Sampling distributions associated with the multivariate t distribution

The known sampling distributions and simulation methods associated with multivariate t distributions are reviewed. We believe that this review will serve as an important reference and encourage further research activities in the area.     

Partnership working and the cultivated activist

Critics and advocates of union–management partnership agreements offer competing assessments of the potential outcomes for workplace union representation. These include the attenuation of the role of lay activists and intra‐union conflict. In this case study of Amicus‐MSF at Legal & General partnership involved centralised decision making, membership loss and activist‐leadership tensions, but these were temporary. With employer support the local union leadership ‘cultivated’ a cadre of pro‐partnership activists with extended reach into management decision making, increasing membership and strengthening workplace organisation.     

Exploring consumer ethics in Ghana,West Africa

Consumer ethics is a growing area of research that focused almost exclusively on consumers in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe and Asia. In this paper, we introduce an African element to the consumer ethics discourse by drawing on survey responses from over 300 Ghanaian consumers to explore their ethical beliefs and judgements. We analysed these data using regression techniques. Our findings show that Ghanaian consumers exhibit lower levels of ethics compared with their America counterparts, especially when the unethical actions facilitate the achievement of their goals. While Ghanaian consumers recognize the value of moral rules, they are prone to suspending their ethical positions as they deem necessary in a particular context. Implications for marketing strategy and future research are discussed.     

Cross-sectional forecasts of the equity premium

If investors are myopic mean-variance optimizers, a stock's expected return is linearly related to its beta in the cross-section. The slope of the relation is the cross-sectional price of risk, which should equal the expected equity premium. We use this simple observation to forecast the equity-premium time series with the cross-sectional price of risk. We also introduce novel statistical methods for testing stock-return predictability based on endogenous variables whose shocks are potentially correlated with return shocks. Our empirical tests show that the cross-sectional price of risk (1) is strongly correlated with the market's yield measures and (2) predicts equity-premium realizations, especially in the first half of our 1927–2002 sample.     

Service delivery frameworks as instruments of citizen empowerment: A tale of two experiences,India and South Africa

This paper presents a comparative assessment of South Africa and India's service delivery improvement strategies, challenges, successes and lessons learnt in advancing their service delivery reform programmes. The cardinal argument in the paper is that the public administrative systems adopted and inherited in the post-democratic epochs in India and South Africa were incapable of meeting the service delivery needs of their respective citizens. They epitomised the traditional and hierarchical public administrative systems that were the object of reforms in the 1990s. The reform initiatives also coincided with global reforms on public administration systems taking place under the aegis of the new public management framework. A key feature of new public management is its application of private-sector ideas to the public sector, such as individual accountability. The paper further undertakes a comparative review of service delivery improvement frameworks of South Africa (Batho Pele) and India (Sevottam) in relation to their objectives and implementation modalities.     

An inconvenient dataset: bias and inappropriate inference with the multilevel model

The multilevel model has become a staple of social research. I textually and formally explicate sample design features that, I contend, are required for unbiased estimation of macro-level multilevel model parameters and the use of tools for statistical inference, such as standard errors. After detailing the limited and conflicting guidance on sample design in the multilevel model didactic literature, illustrative nationally-representative datasets and published examples that violate the posited requirements are identified. Because the didactic literature is either silent on sample design requirements or in disagreement with the constraints posited here, two Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to clarify the issues. The results indicate that bias follows use of samples that fail to satisfy the requirements outlined; notably, the bias is poorly-behaved, such that estimates provide neither upper nor lower bounds for the population parameter. Further, hypothesis tests are unjustified. Thus, published multilevel model analyses using many workhorse datasets, including NELS, AdHealth, NLSY, GSS, PSID, and SIPP, often unwittingly convey substantive results and theoretical conclusions that lack foundation. Future research using the multilevel model should be limited to cases that satisfy the sample requirements described.     

Multilateral trade agreements in Africa

This paper explores the motives behind the formation of intra-African regional integration agreements (RIAs). We focus specifically on rents because they can explain the drive for integration even in the absence of a positive effect on welfare. Whether they are meant to foster rent-seeking or to suppress it, the level of corruption is posited to have a positive effect on the willingness to enter into RIAs. However, empirical studies into this effect have come to contradictory conclusions. We find that corruption has a positive effect on the willingness of African countries to join trade agreements. This result remains significant when controlling for endogeneity and heteroskedasticity, as well as the indicator of corruption used. While small, the effect of corruption outperforms most economic variables. Nevertheless, distance and other geographical factors remain the strongest explanatory forces of African integration.     

Dependence structure and symmetry of Huang-Kotz FGM distributions and their extensions

An extension of FGM class of bivariate distributions with given marginals is presented. For Huang-Kotz FGM distributions some theorems characterizing symmetry and conditions for independence are obtained. The new family of distributions allows us to achieve correlation between the components greater than 0.5.