Automation,growth, and factor shares in the era of population aging

Journal of Economic Growth - How does population aging affect economic growth and factor shares in times of increasingly automatable production processes? The present paper addresses this question...     

Qualifications,job mismatch,and workers with disabilities

Portuguese Economic Journal - Using panel estimation on longitudinal data from the Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled (PSED), this study examines the relationship between wages and job...     

Economic production quantity model with imperfect-quality items, two-way imperfect inspection and sales return

In practices, not only production but inspection processes are often not perfect, thereby generating defects and inspection errors. Previous imperfect-quality inventory studies, however, have mostly focused on developing cost-minimizing models that do not consider imperfect inspection processes and related defect sales return issues despite their practical significance. Thus, this study proposes a profit-maximizing economic production quantity model that incorporates both imperfect production quality and two-way imperfect inspection, i.e., Type I inspection error of falsely screening out a proportion of non-defects and disposing of them like defects and Type II inspection error of falsely not screening out a proportion of defects, thereby passing them on to customers, resulting in defect sales returns. We also consider rework and salvage in disposing of screened and returned items. Then we solve the model optimally and present numerical sensitivity analyses to provide important managerial insights into practices.     

Infrastructure Bond Markets Development in Asia: Challenges and Solutions

To sustain economic growth momentum, Asia needs to continue investing heavily in infrastructure such as roads, ports, and power plants. Financing the region’s huge demand for infrastructure investments is an essential issue for policy-makers across the region. Against the backdrop of expanding fiscal burdens of Asian governments and more stringent capital requirements on bank lending, local currency bonds can serve as an alternative for infrastructure financing in Asia. In this paper, we use empirical analysis to identify the major determinants of infrastructure bond market development. Evidence indicates that an economy’s size is positively related to infrastructure bond market development. Furthermore, we find that Project Bond Initiative, a European Union initiative, contributed significantly to infrastructure development in Europe. The implication for Asian policy-makers is that deepening regional integration of Asian bond markets would help Asian economies to reach an efficient economic scale to foster infrastructure bond market and policy measures in the forms of credit enhancement would facilitate issuance of infrastructure bonds.     

Allocation of Time and Household-level Consumption Equivalent Welfare: A Case of South Korea

Using “2014 Time Usage and Quality of Life” of 17th KLIPS (Korean Labour and Income Panel Study), the first and most detailed time use survey of its kind in South Korea, we first document the patterns of time use in market work, nonmarket work (household work), child care, and a variety of definitions in leisure. We find that, while men work longer hours, men’s additional market work is well compensated by more leisure and less hours in nonmarket work and child care. We also find within-household unequal distribution of time use in nonmarket work, child care, and leisure in favour of men. Consistent with the cases of the US and other advanced economies, high-income earners tend to enjoy less hours of leisure while they spend more money on leisure activities. Secondly, we calculate the household-level consumption equivalent measure that considers consumption, leisure, life expectancy, and uncertainty. We find that taking into account non-separable preference over leisure and consumption and the quality of leisure is important and household-level welfare measures based solely on income or consumption are both incomplete and misleading.     

Gendering consumer ethics

Consumer ethics research has greatly enhanced our knowledge of the social and environmental consequences and considerations of consumption choices. We argue, however, that gender theory introduces important aspects of ethical enquiry currently overlooked. To build our argument, we undertake a critical literature review that assesses current gender theory and related applications in gender and consumption research. In doing so, we offer a conceptual pathway that elucidates the intersection of gender with consumer ethics in relation to three distinct levels of understanding; socio‐economic, embodied‐affective and representational. Although fundamentally intertwined, for our current purposes, these are analytically distinct. Implications and avenues for future research into gendering consumer ethics are discussed.     

The effects of leader‐member exchange and employee learning on perceived employability

In today’s rapidly changing society, the critical issues for organizations are how to attract individuals with high‐level employability and what role to play in maintaining and enhancing that employability. This study primarily aimed to investigate the effects of leader‐member exchange and employee learning on perceived employability. The literature review showed that leader‐member exchange is about the mutual relationship between the leader and members of an organization, and that employee learning consists in the individual employees’ continuing learning behaviours. The data for this study were collected from 257 South Korean insurance company employees. The study findings demonstrated that leader‐member exchange has a significant positive influence on the one dimension of perceived employability: corporate sense. Employee learning, on the contrary, was shown to have statistically significant positive effects on all the five dimensions of employability. Conclusions were drawn, and the implications and limitations of the study are discussed.     

Environmental efficiency measurement when producers control pollutants under heterogeneous conditions: a generalization of the materials balance approach

Journal of Productivity Analysis - This article provides a generalization of the materials balance-based production model introduced by Coelli et al. (2007). Based on this, some new environmental...     

Guest Editorial: Business Ethics in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

Journal of Business Ethics -