Expected and reported division of responsibility of household tasks among older wives in two residential settings

Literature on sex roles encompasses numerous studies on the division of responsibility in late-life marriages. Some older wives report that they continue to assume responsibility for mos: household chores and they actually perform most tasks. Other wives claim that following retirement, husbands increase their participation within the household arena. However, the increase tends to be in the level of activity involvement rather than in assuming responsibility for new or non-traditional chores. The trend toward egalitarianism in later life, especially for happy couples, is documented by numerous studies. It appears that while role expectations are less gender-specific among older people, they tend to follow the patterns established during middle-age. However, the research is not conclusive. No analysis has compared different living environments of older couples. A sample (n = 244) or older wives (mean age 72 years) living in two different residential settings were questioned via a mailed survey about their responsibility and behaviours regarding 12 household tasks: cooking meals, washing dishes, doing yard work, washing clothes, maintaining the car, writing letters, scheduling family events, getting or earning money, cleaning house, shopping, undertaking household repairs and making family decisions. High scores suggest a non-traditional approach to sex-role tasks, while low scores suggest egalitarian relationships. The views that wives have of division of responsibility of household tasks is explored: who should take responsibility for tasks and who does the tasks? Variables previously found to influence sex-role beliefs are examined. In particular, relationships between sex roles and marital quality, length of marriage, family income, frequency of interaction with children, residential environment and health are presented.     

SIMILARITY JUDGMENTS IN STRATEGY FORMULATION: ROLE,PROCESS AND IMPLICATIONS

Similarity judgments are an important and distinct aspect of strategy formulation. They are manifest in strategic decisions and errors, and in the construction of analytic concepts such as strategic groups and relatedness in diversification. However, existing models of strategy formulation either assume away the process of making similarity judgments or regard it as unproblematic. This paper highlights the role of similarity judgments in strategy formulation, and discusses cognitive findings showing that decision makers’ assessment of similarity is not free from bias. The cognitive findings help construct a new process explanation for a wide range of apparently isolated strategic errors. The process explanation is contrasted and integrated with traditional explanations based on imperfections in decision inputs. Finally, in light of the cognitive findings, the methods and assumptions of existing approaches in strategy formulation research to the construction of analytic concepts are reexamined. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bringing It Home: A Study of the Incentives Surrounding the Repatriation of Foreign Earnings Under the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004

The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (the Act) creates a temporary tax holiday that effectively reduces the U.S. tax rate on repatriations from foreign subsidiaries from 35% to 5.25%. Firms receive the reduced tax rate by electing to take an 85% dividends received deduction on repatriations in 2004 or 2005. This paper investigates the characteristics of firms that repatriate under the Act and how they use the repatriated funds. We find that firms that repatriate under the Act have lower investment opportunities and higher free cash flows than nonrepatriating firms. Further, we find that repatriating firms increase share repurchases during 2005 by approximately $60 billion more than nonrepatriating firms, an amount that cannot be explained by differences in earnings between the two groups of firms. This increase represents about 20% of the $291.6 billion repatriated by our sample firms under the Act.     

Optimal Forbearance of Bank Resolution

This paper analyzes a regulator's optimal strategic delay of resolving banks when the regulator's announcement of the intervention delay endogenously affects the depositors' run propensity. Given intervention, the regulator either liquidates the remaining illiquid assets (“prompt corrective action”) or continues managing the assets at a reduced skill level (“resolution under receivership”). In either case, I show that if the regulator tolerates fewer withdrawals until intervention, the depositors may react by preempting the regulator: they run on the bank more often ex ante. A policy of never intervening can leave the bank more stable than a conservative intervention policy.     

Truth in Investing: The Need for Legislation

This paper shows that a wide variety of techniques are used to calculate yields on consumer investment instruments. No regulation comparable to the Federal Reserve System's Truth in Lending statute (Regulation Z) exists to standardize yields on consumer investments, and thus the consumer is not given the information necessary to make proper comparisons among alternative investments. The paper reviews yield calculation methods and reinvestment assumptions; it also examines the potentially deceptive use of Treasury bill yields as the ceiling for bank and thrift accounts. In order to reduce confusion and standardize reported yields, it is proposed that disclosure be required of both the simple yield and the annualized effective yield, assuming reinvestment at the initial rate of return.     

Regulatory Arbitrage in Cross‐Border Banking Mergers within the EU

Expanding the cross‐country footprint of an organization's profit‐making activities changes the geographic pattern of its exposure to loss in ways that are hard for regulators and supervisors to observe. This paper tests and confirms the hypothesis that differences in the size and character of safety‐net benefits available to banks in individual EU countries help to account for cross‐border merger activity. Our results suggest that central bankers need to develop statistical procedures for assessing the consequences of differences in supervisory strength and weakness in partner countries. We believe that the methods used here can help in this task.     

Risk Aversion Revisited

In order to supply additional empirical evidence of the effect of wealth on relative risk aversion, this study investigates households' demand for risky assets, using analysis of covariance techniques applied to the asset holdings of Canadian individual households. The extent and pattern of life-cycle effects are also examined. Results generally point to decreasing relative risk aversion when housing is either excluded from the definition of wealth or treated as a riskless asset. The investor's life-cycle plays a prominent role in portfolio selection behavior, with risk aversion increasing uniformly with age. Tax differentials do not seem to be an important element in investment decisions with respect to risk. When the sample and wealth definitions are censored in order to approximate those of previous empirical studies, their findings on relative risk aversion are generally corroborated.     

The Changing Nature of Contracting and Trust in Public‐Private Partnerships: The Case of Victorian PPP Prisons

This paper examines shifting constructions of contracting and trust that are manifest between pre‐2000 and post‐2000 public‐private partnerships (PPPs) providing prison facilities and/or services in the Australian State of Victoria. As such, this paper is significant because it outlines longitudinal insights into the nature of changing practices sustaining these PPPs. The post‐2000 period examined reflects a change of government and the policy context. Our examination is based on a range of primary and secondary documents. The primary documents comprise three pre‐2000 Prison Services Agreements and two post‐2000 Facilities Services Agreements. A number of government and other reports constitute the secondary documents consulted. While there are many substantive similarities between the contracts, we find five main areas of changed contracting practices over the period examined. These relate to: first, the objectives of the PPP prisons; second, risk management practices; third, the approach to performance measurement and reporting; fourth, the structuring of incentive and payment mechanisms; and fifth, the emphasis on collaboration. Overall, we find that the post‐2000 contracts promote a more overt development of goodwill trust and relational contracting, building on presumptions of contractual and competence forms of trust. However, quite different outcomes have been achieved from particular contractual contexts. Our study suggests that in complex PPP contracts, the influences of both the transacting parties and the transaction environment have been insufficiently recognized in the literature on PPPs.