The significance of employee skill in flexible work organizations

Pressures for flexibility among enterprise employees have been explained in previous studies to be largely the result of exogenous factors driven by market pressures for improved product variety, quality and service. This paper derives new insights into the concept of flexibility based on the premise that manufacturing systems based on traditional hierarchical control have significantly given way to enterprise practices that stress a direct connection between employee skill enhancement, market outcomes and rewards. Through an analysis of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WER98) the study provides a more substantive explanation of the variables associated with flexibility, which have become significant in the transition process towards modern enterprise practices. Flexibility is demonstrated to be not only market driven but also dependent on endogenous factors directly promoted by management that stress workforce participation, collaborative working and multifaceted skills development. We provide empirical support for these arguments from an analysis of WERS98.     

A study of employee affective organizational commitment and retention in Pakistan: the roles of psychological contract breach and norms of reciprocity

Abstract

Social exchange theory and notions of reciprocity have long been assumed to explain the relationship between psychological contract breach and important employee outcomes. To date, however, there has been no explicit testing of these assumptions. This research, therefore, explores the mediating role of negative, generalized, and balanced reciprocity, in the relationships between psychological contract breach and employees’ affective organizational commitment and turnover intentions. A survey of 247 Pakistani employees of a large public university was analyzed using structural equation modeling and bootstrapping techniques, and provided excellent support for our model. As predicted, psychological contract breach was positively related to negative reciprocity norms and negatively related to generalized and balanced reciprocity norms. Negative and generalized (but not balanced) reciprocity were negatively and positively (respectively) related to employees’ affective organizational commitment and fully mediated the relationship between psychological contract breach and affective organizational commitment. Moreover, affective organizational commitment fully mediated the relationship between generalized and negative reciprocity and employees’ turnover intentions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Does CPI Granger-cause WPI? New extensions from frequency domain approach in Pakistan

The present study significantly contributes to the economic literature by investigating the direction of causality between WPI and CPI by applying frequency domain causality approach developed by Lemmens et al. (2008) based on spectral approach. We use monthly frequency data covering the period of 1961–2010 in case of Pakistan. Our results provide evidence of cointegration between the variables. Furthermore, we find unidirectional causal relationship running from CPI to WPI that varies across frequencies i.e., CPI Granger-causes WPI at lower, medium as well as higher level of frequencies reflecting long-run, medium and short-run cycles. This implies that CPI should be a leading indicator for important policy decisions pertaining to monetary or fiscal policies in Pakistan.     

A martingale representation theorem and valuation of defaultable securities

We consider a financial framework with two levels of information: the public information generated by the financial assets, and a larger flow of information that contains additional knowledge about a random time. This random time can represent many economic and financial settings, such as the default time of a firm for credit risk, and the death time of an insured for life insurance. As the random time cannot be seen before its occurrence, the progressive enlargement of filtration seems tailor‐fit to model the larger flow of information that incorporates both the public flow and the information about the random time. In this context, our interest focuses on the following challenges: (a) How to single out the various risks coming from the financial assets, the random time, and their correlations? (b) How these risks interplay and lead to the formation of any risk in the larger flow of information? It is clear that understanding how risks build‐up and interact, when one enlarges the flow of information, is vital for an efficient risk management and derivatives' evaluation in those informational markets. Our answers to these challenges are full and complete no matter what the model for the random time is and no matter how the random time is related to the public flow. In fact, we introduce “pure default” risks, and quantify and classify these risks afterward. Then we elaborate our martingale representation results, which state that any martingale in the large filtration stopped at the random time can be decomposed into orthogonal local martingales (i.e., local martingales whose product remains a local martingale). This constitutes our first principal contribution, while our second contribution consists in evaluating various defaultable securities according to the recovery policy, within our financial setting that encompasses any default model, using a martingale “basis.” Our pricing formulas explain the impact of various recovery policies on securities and determine the types of pure default risk they entail.     

Output growth and investment dynamics in Finland: a panel data analysis

This study analyzes the relationship between output growth and investment in a panel of 20 regions of Finland over the period 1975–2007. This regional study uses Granger non-causality and error-correction models. The most important finding of this study is a unidirectional causality which runs from investment to output growth. The study also verifies the existence of a positive association between growth and investment for the panel of 20 regions of Finland. These findings reconcile with the capital fundamentalists.     

Stock price synchronicity and liquidity

We argue and provide evidence that stock price synchronicity affects stock liquidity. Under the relative synchronicity hypothesis, higher return co-movement (i.e., higher systematic volatility relative to total volatility) improves liquidity. Under the absolute synchronicity hypothesis, stocks with higher systematic volatility or beta are more liquid. Our results support both hypotheses. We find all three illiquidity measures (effective proportional bid-ask spread, price impact measure, and Amihud's illiquidity measure) are negatively related to stock return co-movement and systematic volatility. Our analysis also shows that larger industry-wide component in returns improves liquidity. We find that improvement in liquidity following additions to the S&P 500 Index is related to the stock's increase in return co-movement.     

Underpricing and Firm Quality in Initial Public Offerings: Evidence from Singapore

Firms seeking initial public listings on the Stock Exchange of Singapore can choose between offering their shares at a fixed price or selling them in two tranches: the first tranche is offered at a fixed price while the issue price of the second tranche is determined via a tender system. Consistent with the existing signalling literature, tendering IPO firms underprice their fixed price tranche more than non-tendering IPO firms. The underpricing in the fixed tranche is recouped through higher proceeds from the tender tranche. Our evidence suggests that IPO firms use the tender option to signal superior firm quality.     

An Investigation into Factors Affecting the Occupational Choices of Nominated Farm Heirs in Ireland

The resilience of family farming is an important feature of the structure of the farming industry in many countries, due largely to the ‘smooth’ succession of farms from one generation to the next. The stability of this structure is now threatened by the widening gap between the income expected from farming when compared with non‐farming occupations in an economy like Ireland, operating at almost full employment. Nominated farm heirs are increasingly unlikely to choose full‐time farming as their preferred occupation. To identify the factors that affect this occupational choice, a multinomial logit model is developed and applied to Irish data to examine the farm, economic and personal characteristics that influence a nominated heir's decision to enter farming as opposed to some non‐farming occupation. The results show a significant negative relationship between higher education and the choice of full‐time farming as an occupation. The interdependence between education and occupational choices is further explored using a bivariate probit model. The main findings are: the occupational choice and the decision to continue with higher education are made jointly; the nominated heirs on more profitable farms are less likely to pursue tertiary education and therefore more likely to enter full‐time farming. The model developed is sufficiently general for studying the phenomenon of succession on farms.     

Stock price synchronicity and analyst coverage in emerging markets

This paper examines the relation between the stock price synchronicity and analyst activity in emerging markets. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that security analysts specialize in the production of firm-specific information, we find that securities which are covered by more analysts incorporate greater (lesser) market-wide (firm-specific) information. Using the R² statistics of the market model as a measure of synchronicity of stock price movement, we find that greater analyst coverage increases stock price synchronicity. Furthermore, after controlling for the influence of firm size on the lead–lag relation, we find that the returns of high analyst-following portfolio lead returns of low analyst-following portfolio more than vice versa. We also find that the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts in a high analyst-following portfolio affects the aggregate returns of the portfolio itself as well as those of the low analyst-following portfolio, whereas the aggregate change in the earnings forecasts of the low analyst-following portfolio have no predictive ability. Finally, when the forecast dispersion is high, the effect of analyst coverage on stock price synchronicity is reduced.     

MINIMAL ENTROPY–HELLINGER MARTINGALE MEASURE IN INCOMPLETE MARKETS

This paper defines an optimization criterion for the set of all martingale measures for an incomplete market model when the discounted price process is bounded and quasi-left continuous. This criterion is based on the entropy–Hellinger process for a nonnegative Doléans–Dade exponential local martingale. We develop properties of this process and establish its relationship to the relative entropy "distance." We prove that the martingale measure, minimizing this entropy–Hellinger process, is unique. Furthermore, it exists and is explicitly determined under some mild conditions of integrability and no arbitrage. Different characterizations for this extremal risk-neutral measure as well as immediate application to the exponential hedging are given. If the discounted price process is continuous, the minimal entropy–Hellinger martingale measure simply is the minimal martingale measure of Föllmer and Schweizer. Finally, the relationship between the minimal entropy–Hellinger martingale measure (MHM) and the minimal entropy martingale measure (MEM) is provided. We also give an example showing that in contrast to the MHM measure, the MEM measure is not robust with respect to stopping.