ESTIMATING WELFARE IN INSURANCE MARKETS USING VARIATION IN PRICES

We provide a graphical illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection. We then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of insurance. Such variation, together with quantity data, allows us to estimate the demand for insurance. The same variation, together with cost data, allows us to estimate how insurer's costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price. The slope of this estimated cost curve provides a direct test for both the existence and nature of selection, and the combination of demand and cost curves can be used to estimate welfare. We illustrate our approach by applying it to data on employer-provided health insurance from one specific company. We detect adverse selection but estimate that the quantitative welfare implications associated with inefficient pricing in our particular application are small, in both absolute and relative terms.     

Socioeconomic Impacts of Public Forest Policies on Heterogeneous Agricultural Households

Nepal has a long history of returning public forests to local people as part of its community forestry programme. In principle the community forestry programme is designed to address both environmental quality and poverty alleviation. However, concern has been expressed that forest policies emphasise environmental conservation, and that this has a detrimental impact on the use of community forests in rural Nepal where households require access to public forest products to sustain livelihoods. To study the effect of government policies on forest use, an economic model of a typical small community of economically heterogeneous households in Nepal was developed. The model incorporates a link between private agriculture and public forest resources, and uses this link to assess the socioeconomic impacts of forest policies on the use of public forests. Socioeconomic impacts were measured in terms of household income, employment and income inequality. The results show that some forest policies have a negative economic impact, and the impacts are more serious than those reported by other studies. This study shows that existing forest policies reduce household income and employment, and widen income inequalities within communities, compared to alternative policies. Certain forest policies even constrain the poorest households?? ability to meet survival needs. The findings indicate that the socioeconomic impacts of public forest policies may be underestimated in developing countries unless household economic heterogeneity and forestry??s contribution to production are accounted for. The study also demonstrates that alternative policies for managing common property resources would reduce income inequalities in rural Nepalese communities and lift incomes and employment to a level where even the poorest households could meet their basic needs.     

Propensity to Support Sustainability Initiatives: A Cross-National Model

Businesses and the social sciences are increasingly facing calls to further scholarship dedicated to understand sustainability. Furthermore, multinationals are also facing similar calls given their high profile and their role in environmental degradation. However, a literature review shows that there is very limited understanding of sustainability at a cross-national level. Given the above gaps, we contribute to the literature by examining how selected GLOBE [House et al., Culture, leadership and organizations: The GOBE study of 62 societies. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 2004] cultural dimensions are related to individuals’ propensity to support sustainability initiatives in 33 countries. We use data from the World Values Survey [World Values Study Group, World Values Surveys and European Value Surveys, 1999–2001. Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, Ann Arbor, 2004] and test our hypotheses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). Results support all but one hypothesis. Specifically, uncertainty avoidance is not related to propensity to support sustainability initiatives. In contrast, performance orientation and assertiveness have the desired negative relationship with our dependent variable while collectivism, future orientation, and human orientation have the desired positive relationship. We discuss the conceptual and practical implications of this study.     

Career barriers: Do we need more research?

Research on career barriers has stressed the commonalities among women, and the ways in which women can develop the personal and professional skills they need to demonstrate their commitment to the organization. However, this individualistic focus is not appropriate for dealing with the problem of combining career and family responsibilities. Our research focus must now turn to the commonalities among organizations, and the ways in which different organizational structures and cultures are more or less responsive to women. A study of Canadian National Sport Organizations illustrates some of the issues in this approach.Dr. Dallas Cullen is a member of the Department of Organizational Analysis in the Faculty of Business at the University of Alberta, with a teaching specialization in gender issues in organizations. Some of her previous research focussed on the impact of affirmative action on women's labour force participation in Canada and the U.S.     

供应链会计

继2006年7月和8月FM登载的有关组织间成本管理问题的文章之后，John Cullen又提出了财务经理还能够在其他哪些领域提供物流支持[编者按]     

Savings behaviour in low-income countries

The empirical literature on savings in low-income countrieshas exploited some remarkable data sets to shed new light onsavings behaviour in the poor agricultural households that makeup the majority of the population in such countries. A numberof conclusions have emerged: (i) the degree of consumption smoothingover seasons within the year and across years, in response tovery large income fluctuations, is higher than was supposed;(ii) the lack of complete insurance and credit markets, however,is manifested in asset stocks and asset compositions among farmers,especially small farmers, that are inefficient; (iii) the combinationof low and volatile incomes is an important cause of inefficiencyand income inequality; (iv) the proximity of formal financialinstitutions increases financial savings and crowds out informalinsurance arrangements, thus, in principle, better facilitatingfinancial intermediation; and (iv) simple life-cycle modelsof savings do not appear to explain long-term savings in low-incomesettings.     

Joint estimation of discount rates and willingness to pay for public goods

We analyze willingness to pay (WTP) for environmental programs whose time periods of benefit and repayment differ, using a net present value framework that identifies parameters of both WTP and personal discount rates. Respondents to a contingent valuation survey focusing on protection of critical habitat buffer zones for the endangered Steller Sea Lion in Alaska were asked their willingness to pay for 1-, 5-, and 15-year repayment periods. We jointly estimate the personal discount rates and WTP via maximum likelihood, and compare with a model assuming a fixed, market discount rate.     

A test of the Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross model of the term structure

We test the theory of the term structure of indexed bond pricesdue to Cox, Ingersoll, and Ross (CIR). The econometric methoduses Hansen.'s generalized method of moments and exploits theprobability distribution of the single-state variable in CIR.'smodel, thus avoiding the use of aggregate consumption data.It enables us to estimate a continuous-time model based on discretelysampled data. The tests indicate that CIR's model for indexbonds perform reasonably well when confronted with short-termTreasury-bill returns. The estimates indicate that term premiumsare positive and that yield curves can take several shapes.However, the fitted model does poorly in explaining the serialcorrelation in real Treasury-bill returns.     

Educating Business Students About Sustainability: A Bibliometric Review of Current Trends and Research Needs

There has been substantial growth of interest in sustainability in business, management and organisational studies in recent years. This article applies Oswick’s (J Manag Spirit Relig 6(1):15–25, 2009) method of bibliometric research to ascertain how this growth has been reflected in scholarly publishing, particularly as it relates to business and management education over the 20 years 1994–2013. The research has found that sustainability as a general topic in business and management studies, as evidenced by scholarly publishing, has accelerated rapidly both in terms of items published and cited. In the mid-2000s, the emphasis of books published in this area began to change from one which advocated ‘sustainable development’ to one which viewed sustainability as a management practice which could help businesses and society simultaneously. The literature on sustainability within the field of management and business education has been smaller, but has enjoyed a similar growth rate which accelerated sharply in the most recent 5 years of the dataset. Most of the scholarly, peer-reviewed articles analysed tend to advocate the inclusion of sustainability on business school curricula, or to demonstrate the various ways in which faculty have integrated sustainability-related principles in their teaching. A smaller amount of research has been undertaken on the learning experiences of the ‘recipients’ of these approaches. There is evidence of an extensive variety of approaches used by educators, but the most significant research need which presented is for more empirically driven studies on how and why business and management students engage with the principles of sustainability.