Assessing Organizational Adoption of Information Systems Outsourcing

The information systems outsourcing (ISO) field continues to grow, as organizations consistently seek improvements in IT activities. The global scope of outsourcing participation and growth leads to gaps of knowledge related to the contextual factors that influence ISO adoption. Using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, this study identifies and contextualizes the determinants of ISO adoption. Data collected from 261 firms suggest that relative advantage, firm size, top management support, and competitive pressure are the main determinants of ISO. This study highlights the importance of assessing ISO using the TOE theoretical lens, and offers replication of prior results, the lack of which is a growing concern in social science research.     

Founders versus non-founders in large companies: financial incentives and the call for regulation

This paper is intended to question some of the premises in the ever increasing calls to regulate executive pay. We focus on founders, and extend Shleifer and Vishny’s (1989, Journal of Political Economy, 94, 461–488) manager-specific investments model by explicitly modeling managerial effort and pay performance sensitivity. Tests of this model on a data set of large companies, controlling for the endogeneity of managerial compensation, indicate that founders tend to be less responsive to performance incentives and generally more entrenched. At the same time, founders’ led firms are more valuable, supporting our predictions. This suggests that for founders, regulation of compensation may not be very effective.      

Repeated Games with Bounded Entropy

We investigate the asymptotic behavior of the maxmin values of repeated two-person zero-sum games with a bound on the strategic entropy of the maximizer's strategies while the other player is unrestricted. We will show that if the bound η(n), a function of the number of repetitions n, satisfies the condition η(n)/n → γ (n → ∞), then the maxmin value Wⁿ(η(n)) converges to (cav U)(γ), the concavification of the maxmin value of the stage game in which the maximizer's actions are restricted to those with entropy at most γ. A similar result is obtained for the infinitely repeated games. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C73, C72.     

Dimentions of tourist satisfaction with a destination area

Pizam, Abraham, Yoram Neumann, and Arie Reichel.. “Dimensions of Tourist Satisfaction with a Destination Area,” Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. V, No. 3, July/September 1978, pp. 314–322. This paper empirically identifies eight factors of tourist satisfaction with Cape Cod, Massachusetts (USA) as a tourist destination area; and it suggests the means to measure them. By using a factor-analytic approach based on data obtained from a survey of 685 vacationing tourist, the following factors of tourist satisfaction were derived: beach oppurtunities, cost, hospitality, eating and drinking facilities, accommodation facilities, environment, and extent of commercialization.     

The Rise of China: Prospects of Regional Trade Policy

China now engages in multilateral trade liberalization as a new member of the WTO. Concurrently, the number of regional trade agreements is increasing worldwide. China and its trading partners would benefit from increased regional liberalization. Using a gravity equation for 23 Asia-Pacific countries between 1992 and 2000, we show that ASEAN and APEC currently have small effects on Asia-Pacific exports, which are mainly influenced by growth, trade barriers, and common language. However, we find that China’s participation in regional agreements has large export potentials, not only with respect to ASEAN, but also in a broad agreement including South and East Asian countries. JEL no. F15, F17     

New Evidence on Home Prices from Freddie Mac Repeat Sales

The weighted repeat sales price index methodology recently reported in Case and Shiller [5] [6] is applied to a dataset of over eight million loans bought by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation over the last twenty years. Regional price indices are reported and compared to indices from other sources. Statistical issues in the creation of the index, both technical and due to sample selectivity of the Freddie Mac dataset, are extensively discussed. It is found that the new index grows at a rate similar to other indices up until 1985, after which time it grows at a significantly higher rate.     

Consumer Response to a National Marketplace for Individual Health Insurance

The objective of this analysis is to simulate the difference between national and state‐specific individual insurance markets on take‐up of individual health insurance. This simulation analysis was completed in three steps. First, we reviewed the literature to characterize the state‐specific individual insurance markets with respect to state regulations and to identify the effect of those regulations on health insurance premiums. Second, we used empirical data to develop premium estimates for the simulation that reflect case‐mix as well as state‐specific differences in health care markets. Third, we used a revised version of the 2005 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to complete a set of simulations to identify the impact of three different scenarios for national market development. (National market estimates are based on the simulation model with competition among all 50 states and moderate impact assumptions.) We find evidence of a significant opportunity to reduce the number of uninsured under a proposal to allow the purchase of health insurance across state lines. The best scenario to reduce the uninsured, numerically, is competition among all 50 states with one clear winner. The most pragmatic scenario, with a good impact, is one winner in each regional market.     

How Elastic is the Demand for Labour in Belgian Enterprises?Results from Firm Level Accounts Data, 1987–1994

This paper analyzes wage elasticities using a panel dataset of 2800 large Belgian firms over the period 1987–1994. We explore various functional forms and find that the short-run wage elasticity varies between –0.37 and –0.65, while the long-run elasticity is robustly estimated to be larger than 1 in absolute value. These results are striking for they are much higher than those reported in previous studies using macroeconomic time-series data. This suggests that labour costs are more important in determining the demand for labour than initially was believed.