Disability, absence and the health reform era

The total cost of employee absence for many employers is high, and the correlation between employee health and disability is clear. This article reviews several challenges employers face in managing employee health and absence in a well-integrated manner. Although such an undertaking is not easy, the additional cost national health care reform may bring makes the interrelationship between employer profitability and employee absence, health and disability more crucial than ever for employers to recognize and manage.     

Behavioural Orientations of Non‐Profit Boards as a Factor in Entrepreneurial Performance: Does Governance Matter?

Relatively little is understood about factors triggering entrepreneurial behaviour within organizations not driven by profit motives. Governance plays an important role in non‐profits, particularly boards of directors. Integrating resource‐based theory and entrepreneurial orientation research, we examine the influence of non‐profit boards as strategic resources shaping the organization's entrepreneurial orientation and performance. In particular, we focus on the non‐profit board's underlying behavioural orientations, or the extent to which the board is strategic, activist, conservative, and cohesive. Findings from a cross‐sectional survey on arts and culture organizations demonstrate that three of these behavioural orientations impact levels of entrepreneurship occurring within non‐profits. Higher levels of entrepreneurship affect social performance, but not financial performance.     

Quantifying tax effects under policy foresight

Studies of tax effects make the conventional information assumption that changes in period-t taxes become known at t. Legislative lags, however, imply that news arrives before tax changes take place. Under policy foreknowledge, the conventional information structure is therefore misspecified. Simulations of a standard neoclassical growth model suggest that foresight of only one quarter can distort substantially the estimates of tax effects obtained under the no-foresight assumption. Also, it is crucial to model capital and labor taxes separately: anticipated changes in these two tax policies have opposite effects on consumption, investment, labor, and output before policy realization.     

Alliances and cost declaration

Our model explores the co‐existence of both cooperative and competitive behaviors in an alliance setting. Specifically, when alliance partners cooperatively choose observable contributions given reported costs, their self‐interested behavior may lead to misreporting of costs related to these contributions. We show that truthful cost reporting by an alliance firm is valuable, thereby establishing that accurate cost reports are a determinant of successful alliance performance. Next we show that an alliance firm's cost reporting behavior may depend on the type of payoffs it receives from alliance, i.e., a share of profit or revenue, and also on the type of relationship between contributions, i.e., whether they are technical substitutes or complements. While we have focussed on highlighting factors which underlie cost misreporting, this study also may serve as a basis for investigating ways to design contracts to diminish the loss an alliance suffers from cost misreporting of the firms, thus increasing the chance that an alliance will be successful. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does Allowing the Bells to Offer InterLATA Long-Distance Service Affect Entry into Local Telephony?

Following the 1984 divestiture of AT&T, local telephone service was provided by several Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs). The RBOCs served as monopoly providers of local telephone service in their respective territories but were prohibited from offering long-distance service to their in-region subscribers. Section 271 of the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996 allows an RBOC to offer in-region long-distance service if it demonstrates that the local telephone exchange market is open to competitive entry. This study empirically evaluates the efficacy of this policy by considering the impact of RBOC entry into long-distance on the development of competitive entry into local telephony. The results suggest that section 271 has been successful in promoting entry into local telephony. However, aggregate price data suggest that this entry has not been realized with lower rates for residential telephone subscribers.     

Does the ADA Disable the Disabled?— More Comments

This article examines how best to identify individuals with disabilities for analysis of the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990. It also explores whether amending the ADA to broaden its definition of disability can be expected to improve the employment prospects of those who seek its protections. Answering these questions requires that we learn much more about the labor force participation decisions of those with disabilities. Our aim here is to encourage further consideration and analysis of these and related questions regarding the possible effects of the ADA and of other environmental factors that affect the labor force participation of those with disabilities.     

Industrial Companies' Evaluation Criteria in New Product Development Gates

This article presents the results of a study on the evaluation criteria that companies use at several gates in the NPD process. The findings from 166 managers suggest that companies use different criteria at different NPD evaluation gates. While such criteria as technical feasibility, intuition and market potential are stressed in the early‐screening gates of the NPD process, a focus on product performance, quality, and staying within the development budget are considered of paramount importance after the product has been developed. During and after commercialization, customer acceptance and satisfaction and unit sales are primary considerations. In addition, based on the performance dimensions developed by Griffin and Page (1993), we derive patterns of use of various evaluative dimensions at the NPD gates. Our results show that while the market acceptance dimension permeates evaluation at all the gates in the NPD process, the financial dimension is especially important during the business analysis gate and after‐market launch. The product performance dimension figures strongly in the product and market testing gates. The importance of our additional set of criteria (i.e., product uniqueness, market potential, market chance, technical feasibility, and intuition) decreases as the NPD process unfolds. Overall the above pattern of dimensions' usage holds true for both countries in which we collected our data, and across firms of different sizes, holding different market share positions, with different NPD drivers, following different innovation strategies, and developing different types of new products. The results also are stable for respondents that differ in terms of expertise and functional background. The results of this study provide useful guidelines for project selection and evaluation purposes and therefore can be helpful for effective investment decision‐making at gate‐meetings and for project portfolio management. We elaborate on these guidelines for product developers and marketers wishing to employ evaluation criteria in their NPD gates, and we discuss directions for further research.     

The ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of HRM in small firms

This paper looks at the ‘science’ and ‘practice’ of human resource management in small firms. While there is growing evidence that the practice of human resource management in small firms is characterized by informality, there is less evidence about the science, or explaining why this is the case. We look to writing on strategic human resource management, which has at its heart the resource based view of the firm, for possibilities offered to understanding the science of human resource management in small firms.