Absenteeism in Israeli schoolteachers: An organizational ethics perspective

Two studies are presented with the purpose of investigating teacher absences in Israel from the perspectives of organizational normative behavior (Study 1) and organizational ethical climate (Study 2). Study 1 posits that absence may represent shirking behavior, and tested this hypothesis by investigating temporal absence trends of the entire public teacher population in Israel around weekends, holidays, and days of heavy workload. Results provide evidence which supports our theoretical expectations. Study 2 proposes that teachers' work absences are associated with the school's ethical climate. Using a sample of high-school teachers, our results supported this hypothesis, particularly for low-seniority and non-tenured teachers. We suggest that the normative behavior and ethical climate perspectives offer new vistas for advancing our understanding of absence behavior in organizations.     

GASOLINE PRICES,GOVERNMENT SUPPORT,AND THE DEMAND FOR HYBRID VEHICLES IN THE UNITED STATES*

We analyze the determinants of hybrid vehicle demand, focusing on gasoline prices and income tax incentives. We find that hybrid vehicle sales in 2006 would have been 37% lower had gasoline prices stayed at the 1999 levels, and the effect of the federal income tax credit program is estimated at 20% in 2006. Under the program, the cost of reducing gasoline consumption was $75 per barrel in government revenue and that of CO₂ emission reduction was $177 per ton. We show that the cost effectiveness of federal tax programs can be improved by a flat rebate scheme.     

Tight LP-based lower bounds for wavelength conversion in optical networks

With the introduction of optical switching technology in telecommunication networks, all-optical connections, so-called lightpaths, can be established. Lightpaths have to be assigned a wavelength in such a way that no two lightpaths sharing a fiber use the same wavelength. The wavelength of operation can only be exchanged by the deployment of a wavelength converter. In this paper, we study the minimum converter wavelength assignment problem. We develop three integer programming formulations to minimize the number of converters and study their properties. Where the first two formulations lack the power to provide non-trivial lower bounds, tight lower bounds can be computed by solving the linear relaxation of the third formulation by delayed column generation. In fact, the lower bound equals the best known solution value for all realistic instances at our disposal. In a computational study, we compare different strategies to enhance the column generation algorithm.     

Are happy people more employable? Evidence from field experiments

This novel study investigated the response of the labour market to employee happiness. Two field experiments examined the role of happiness in the hiring process. We found that including a personal happiness statement in the curricula vitae significantly increases employer callbacks for men. Strikingly, women do not enjoy the same happiness premium.     

Retirement of Older Workers and Employment of the Young

Policy makers have often argued that an additional benefit of facilitating early retirement is that it creates employment for the young. This may happen if older and younger workers are substitutes. Nowadays policies are aimed at increasing employment of older people to counter the economic consequences of an aging population. Opponents of such policies argue that these will adversely affect youth employment. This paper revisits the nexus between employment of older and younger workers, if only to put any concerns for adverse effects of later retirement on youth employment to rest. To empirically investigate this issue we estimate a dynamic model of employment of the young, prime age and old people using panel data of 22 OECD countries over the time period 1960–2008. Our empirical analysis does not support the hypothesis that employment of the young and old are substitutes and finds some minor complementarities. This suggests that encouraging later retirement will have no adverse effect on youth employment.     

Job satisfaction,lifestyle and demographics of U.S. hospitality industry workers — versus others

A study intended to compare the U.S. hospitality industry employees' work attributes, demographics and lifestyles with employees in four other industry groupings found out that in all three major areas hospitality employees were typified by very specific characteristics. In demographic characteristics these employees came from minority groupings and large families and perceived themselves to be of lower social class. They were less satisfied with their job and life in general and did not think their job to be an important element in their self-accomplishment.     

The systems approach to household labor supply in the Netherlands

Summary Deaton and Muellbauer's `Almost Ideal Demand System' is employed to model the joint determination of family income and male and female labor supply of individual households in the Netherlands. Family composition effects are incorporated as quasi-price effects, as originally proposed by Batten. The model is estimated for a cross-section of households in the Netherlands in 1982, to explain both actual hours of work and preferred hours of work. An analysis of the effects of rationing of male labor supply, by a mandatory reduction of the length of the working week, points to a sizeable compensating effect on female labor supply.The authors thank Jacques Siegers, Joop Hartog, Tom Wansbeek and a referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Geert Ridder kindly provided his maximum likelihood computer program GRMAX, which was used in the estimation of the model.     

Primacy in stock market participation: the effect of initial returns on market re-entry decisions

We examine whether initial returns influence investors’ decisions to return to the stock market following withdrawal. Using a survival analysis technique to estimate Finnish retail investors’ likelihood of stock market re-entry reveals that investors who experience lower initial returns are less likely to return, even after controlling for returns in the last month and average monthly returns for the duration of investing. This primacy effect is robust to accounting for endogeneity in investors’ exit decisions, and other behavioural biases such as recency and saliency of investment experience. Individual investors appear to be subject to primacy bias and tend to put a significant weight on initial experiences in re-entry decisions.