The need for a strategic approach on the railways to the management of the vehicle–track interface

Network Rail's decision in 2003 to bring track maintenance back in-house was long-overdue recognition that responsibility for safety on Britain's railways cannot be abdicated – but there was more to it than that. The accidents at Hatfield and Potter's Bar (both in Hertfordshire, UK), in particular, had exposed very vividly how privatisation had encouraged each now separated and competing part of the industry to operate in its own interests: records, data and expertise were fragmented, and track and train operators alike each sought to minimise their individual costs in isolation. This paper argues from a systems analysis perspective that, on vehicle and track maintenance at least, the overall costs to the industry are in such circumstances likely to be higher than if the various parties were to work together towards minimising total track and train maintenance costs between them. Far from increasing efficiency, privatisation had the effect of reducing it.     

Growth and enduring epidemic diseases

This paper analyzes the interplay of human capital formation and economic growth when there is premature adult mortality. Failing adequate insurance arrangements, a long wave of such mortality can so undermine human capital formation as to induce an economic collapse. In nuclear family structures, random matching of partners is superior to assortative mating only if the shock is not too big and initial levels of human capital are not too low. Full pooling of mortality risks with equal treatment of all children in extended families may fend off a general collapse, depending on the initial conditions and the size and duration of the shock. To avoid undesirable effects on expectations, awareness campaigns should be complemented by policies that credibly promise to reduce future mortality. If mortality depends on the general level of human capital, indeterminacy can arise in the form of more than one rational expectations path.     

Power, Self-regulation and the Moralization of Behavior

The perception of behavior as a moral or conventional concern can be influenced by contextual variables, including status and power differences. We propose that social processes and in particular social role enactment through the exercise of power will psychologically motivate moralization. Punishing or rewarding others creates a moral dilemma that can be resolved by externalizing causation to incontrovertible moral rules. Legitimate power related to structure and position can carry moral weight but may not influence the power holder’s perceptions of rules and general norms of behavior. Social identity theory suggests moralization could be promoted by a concern for shared, defining values. However, the tendency to moralize another’s behavior can be injurious to shared identity. We explored white-collar employees’ perceptions of several categories of noxious or deviant workplace behaviors and regressed these perceptions on the tendency to use legitimate, referent, or reward and punish power; social identity; and the interaction of social identity and power, in particular legitimate power. Only the tendency to influence others through punishment or reward predicted moralization. Alternative causal explanations for the findings were addressed through the absence of any relationships between punishment and reward power and perceptions of deviant behaviors as wrong, upsetting, or requiring punishment. We discuss these results in the context of self and social processes, the social construction of morals and power, and the impact of managers’ behavior on group or organizational ethics.     

New development: All change? Performance assessment regimes in UK local government

Contrasting approaches to assessing the performance of public services highlight important issues for policy-makers and future research. We need systematic comparisons between countries. We should use a broader range of evidence. The public ought to have a greater role in designing performance criteria, and we need to know more about the impacts of assessments.     

The decline of paid overtime working in Britain

The share of paid-for overtime hours within total paid-for hours worked in Britain has declined from 5.4% to 2.0% between 1997 and 2020. We investigate this decline, focussing on its distribution across full-time (f/t) and part-time males and females and across 19 one-digit industries. It is established that f/t males are dominant in the decline both of overtime working and overtime hours. We explore the implications of the decline on the share of overtime pay within total pay as well as on the gender pay gap. We test for economic, structural and cyclical influences on overtime working via a two-part regression model that allows us to differentiate between the incidence of overtime working and weekly overtime hours of overtime employees. We examine how paid-for overtime has varied with collective bargaining coverage, low pay, the 2008 financial crisis, the arrival of Covid-19, job mobility and the public/private sector dichotomy. Combined marginal effects of changes in the incidence of overtime working and weekly overtime hours are also provided. The influence of the decline of collective bargaining in the last two decades on overtime working is highlighted using Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions.     

Earnings management,audit adjustments,and the financing of corporate acquisitions: Evidence from China

Acquirers are motivated to overstate earnings prior to stock-financed acquisitions. We hypothesize that audits help to detect and correct such overstatements. We test this using a difference-in-differences design, which compares audit adjustments to earnings for stock-financed and cash-financed acquirers before versus after the acquisitions. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find larger downward adjustments in the audits immediately before stock-financed acquisitions. Further analysis of regulatory sanctions suggests the downward adjustments are in fact warranted, rather than auditors being overly conservative. Moreover, modifications in audit reports suggest that downward adjustments do not correct all of the reporting irregularities in audited financial statements.     

Modelling security market events in continuous time: Intensity based,multivariate point process models

A continuous time econometric modelling framework for multivariate financial market event (or ‘transactions’) data is developed in which the model is specified via the vector conditional intensity. Generalised Hawkes models are introduced that incorporate inhibitory events and dependence between trading days. Novel omnibus specification tests based on a multivariate random time change theorem are proposed. A bivariate point process model of the timing of trades and mid-quote changes is then presented for a New York Stock Exchange stock and related to the market microstructure literature. The two-way interaction of trades and quote changes in continuous time is found to be important empirically.