Performing 'Performance'—A Comedy in Five Acts

The public service in the United Kingdom is awash with performance data. From the ubiquitous league tables for schools, local authorities and police services, through key performance indicators for civil service agencies right up to Government-level Public Service Agreements, the number of published performance data sets probably now reaches five figures annually. The author discusses some of the aspects of being what are probably the most 'performance-reported' public services in the world.     

Dimensions of brand performance: Challenges for marketing management and managerial accountancy

This paper evaluates a range of inherent conflicts characteristic of the marketing/accounting interface. It addresses the problems which accountants face when budgeting expenditures for brand management or when attempting to assess the value of brand equity. Dimensions of brand performance are outlined, as are the management processes underpinning their creation and sustenance. A brand value budgeting perspective is proposed which integrates these processes within a framework linking marketing assets to the generation of cumulative strategic value.     

A Cost Indirect Evaluation of Productivity Change in UK Universities

The study provides an empirical analysis of productivity change in publicly-funded UK universities, against a background of government policy specifically designed to enhance the productive efficiency of universities in the provision of teaching and research. The nonparametric analysis employs a cost indirect approach to measuring productivity change, taking explicit account of the quality of research output and decomposing productivity change into technical change and efficiency change. The latter is also decomposed into changes in pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and output congestion. Changes in size efficiency are also computed. On average, productivity declined by 4% over 1989–92, mainly as a result of regressive technical change. Evidence of biased technological change was found, with the frontier shifting out in favour of the teaching outputs and in relative to the research output.     

Managing absence in an NHS hospital

Absence studies often pay little attention to institutional settings. This study of a large hospital looks at factors affecting absence, and worker attitudes to time off. It reveals a highly committed workforce, but one with low morale, deeply distrustful of a management initiating rapid changes.     

When it comes to the crunch: What are the drivers of the US banking crisis?

This article considers how permissive regulatory conditions helped change the size and scope of the US mortgage market. Asset backed securitization facilitated an expansion of the US mortgage market and modified the structure of the value chain within which financial assets, risk and liquidity were managed. New sophisticated mortgage products, indulgent lending practices, loose credit assessment and flimsy documentation increased the probability of mortgage default in an economic downturn. US banks were not in a position to absorb mark-to-market losses on mortgage assets and goodwill impairment resulting from a credit crunch because they operate with narrow profit margins and a limited equity cushion in the balance sheet. This article questions the viability and sustainability of this banking business model.     

INDUCED INNOVATION IN UNITED STATES FIELD CROPS, 1939-78

During the past four decades, United States field crop production has been transformed by the mechanical and fertiliser revolutions. In this study crop-specific estimates of the technical progress parameters that represent these changes are used to test the microeconomic theory of induced innovation. Tests based on the land/labour ratio, derived from a reformulation of the Hayami and Ruttan model, entirely support the inducement hypothesis and suggest that the partial failure of previous empirical investigations resulted from specification problems.