Injury count model for quantification of risk of occupational injury

Reduction of risk of occupational injuries is one of the most challenging problems faced by industry. Assessing and comparing risks involved in different jobs is one of the important steps towards reducing injury risk. In this study, a comprehensive scheme is given for assessing and comparing injury risks with the development of injury count model, injury risk model and derived statistics. The hazards present in a work system and the nature of the job carried out by workers are perceived as important drivers of injury potential of a work system. A loglinear model is used to quantify injury counts and the event-tree approach with joint, marginal and conditional probabilities is used to quantify injury risk. A case study was carried out in an underground coal mine. Finally a number of indices are proposed for the case study mine to capture risk of injury in different jobs. The findings of this study will help in designing injury intervention strategies for the mine studied. The job-wise risk profiles will be used to prioritise the jobs for redesign. The absolute indices can be applied for benchmarking job-wise risks and the relative indices can be used for comparing job-wise risks across work systems.     

Boosting the Employment Rate of Older Men and Women

European countries need to expand employment among older individuals. Many papers have examined this issue from different angles. However, very few seem to have considered its gender dimension properly, despite evidence that lifting the overall senior employment rate requires significantly raising that of women older than 50. The key issue examined by this paper is whether employers are willing to employ more older workers, in particular older women. The answer depends to a large extent on the ratio of older individuals’ productivity to their cost to employers. To address this question we tap into a unique firm-level panel of Belgian data to produce robust evidence on the causal effect of age/gender on productivity and labour costs. We take advantage of the panel structure to identify age/gender-related differences from within-firm variation. Moreover, inspired by recent developments in the production function estimation literature, we address the problem of endogeneity of the age/gender mix, using a structural production function estimator (Olley and Pakes in Econometrica 64(6):1263–1297, 1996; Levinsohn and Petrin in Rev Econ Stud 70(2):317–341, 2003) alongside IV-GMM methods where lagged value of labour inputs are used as instruments. Our results indicate a small negative impact of larger shares of older men on the productivity-labour cost ratio. An increment of 10%-points of in their share causes a 0.17–0.69%-point contraction. However, the main result is that the equivalent handicap with older women is larger, ranging from 1.3 to 2.0%-points. This is not good news for older women’s employability. And the vast services industry does not seem to offer working conditions that mitigate older women’s disadvantage, on the contrary.     

The Price-Quality Relationship—Revisited

Using price data collected in Indianapolis and Lafayette, Indiana, rank order correlations between price and quality were computed. These were compared to correlations based on price data obtained from the publications of consumer product testing organizations. It was found that price-quality correlations based on the price data furnished by consumer product testing organizations may not reflect price-quality correlations for specific markets. A second finding of the study suggests the existence of variability across store types with respect to price-quality correlations.     

Types and Amounts of Information Used by Efficient Consumers

This paper describes a research methodology which assesses the efficiency of consumer decision-making based on the types and amounts of informational cues used. A simple operational method is used to classify consumers into three levels of consumer efficiency based on how well they perform in assessing the optimal choice. The information chosen by perfectly efficient consumers, or those scoring at the maximum level of efficiency, is examined for indicators of optimal information seeking and decision-making techniques.     

Book of Intdernational Economics Affairs: MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISES — A CONTINUING SAGA

AMERICAN MULTINATIONALS AND AMERICAN INTERESTS, by C. Fred Bergsten, Thomas Horst and Theodore H. Moran ALTERNATIVES TO THE MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE, by Mark Casson THE ECONOMICS OF MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE, by Neil Hood and Stephen Young     

The economic and poverty impacts of maize research in West and Central Africa

This article assembles the results of three multicountry surveys on variety performance and adoption patterns to measure the impacts of maize research in West and Central Africa from 1981 to 2005, and uses cost data since 1971 to compute social rates of return on public investments in maize research in the region. Adoption of modern varieties increased from less than 5% of the maize area in the 1970s to about 60% in 2005, yielding an aggregate rate of return on research and development (R&D) investment of 43%. The estimated number of people moved out of poverty through adoption of new maize varieties rose gradually in the 1980s to more than one million people per year since the mid 1990s. Over half of these impacts can be attributed to international maize research at IITA and CIMMYT. The article concludes with a discussion of strategic options to enhance the impacts of maize research in the region.     

Evaluation of subsidiary marketing performance: combining process and outcome performance metrics

Issues in evaluating marketing performance and devising appropriate metrics for measurement have taken center stage in marketing thought and practice in recent years. We propose an empirical model that enables a multinational enterprise (MNE) to assess the marketing performance of its subsidiaries, taking into explicit consideration the fact that tactical actions by subsidiaries contribute to the creation of assets that can be harnessed for marketing outcomes. Thus, our model captures the asset creation abilities of marketing expenditures and also takes in to account the environmental differences of the context in which each MNE subsidiary operates. We evaluate comparative, overall, and process-level (creation of market assets and market yield) marketing performance in the context of multi-country operations. This simultaneous examination of marketing process and marketing outcome performance enables a global corporation to gain strategic, operational, and diagnostic insights into the performance of its subsidiaries. Our approach is empirically illustrated with an evaluation of the marketing performance of subsidiaries of a large global corporation.     

Impact of Personal and Situational Factors on Taxpayer Compliance: An Experimental Analysis

This study used a laboratory experiment with monetary incentives to test the impact of three personal factors (moral reasoning, value orientation and risk preference), and three situational factors (the presence/absence of audits, tax inequity, and peer reporting behavior), while controlling for the impact of other demographic characteristics, on tax compliance. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) reveals that all the main effects analyzed are statistically significant and robustly influence tax compliance behavior. These results highlight the importance of obtaining a proper understanding of these factors for developing effective policies for increasing the level of compliance, and indicate that standard enforcement polices based on punishment alone should be supplemented by an information system that would acquaint tax payers with the compliance level of other tax payers; reinforce the concept of fairness of the tax system among tax payers; and develop programs that enhance and appeal to a taxpayer's moral conscience and reinforce social cohesion.     

Potential impacts of Bt eggplant on economic surplus and farmers' health in India

In this article, the potential impacts of Bt eggplant technology in Indian agriculture are analyzed. Several proprietary Bt hybrids are likely to be commercialized in the near future. Based on field trial data, it is shown that the technology can significantly reduce insecticide applications and increase effective yields. Comprehensive farm-survey data are used to project farm-level effects and future adoption rates. Simulations show that the aggregate economic surplus gains of Bt hybrids could be around US$108 million per year. Consumers will capture a large share of these gains, but farmers and the innovating company will benefit too. As the company has also shared its technology with the public sector, Bt open-pollinated varieties might become available with a certain time lag. This would make the technology more accessible, especially for resource-poor farmers, entailing further improvements in welfare and distribution effects. The wider implications of the private–public technology transfer are discussed. Furthermore, the potential benefits for farmers' health resulting from reduced insecticide applications are examined, using an econometric model and a cost-of-illness approach. These benefits are worth an additional $3–4 million per year, yet they constitute only a small fraction of the technology's environmental and health externalities. More research is needed for comprehensive impact analysis.     

A model of optimal import phytosanitary inspection under capacity constraint

Growth and liberalization of world trade have increased the risks of introduction of quarantine plant pests into importing countries. Import inspection of incoming commodities is a major tool for prevention of pest introductions related to world trade, but inspection capacities are limited. This article develops a theoretical and an empirical model for the optimal allocation of inspection effort for phytosanitary inspection of imported commodities when the inspecting agency has a limited capacity. It is shown that the optimal allocation of inspection effort equalizes marginal costs of pest introduction across risky commodity pathways. The numerical illustration finds the optimal allocation of inspection effort of chrysanthemum cuttings imported in the Netherlands. The numerical results suggest that ceteris paribus , greater inspection effort should be allocated to pathways whose inspection yields a greater reduction in the expected costs of pest introduction. The numerical results also suggest that import inspection has a high marginal benefit. In particular, we found that each additional euro of the inspection capacity decreases the expected costs of pest introduction from 18 to 49 euros, depending on the initial inspection capacity.