An ill-informed choice: empirical evidence of the link between employers’ part-time or temporary employment strategies and workplace performance in Canada

Many employers seek flexibility through part-time or temporary employment to achieve improved competitiveness and success. Using strategic choice theory, this study is a longitudinal examination of employers’ strategic decisions of reducing labour costs and using part-time or temporary workers on workplace performance. Workplace performance is measured through profitability, productivity and change in net operating revenue. Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey longitudinal workplace data are used for the analysis. Results show that reducing labour costs strategy has no effect on profitability, productivity or change in net operating revenue, and using part-time or temporary workers strategy shows decreased profitability and productivity, and that there is no effect on the change in net operating revenue in Canadian workplaces studied. Based on these findings, we recommend that employers, in Canada and elsewhere, not only carefully weigh reducing labour costs and employing part-time or temporary workers strategies for workplace performance, but also reconsider such strategies and instead seek alternative means of improving workplace performance.     

Evaluation of psychosocial and organizational factors in offshore safety: a comparative study

This study compares UK and Norwegian offshore workers' evaluations of social and organizational factors that can have an impact upon safety on offshore installations. A total of 1138 Norwegian (87% response rate) and 622 UK workers (40% response rate) responded to a self-completion questionnaire, which was distributed to 18 installations in February/March 1994. The questionnaire contained six scales that were suitable and relevant for the purposes of comparison. These scales measured ‘risk perception’, ‘satisfaction with safety measures’, ‘perceptions of the job situation’, ‘attitudes to safety’, ‘perceptions of others' commitment to safety’ and ‘perceptions of social support’. The data show clear differences in how UK and Norwegian workers evaluate various social and organizational factors that can have an impact upon safety, however, eta² analysis indicated that for most of the scales ‘installation’ explained a greater percentage of the variance than sector. The exceptions to this were scales measuring ‘safety attitudes’ where both sector and installation contributed equally to the effects. Although the results from the ‘safety attitudes’ scales should be interpreted with caution (due to low internal reliability), it is possible that they are tapping into more deeply held beliefs about the nature of safety, e.g. ‘fatalism’ and the ‘causes of accidents’. In contrast, the other scales are measuring factors directly related to the working environment such as perceptions of risk and satisfaction with safety measures on the installation. These may reflect the prevailing ‘safety climate’ or ‘atmosphere’ on the installations surveyed, whereas constructs such as ‘fatalism’, etc. may be reflections of underlying ‘cultural’ values. Recognizing the existence of different ‘safety cultures’ and understanding the processes which lie behind them could have implications for safety management in an industry which is highly international in nature and in which workers' are often required to work in foreign countries for varying periods of time.     

Portfolio Insurance Strategies when Hedging Affects Share Prices

Option-based portfolio insurance can result in coordinated buying and selling, which destabilizes markets such that hedgers fail to achieve their objective. Gennotte and Leland (1990) show portfolio insurance strategies can have an impact on price movements. Ramanlal and Mann (1996) show how price movements, in turn, can alter hedging strategies. In this paper, we combine these separate effects and develop an equilibrium, executable hedging strategy. This hedging strategy requires less rebalancing than traditional portfolio insurance; more important, it achieves downside protection with a less destabilizing impact on security prices.     

Dynamic mode decomposition for financial trading strategies

We demonstrate the application of an algorithmic trading strategy based upon the recently developed dynamic mode decomposition on portfolios of financial data. The method is capable of characterizing complex dynamical systems, in this case financial market dynamics, in an equation-free manner by decomposing the state of the system into low-rank terms whose temporal coefficients in time are known. By extracting key temporal coherent structures (portfolios) in its sampling window, it provides a regression to a best fit linear dynamical system, allowing for a predictive assessment of the market dynamics and informing an investment strategy. The data-driven analytics capitalizes on stock market patterns, either real or perceived, to inform buy/sell/hold investment decisions. Critical to the method is an associated learning algorithm that optimizes the sampling and prediction windows of the algorithm by discovering trading hot-spots. The underlying mathematical structure of the algorithms is rooted in methods from nonlinear dynamical systems and shows that the decomposition is an effective mathematical tool for data-driven discovery of market patterns.     

南卡人圆"美国梦"——亚伦·格雷斯潘的奋斗传奇

在大学的学生经常听到：当实习生是你毕业后找工作最好的敲门砖。对于亚伦．格雷斯潘(Allen Gillespie),实习生给他的不仅是开始,也是一个起飞的发射台。他的实习生机会对他及对他的雇主是双赢的。亚伦是住在南卡州的Ander- son市,离乔治亚州的亚特兰大市东北2小时车程。他就读于弗吉尼亚州的华盛顿李大学,一心想进     

Children’s Snacks,their Ads and Consumer Sovereignty

Abstract

The concept of sovereign consumer preferences is challenged from three sides: child consumers, unhealthy food and advertising. The two theoretical concepts of merit goods and libertarian paternalism are implemented in order to classify situations in which full consumer sovereignty does not apply. An empirical analysis of ads for children’s snacks reveals the libertarian paternalist perspective as helpful for understanding the demand for and justification of ‘soft’ governmental intervention in the case of the advertised snacks, whilst the ads for these snacks may well be demerit goods. The banning or heavy taxation of these ads is therefore advocated.     

The search for relative value in bonds

Comparing asset swap spreads across bonds is a widely used tool for measuring relative value. This approach leads portfolio managers to increase their risk exposure in ways that are not transparent. Credit default swaps are utilized to demonstrate that viewing wide asset swaps as an indicator of relative value is a mirage. The paper documents the empirical regularities in the term structure of credit spreads and spread volatilities that make this result possible. In addition, we present empirical evidence of the imprint made on corporate bond returns by the widespread use of the asset swaps data.     

Global civil society: lessons from ocean governance

Late 20th century ideas about governance of the world's oceans may provide clues to the role of “civil society” in the 21st century. The UN Convention on Law of the Sea has radically changed traditional ideas about “national sovereignty”, shifting its focus from territorial to functional, imposing on states the duty to cooperate and pay taxes, requiring the sharing of sovereign rights, and transcending sovereignty with the “common heritage” concept. The proliferation of nongovernmental organisations operating on the international stage is empowering all elements of a burgeoning global civil society. In some pioneering experiences in international relations, nongovernmental representatives sit on a par with delegates from governments. Most of the elements of global civil society—NGOs, international business, the community of scientists, worldwide media, and local communities—are not yet focused on the kinds of globalization that can narrow the rich–poor gap and promote sustainable development, but in the new century, a more global civil society can play a more constructive role.     

Assessing the Benefits of Trade Facilitation: A Global Perspective

This paper estimates the relationship between trade facilitation and trade flows using a panel of disaggregated manufactured goods for the 2000–2001 period for 75 countries. Four categories of trade facilitation are defined, measured and assessed for their impact on bilateral trade flows using a gravity model. The four measures of trade facilitation are: port infrastructure (air and maritime), customs environment, regulatory environments and e‐business infrastructure. The results suggest that raising global capacity halfway to the world average in the four areas would increase trade by $377 billion. Most regions of the world increase exports more than imports. In large part, this result stems from increased exports to OECD markets that is obtained through a country's own effort to improve ports, customs, regulations and services infrastructures. In addition, the results suggest that reform and capacity building in trade facilitation in areas related to GATT Articles V, VIII and X that are under discussion at the World Trade Organisation could expand trade and exports significantly. Many of the reform measures necessary to achieve this goal need not necessarily require large‐scale investment projects, but rather action in legal and administrative reform to facilitate trade.