK, prior to separation, is addressed. The methodology utilises the correspondence between cointegration and error correction mechanisms as a method of tracking the adjustment of costs to equilibrium levels. Significant cost complementarities between postal and telecommunications services are found raising doubts concerning the desirability of separation.     

STRUCTURAL VECTOR AUTOREGRESSIONS: CHECKING IDENTIFYING LONG‐RUN RESTRICTIONS VIA HETEROSKEDASTICITY

Long‐run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just‐identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have been used for this purpose. Three main approaches have been used, exogenously generated changes in the unconditional residual covariance matrix, changing volatility modelled by a Markov switching mechanism and multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity models. Using changes in volatility for checking long‐run identifying restrictions in structural VAR analysis is illustrated by reconsidering models for identifying fundamental components of stock prices.     

Trust or not: Heuristics for making trust-based choices in HR management

The present two studies examine how the participants (i.e., 150 managers) make trust-based employee selection in hypothetical situations, based on five cues of trustworthiness derived from previous surveys. In Study 1, each executive participant is presented with a pair of candidates with different cue profiles so that the choice would favor one of them based upon each of the four following heuristics: Franklin's rule, likelihood expectancy, take-the-best (TTB), and minimum requirement (MR). Study 2 adopting a within-subject design jointly compares the four heuristics. The results show that simple heuristics (MR and TTB) outperform the more complex strategies (Franklin's rule and likelihood expectancy) in their predictive accuracy. The MR heuristic, a heuristic tallying the frequency of passes against a set of minimal rather than optimal or satisfactory requirements, performs even better than the TTB heuristic, particularly when the number of the cues identified as MRs is small.     

Faculty Gender in the College Classroom: Does It Matter for Achievement and Major Choice?

Many feel that faculty members of the same gender may serve as role models, helping students to perform better in classes and encouraging them to continue in a subject. However, while higher education research has found evidence of positive effects of matching on gender, there are also many findings of zero impact. The main hurdle in this literature is identifying the exogenous impact in the absence of student sorting by gender. This article addresses this difficulty by using institutional data from a private liberal arts institution to examine outcomes for students in courses taught by new faculty members for which the students would not know the gender before registering. Results provide evidence of a role model effect for both genders; students earn higher grades in courses taught by same‐gender instructors in fields traditionally dominated by the opposite gender. Major choice and course‐taking behavior are mostly unaffected by faculty gender.     

Do global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel consumption exhibit long memory? a fractional-integration analysis

In this article we use an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average approach to measure the degree of fractional integration of aggregate world CO₂ emissions and its five components – coal, oil, gas, cement, and gas flaring. We find that all variables are stationary and mean reverting, but exhibit long-term memory. Our results suggest that both coal and oil combustion emissions have the weakest degree of long-range dependence, while emissions from gas and gas flaring have the strongest. With evidence of long memory, we conclude that transitory policy shocks are likely to have long-lasting effects, but not permanent effects. Accordingly, permanent effects on CO₂ emissions require a more permanent policy stance. In this context, if one were to rely only on testing for stationarity and non-stationarity, one would likely conclude in favour of non-stationarity, and therefore that even transitory policy shocks have permanent effects. Our fractional-integration analysis highlights that this is not the case.     

Quality,Satisfaction and Customers’ Future Intention: The Case of Hotels’ Fitness Centers in Cyprus

In an era of fierce competition, financial hardship, and volatile customer expectations the hospitality industry is seeking out new revenue centers that can both enrich the customer experience, and contribute to financial success. Capturing the attention of the industry, fitness centers have become a fundamental component of the contemporary hospitality experience with numerous strategic, operational and tactical implications. Responding to the need for further empirical investigation, the study, by adopting a quantitative methodology, holistically investigates quality, satisfaction, and behavioral intention in fitness centers currently operating in upscale hospitality establishments in Cyprus. Findings suggest that satisfaction with the provision of fitness services in hotels is primarily associated with the dimensions of employee behavior and workout facilities. Moreover, workout facilities was the only quality dimension which was significantly associated with the respondents’ intention to renew their membership, whereas a strong relationship between satisfaction and future intention was substantiated.     

Characterizations of bivariate distributions using concomitants of record values

In this paper, we consider a family of bivariate distributions which is a generalization of the Morgenstern family of bivariate distributions. We have derived some properties of concomitants of record values which characterize this generalized class of distributions. The role of concomitants of record values in the unique determination of the parent bivariate distribution has been established. We have also derived properties of concomitants of record values which characterize each of the following families viz Morgenstern family, bivariate Pareto family and a generalized Gumbel’s family of bivariate distributions. Some applications of the characterization results are discussed and important conclusions based on the characterization results are drawn.