Where Are They Now? Tracking the Ph.D. Class of 1997

We report early career outcomes of economics Ph.D.s by tracking the U.S. class of 1996-1997. We examine employment outcomes, work activities, salaries, and graduates' attitudes toward their jobs. By 2003, all of the respondents were employed, although almost half changed employers during the six years. Salaries of the cohort increased at an average annual rate of 8.2% from 1997 through 2003. Academic-year salaries rose about 5.7% per year, whereas private sector salaries skyrocketed at 15% per year. Finally, the median salaries of first-year full-time permanent 9- to 10-month academic economists hired in 2002-2003 actually exceed the median 2003 salaries of their counterparts initially hired in 1997-1998. Some of this apparent salary inversion reflects a different mix of employers and departments between the two cohorts, with the younger group securing relatively more jobs at higher-paying institutions.     

Do Better‐Governed Australian Firms Make More Informative Disclosures?

Abstract:   We investigate whether and if so, how, corporate governance 'quality' ¹ is related to the information flows from a company and how the share market and its agents respond. Specifically, we study links between the 'quality' of a firm's corporate governance (CGQ) and the informativeness of its disclosures. We employ six indicators of informativeness. They include document counts, properties of analysts' forecasts and a 'timeliness' metric, in the spirit of Ball and Brown (1968) , that reflects the average speed of price discovery throughout the year. Our results suggest the answer to our question is 'Yes': better‐governed firms do make more informative disclosures.     

The organizing vision of application service provision: a process-oriented analysis

The processes by which information systems (IS) innovations become institutionalized are the subjects of much debate within the field of organization theory. Yet few empirical studies exist which examine how IS innovations come to be adopted and diffused across organizations. This paper draws from neo-institutional theory by extending the work of Swanson and Ramiller, using their concept of the organizing vision as a lens for observing and analysing an emerging information systems innovation targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which came to be known as application services provisioning (ASP). We observe that over time, the initial euphoria and ‘hype’ which surrounded the organizing vision of ASP was replaced by scepticism and distrust, as powerful institutional interests in the form of leading technology firms, industry analysts and IT consultancies were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to disseminate ASP throughout the wider business and not-for profit IS user communities. The lessons from this research suggest that a processes-oriented analysis of how organizing visions are interpreted, legitimised and mobilized is critical for understanding and explaining how underdevelopment of an organizing vision at an early stage, may inhibit its later adoption and institutionalization.     

The strategic management of a large scale IT project in the financial services sector

This article explores theoretical and empirical work on IT strategy formulation. While the managerialist focus upon a structured rational text-book model is common in the literature, it is not supported by empirical research on IT projects in the financial services sector.     

The Usefulness of Experimental Auctions in Determining Consumers' Willingness-to-Pay for Quality-Differentiated Products

The validity and effectiveness of using experimental auctions to elicit consumers' willingness-to-pay for closely related, quality-differentiated products is examined. The effect of panelists' demographics on bid values and auction winners, and the impact of experimental procedures on auction prices are analyzed. Demographic variables are poor predictors of bids and auction winners. Experimental procedures such as panel size and initial endowment influence market price level. Relative bid differences for paired samples are primarily influenced by relative differences in taste panel ratings. Relative willingness-to-pay values elicited through experimental auctions appear valid, while actual willingness-to-pay values are influenced by experimental design.     

Flexible Contracts and Human Capital Investments

As suggested by human capital theory, workers with flexible contracts participate less often in training than those with permanent contracts. We find that this is merely due to the fact that flexworkers receive less employer-funded training, a gap they can only partly compensate for by their own training investments. Flexworkers particularly participate less in firm-specific training that is meant to keep up with new skill demands than workers with permanent contracts. However, for those who participate in employer-funded firm-specific training, a temporary contract appears to facilitate the transition to a permanent contract with the same employer. However, this does not hold for participation in self-paid training. This training, which is usually general training, does not help in finding a better job.