The potential of African trade integration – Panel data evidence for the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite

ABSTRACT

The COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite FTA, formed in 2011, is supposed to be a milestone towards Africa's continental trade integration. This study analyzes the impact of regional integration among the Tripartite countries on their bilateral imports before that date to evaluate the latest integration efforts. We estimate an extended gravity model on a large panel of 51 African countries using yearly observations from 1995 to 2010. We proxy existing formal trade barriers by sample average tariff data on imports from the world as well as indicator variables for the membership in regional FTAs. We consider different estimation techniques and discuss distinct sets of fixed effects. The PPML regression results indicate that remaining tariffs are significantly negatively correlated with imports throughout the preferred multiplicative models. An FTA status does not show a clear-cut import enhancing effect. In the specifications that control for country-year effects, the EAC coefficient is positively correlated with imports, and the COMESA and SADC FTA membership show a positive relation to imports within some reduced-sample robustness checks.     

Does Women’s Labor Force Participation Reduce Domestic Violence? Evidence from Jordan

Enhancing women’s labor force participation is seen as a way to promote their empowerment and improve their well-being and that of their children. The empirical literature on the relationship between women’s employment status and domestic violence is less clear-cut. Using quantitative data from Jordan in 2007, this study explores the effect of women’s employment, as measured by their participation in paid work outside the home, on reported domestic violence, controlling for the potential endogeneity of women’s employment, which might bias the relationship between employment and domestic violence. Without taking endogeneity into account, the regression results suggest that a woman’s participation in paid work enhances violence by her husband. After controlling for endogeneity, these results turn out to be insignificant, which suggests that women’s work status has no causal influence on marital violence. Differentiating between various types of domestic violence provides weak evidence that women’s employment lowers sexual violence.     

A wavelet analysis for exploring the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and tourist footfalls in the USA

We attempt to establish the relationship between Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) and international tourist footfalls in the USA. In the first stage, we investigate the influence of country-specific EPU and global EPU on tourist footfalls. Since, these two are overlapping in nature, in the second stage, we study the isolated influence of country-specific EPU on footfalls by eliminating the influence of global EPU and vice versa. We consider a study period spanning over January 1997 to April 2017. To capture the variations in the relationship at different time dimensions, we apply wavelet-based techniques. We observe the following: (a) the impact of policy uncertainty shock has a little immediate impact on tourist footfalls, (b) medium to long-run shocks persist due to occurrence of major undesirable economic events, and (c) the influence of domestic (country-specific) EPU is dominant in comparison to global EPU for the USA.     

Keeping Their Cards Close to Their Chests: How Non‐Delegating CEOs Avoid Forced Career Ends

It is a common belief that CEOs must delegate to be successful. We hesitate to support this generalization and investigate how the distribution of responsibility within top management teams (TMTs) can influence the likelihood of a CEO’s dismissal. Consistent with an agency theory perspective, our results indicate that CEOs may choose not to delegate their responsibilities to other executive TMT members, so as to benefit from an increased information asymmetry vis‐à‐vis the board of directors. Taking the resource‐based view as a complementary theoretical perspective, we find that non‐delegating CEOs benefit from their greater firm‐specific knowledge, which the board of directors considers as a valuable resource that should be retained. Our work also demonstrates that a more intense CEO–TMT interaction weakens the relation between non‐delegation and the likelihood of CEO dismissal. In sum, our research shows that the CEO’s delegation decision does not necessarily lead to a competence distribution that is in the firm's best interest; rather, it reflects a complex interplay between the potentially opportunistic career interests of the CEO, the involvement of other TMT members and the board of directors. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Goodness-of-fit test with nuisance regression and scale

In the linear model Y _i = x _i + e _i, i=1,,n, with unknown (, ), {\open R}^p, >0, and with i.i.d. errors e ₁,,e _n having a continuous distribution F, we test for the goodness-of-fit hypothesis H ₀:F(e)F ₀(e/), for a specified symmetric distribution F ₀, not necessarily normal. Even the finite sample null distribution of the proposed test criterion is independent of unknown (,), and the asymptotic null distribution is normal, as well as the distribution under local (contiguous) alternatives. The proposed tests are consistent against a general class of (nonparametric) alternatives, including the case of F having heavier (or lighter) tails than F ₀. A simulation study illustrates a good performance of the tests. Received July 2001     

Awards: A strategic management perspective

Research summary : Awards are a valuable strategic resource. Motivation theory and the emerging body of empirical literature suggest that awards can have a significant effect on employee motivation and corporate performance, though not always in the intended direction. Awards can also destroy value. The organizational award literature has so far largely neglected this important issue. We develop a synthesis of the dimensions critical for successful award bestowals, and analyze under which conditions awards generate firm‐specific value that is sustained and difficult for competitors to imitate. The process of value creation and capture is contingent on the given firm's organizational characteristics and nature of production. The article concludes by laying out empirical implications. JEL codes: M52, M54, J24, J30. Managerial summary : Awards are widely used in the corporate sector. They fundamentally differ from monetary incentives, which risk crowding out employees' intrinsic motivation. Among the variety of awards, two general types can be distinguished: confirmatory awards based on explicit, pre‐determined performance criteria, and discretionary awards, which rely on broad performance evaluations and may be used ex post to honor outstanding performance. Appropriately designed and adjusted to the specific firm's characteristics, awards enhance employees' motivation and corporate performance. They express recognition and support their recipients' perceived competence and social status. Awards help to retain valuable employees and to establish role models. However, awards may also backfire, for instance, when they provoke envy among coworkers. We propose when awards risk destroying value and when they are particularly useful. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Struggling with Meaningfulness when Context Shifts: Volunteer Work in a German Refugee Shelter

This article draws on an ethnographic study of volunteer work in a German refugee shelter to explore how individual experiences of meaningfulness are intertwined with shifting discursive and organisational contexts. At the beginning of the so‐called refugee crisis, societal discourses portrayed this volunteer work as extraordinarily meaningful – a state we capture through the metaphor of ‘overflow’. This ‘overflow’ mobilised volunteers and was an important point of reference for framing their work experiences as meaningful. Later, shifting discursive and organisational contexts challenged their framings. Instead of letting go, however, the ‘overflow’ triggered volunteers to reframe their experience in dysfunctional ways in order to sustain their sense of meaningfulness. This paper reveals how shifting societal discourses feed into individual experiences of meaningfulness, shows how individuals may respond to such shifts in problematic ways and theorises the nature of such shifts in drawing on Swidler’s notion of settling contexts.     

The inside effects of a strong external employer brand: how external perceptions can influence organizational absenteeism rates

In this study, we invoke a social identity and job resources perspective to investigate the impact of an organization’s internal and external employer brand images on employee absenteeism. Specifically, using workforce samples of 56 Belgian companies (n = 12670) and a second independent study sample (n = 4461), we assess the relative importance of the internal employer brand image (i.e. employee perceptions) and the external employer brand image (i.e. non-employee perceptions) in predicting the absenteeism rate in these organizations. Results show that corporate absenteeism decreases as internal (employee) views and external (non-employee) views of the organization decline. Results further show that the external employer brand image may be a more important driver of absenteeism than the internal employer brand image. Such results highlight that an organization’s external image may be a strong antecedent of important internal organizational behavior outcomes.