A sectoral approach to Okun’s Law

The study adds to the existing literature on the relationship between output and unemployment by using a sectoral specification of Okun’s Law to capture the differential sensitivity of the unemployment rate to output developments in the services and manufacturing sectors. Using quarterly data for the period between 2000 and 2012, we show that Malta’s unemployment rate has been more sensitive to output developments in the services sector than to those in the manufacturing sector. We use different equation specifications and the youth unemployment rate to show that the impact resulting from developments in the manufacturing sector occurs mainly via lay-offs while developments in the services sector affect the unemployment rate via the hiring of new entrants into the labour market.     

Educating business schools about safety & health is no accident

This paper summarizes the consequences of safety and health inattentiveness, and reviews four primary dangers in the workplace. In addition, perspectives of employee health and safety are presented from industry and academia which provide the basis for a strong recommendation to include safety and health issues in business school curricula. Wayne H. Stewart's areas of research and teaching interest include Social Responsibility in Management, Entrepreneurship, and International Business. Wayne is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Case Studies, and has published in the Journal of Management Learning, as well as participating in several academic conferences. Donna E. Ledgerwood is currently the Secretary for the Southern Management Association. Donna was President of the Southwest Academy of Management in 1993 and served as the Academy of Management's Director of Exhibits/Publisher Relations and Director of Advertising from 1983–1991. Having written one of the first articles on sexual harassment in 1980, Donna serves on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Business Strategies and has published in the Labor Law Journal, the Monthly Labor Review, and the Personnel Administrator. Ruth C. May's areas of expertise are International Business, Business Policy and Strategy and International Human Resource Management. Specializing in the transfer of Western management practices to the former Soviet Union, Ruth is currently involved in the development of training programs and privatization processes in central Russia. She has published in the Academy of Management Executive, Multinational Business Review, and Socialist Labor (Russia).     

A spatial interaction model for deriving joint space maps of bundle compositions and market segments from pick-any/J data: An application to new product options

We propose an approach for deriving joint space maps of bundle compositions and market segments from three-way (e.g., consumers x product options/benefits/features x usage situations/scenarios/time periods) pick-any/J data. The proposed latent structure multidimensional scaling procedure simultaneously extracts market segment and product option positions in a joint space map such that the closer a product option is to a particlar segment, the higher the likelihood of its being chosen by that segment. A segment-level threshold parameter is estimated that spatially delineates the bundle of product options that are predicted to be chosen by each segment. Estimates of the probability of each consumer belonging to the derived segments are simultaneously obtained. Explicit treatment of product and consumer characteristics are allowed via optional model reparameterizations of the product option locations and segment memberships. We illustrate the use of the proposed approach using an actual commercial application involving pick-any/J data gathered by a major hi-tech firm for some 23 advanced technological options for new automobiles.     

A new clustering methodology for the analysis of sorted or categorized stimuli

This paper introduces a new stochastic clustering methodology devised for the analysis of categorized or sorted data. The methodology reveals consumers' common category knowledge as well as individual differences in using this knowledge for classifying brands in a designated product class. A small study involving the categorization of 28 brands of U.S. automobiles is presented where the results of the proposed methodology are compared with those obtained from KMEANS clustering. Finally, directions for future research are discussed. Wayne S. DeSarbo is the S. S. Kresge Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Statistics, and Michael D. Johnson is Associate Professor of Marketing, both at the University of Michigan's School of Business Administration. Kamel Jedidi is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business. The authors gratefully acknowledge DuPont Incorporated for providing financial support for this research.     

Blockholder Exit Threats and Financial Reporting Quality

Recent theoretical and empirical studies suggest that blockholders (shareholders with ownership ≥ 5 percent) exert governance through the threat of exit. Blockholders have strong incentives to gather private information and sell their shares when managers are perceived to underperform. To prevent blockholders from selling their shares and the firm from suffering a stock price decline, managers align their actions with the interests of shareholders. As a result of the greater manager‐shareholder alignment, managers' actions are more likely to be in shareholders' best interest, and consequently there is less need for managers to manipulate earnings. Consistent with these predictions from economic theory, we find evidence that as exit threat increases, firms have higher financial reporting quality. Theory also predicts that the impact of blockholders' exit threat on financial reporting quality (FRQ) should increase as the manager's wealth is tied more closely to the stock price, and this is what we find. Our study contributes to the research on the impact of shareholders on FRQ and to an emerging literature on the impact of blockholders in financial markets. Blockholders play an important role in managers' reporting outcomes through their actions as informed investors.     

Differentiation Among US Colleges and Universities

Colleges and universities in the US differ markedly in their access to economic resources. National data are used here to describe the resulting hierarchy that's reflected in schools' spending on their students, the prices those students pay, and the subsidies they get in consequence. Both historical data and projections based on recent institutional saving suggest that economic disparities among institutions and their students are increasing. In a final section, the paper asks what to make of this: what we can say about the right degree of institutional disparity – whether we have too much, too little, or about the right amount of differentiation.