Strategic Purity and Efficiency in the Motor Carrier Industry: A Multiyear Panel Investigation

Two questions facing motor carrier managers are (1) whether carriers should specialize in providing full truckload (TL) or less‐than‐truckload (LTL) services vis‐à‐vis offering mix of both and (2) whether this decision is contingent on carrier size. Yet, the literature provides little guidance because research to date has offered contradictory theoretical predictions and inconsistent empirical findings. Drawing on the theory of strategic purity and information processing theory, we explain why service specialization is likely to increase carriers' technical efficiency and why size will have a more pronounced effect on technical efficiency for carriers specializing in LTL services versus TL services. To test our theory, we assemble a panel data set from archival government sources regarding general freight motor carriers' provision of LTL and TL services. We measure carriers' technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis and test our hypotheses by fitting a series of panel data mixed‐effects models. Our results indicate that carriers are most technically efficient when they specialize in one service type. We also find that size positively affects technical efficiency but only for carriers specializing in LTL services; no returns to scale with regard to technical efficiency exist for carriers specializing in TL services.     

Knocking at the gate: The path to publication for entrepreneurship experiments through the lens of gatekeeping theory

We draw on gatekeeping theory to explore the individual and routine-level criticisms that entrepreneurship experimentalists receive during the review process. Using a multi-study approach, we categorize common gatekeeping themes and present illustrative critiques derived from a unique sample of decision letters and a supplemental survey of entrepreneurship editors. In combination, we extend gatekeeping theory by considering how it applies to the scholarly domain, contribute to the literature by exploring an alternative theoretical explanation as to why entrepreneurship experiments might fail to survive the review process, and finally, provide contextualized recommendations for authors and reviewers of experimental research.     

Leadership After Virtue: MacIntyre’s Critique of Management Reconsidered

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership.     

THE IMPACT OF BODY WEIGHT ON OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY AND CAREER DEVELOPMENT

This article examines the relationship between individuals' weight and employment decisions over the life cycle. I estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals' annual choices of occupation, hours worked, and schooling. Evidence suggests that heavier individuals face higher switching costs when transitioning into white‐collar occupations, earn lower returns to experience in white‐collar occupations, and earn lower wages in socially intensive jobs. I simulate a hypothetical antidiscrimination policy treating obese workers as a protected class. Although such a policy would reduce gaps in occupational attainment, it would have little effect on the observed divergence in wages between obese and nonobese workers.     

Conflict heterogeneity in Africa

The economic development literature widely concurs that conflicts have adverse economic consequences that contribute to poverty, disinvestment and lower human capital leading to widespread inequality and lower economic growth. As such, understanding the nature of conflict has been an important focus for political leaders, policymakers and researchers alike. However, the existing literature does not typically distinguish between the effects of conflict determinants on conflicts by type of actor or aggressor (i.e. state, group and civilian-based). Using panel data analysis for 46 African countries from 1997 to 2017, and a comprehensive geo-referenced Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) conflict dataset, we find evidence of variation in the determinants' effects on conflicts by actor types. For the full sample of countries, we find that military expenditure decreases civilian-based conflicts; globalisation increases both state- and civilian-based conflicts while state fragility increases group-based conflicts. On the other hand, income per capita increases all three types of conflicts. At regional level, we find variation in the effects of military expenditure and globalisation on state- and civilian-based conflicts. However, we find little variation in the effects of the determinants on group-based conflicts across the regions. The findings highlight the nuances in conflicts by actor types and their causes which need to be accounted for when formulating conflict resolution policies.     

DISCRETE CHOICE AND RATIONAL INATTENTION: A GENERAL EQUIVALENCE RESULT

This article establishes a general equivalence between discrete choice and rational inattention models. Matějka and McKay (2015) showed that when information costs are modeled using the Shannon entropy, the choice probabilities in the rational inattention (RI) model take the multinomial logit form. We show that, for one given prior over states, RI choice probabilities may take the form of any additive random utility discrete choice model (ARUM) when the information cost is a Bregman information, a class defined in this article. The prior information of the rationally inattentive agent is summarized in a constant vector of utilities in the corresponding ARUM.     

Decomposing the growth in residential land in the United States

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population only grew 17.8%. At first glance, this suggest an important role for per-household increases. However, the calculations in this paper show that only 24.5% of the growth in residential land area can be attributed to state-level changes in land per household. 37.3% is due to overall population growth, 22.6% to an increase in the number of households over this period, 6% to the shift of population towards states with larger houses, and the remaining 9.6% to interactions between these changes. There are large differences across states and metropolitan areas in the relative importance of these components.     

The Benefit of Mean Auditors: The Influence of Social Interaction and the Dark Triad on Unjustified Auditor Trust

Regulators and researchers have expressed concerns that social interaction leads auditors to unjustifiably trust managers, constituting a lack of sufficient professional skepticism. Using both an abstract laboratory experiment and a contextually rich experiment with practicing auditors we predict and find that higher Dark Triad auditors (those with higher levels of the shared core between psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) are relatively more resistant to lapses in professional skepticism due to the effects of social interaction. This is likely driven by higher Dark Triad auditors' callousness, lack of empathy, and lack of response to social stimuli. In contrast, while higher social interaction initially increases lower Dark Triad auditors' unjustified trust in managers, this effect reverses in subsequent interactions when lower Dark Triad auditors observe evidence suggesting managers have reported aggressively. These findings add to research on the effect of auditor personality traits, audit-client social interaction, and the interaction of these two variables, and suggest that practitioners and researchers account for the interplay of Dark Triad traits and social interaction and their effect on professional skepticism.     

Supplier qualification for high-value goods and services in Nigeria: a comparison of qualified and non-qualified suppliers

This study set out to understand the capabilities of suppliers of high-value products and services in Nigeria. Supplier capability data were collected from almost 500 potential suppliers across 28 product categories. The findings indicate that only a small minority of potential suppliers achieved the required levels of performance and that very few companies have suitable operational capabilities or corporate citizenship behaviour. Furthermore, significant differences were found between service suppliers and product suppliers with regard to performance. The findings suggest that the majority of suppliers of products and services in Nigeria need to improve their operational capabilities and corporate citizenship behaviours, or else risk losing their ability to compete in a changing market place with new barriers to entry.     

Estimating the Dynamics of Mutual Fund Alphas and Betas

This article develops a Kalman filter model to track dynamicmutual fund factor loadings. It then uses the estimates to analyzewhether managers with market-timing ability can be identifiedex ante. The primary findings are as follows: (i) Ordinary leastsquares (OLS) timing models produce false positives (nonzeroalphas) at too high a rate with either daily or monthly data.In contrast, the Kalman filter model produces them at approximatelythe correct rate with monthly data; (ii) In monthly data, thoughthe OLS models fail to detect any timing among fund managers,the Kalman filter does; (iii) The alpha and beta forecasts fromthe Kalman model are more accurate than those from the OLS timingmodels; (iv) The Kalman filter model tracks most fund alphasand betas better than OLS models that employ macroeconomic variablesin addition to fund returns.