Financial and nonfinancial performance measures: How do they affect job satisfaction?

Recent interest on the use of nonfinancial measures (e.g. in the Balanced Scorecard) generally assumes that such measures are essential to overcome the inadequacies of financial measures. However, it remains unclear (1) if the behavioural effects of these nonfinancial measures are different from those of financial measures; and (2) whether these effects are influenced by the relative importance of nonfinancial measures vis-à-vis financial measures. This study hypothesises that the use of performance measures for performance evaluation will significantly affect managers' job satisfaction. However, these effects are indirect through the managers' perceptions of the fairness of these measures and the interpersonal trust these measures promote. Based on a sample of 70 managers, these expectations are supported by the results. More importantly, the results also suggest that (1) the process by which nonfinancial measures affect employee job satisfaction is not different from that of financial measures, and (2) the relative importance of nonfinancial measures vis-à-vis financial measures has no significant effect on employee job satisfaction. These results may have important theoretical and practical implications.     

The integrability of consumer demand functions

The purpose of this paper is to characterize the class of systems of consumer demand functions that are representable as ratios of first-order polynomial functions and are integrable. Starting from a general system of consumer demand functions representable as ratios, we impose successively the restrictions corresponding to homogeneity, summability, symmetry, non-negativity, and monotonicity. We find that the only such systems which are capable of modeling arbitrary own- and cross-substitution effects are the systems generated by transcendental logarithmic utility functions.     

Introducing cable television into Hong Kong : Political and economic implications

This paper seeks to evaluate and predict the impact of the introduction of cable television into Hong Kong, a densely populated and highly dynamic Asian metropolis currently under British administration. The discussion will focus on how the coming of cable communication will impact on the ownership and economic structure of the broadcasting industry, with particular reference to international participation; public policy issues concerning economic structure and programming of the cable system; and the implications for the period of Hong Kong's political transition from the UK to China.     

What if Trading Location Is Different from Business Location? Evidence from the Jardine Group

We examine the price behavior and market activity of the Jardine Group companies after they were delisted from Hong Kong in 1994. Although the trading activity of the Jardine Group moved to Singapore, the core businesses remained in Hong Kong and Mainland China. Evidence indicates the Jardine stocks are correlated less (more) with the Hong Kong (Singapore) market after the delisting. This result cannot be explained by various hypotheses, such as relocation of core business, time‐varying betas, migration of trading activity, and currency and tax distortions. We conclude that price fluctuations are affected by country‐specific investor sentiment.     

Convergence clustering in the Chinese provinces: New evidence from several macroeconomic indicators

In this paper, the convergence clustering in 31 Chinese provinces regarding several important economic indicators over the period 1952 to 2016 was empirically investigated. Several provincial clusters were identified in the per capita (real) gross domestic product (GDP), consumption–income ratio, retail price, and consumer price inflation rates, using a club convergence and clustering procedure. The empirical findings are as follows. First, it was found that all series of the original data contain a significant nonlinear component. Second, it was observed that there are five significant clusters for the per capita income in China. Third, it was found that there are four significant clusters for the consumption–income ratio. Fourth, it was observed that there are four significant clusters for the retail inflation rates and two significant clusters for the consumer inflation rates in China. These results will enable local and central planners to implement economic growth, savings and price adjustment policies for different groups of provinces.     

MULTIATTRIBUTE UTILITY THEORY,INTERTEMPORAL UTILITY,AND CORRELATION AVERSION

Convenient assumptions about qualitative properties of the intertemporal utility function have generated counterintuitive implications for the relationship between atemporal risk aversion and the intertemporal elasticity of substitution. If the intertemporal utility function is additively separable, then the latter two concepts are the inverse of each other. We review a theoretical specification with a long lineage in the literature on multi‐attribute utility and use this theoretical structure to guide the design of a series of experiments that allow us to identify and estimate intertemporal correlation aversion. Our results show that subjects are correlation averse over lotteries with intertemporal income profiles.     

The world price of home bias

Theoretical arguments suggest that as the degree of a country's home bias increases, the global risk sharing between domestic and foreign investors will reduce and thereby increase the country's cost of capital. Consistent with this prediction, we find international differences in the cost of capital to be strongly and positively related to varying degrees of home bias for 38 markets. This finding is robust to different cost of capital proxies, different control variables, alternative home-bias measures, international tradability of stocks, and alternative specifications. Therefore, the overall evidence implies that countries may enjoy a significantly lower cost of capital by reducing the extent of their home bias and hence, increasing global risk sharing.     

Development of a process mining system for supporting knowledge discovery in a supply chain network

In today's competitive environment, business organizations are forced to maintain their competitive advantage by their ability to cut costs, increase revenue and uncover hidden issues. In order to enhance the visibility and transparency of value added information in a supply chain network, a process mining system is proposed for discovering a set of fuzzy association rules based on the daily captured logistics operation data, within the network. The proposed methodology provides all levels of employees with the ability to enhance their knowledge and understanding of the current business environment. Once interesting association rules have been extracted, organizations can identify the root-causes of quality problems in a supply chain and improve performance by fine-tuning the configuration of process parameters in specified processes. The application of the proposed methodology in a case company has also been studied. The prototype system has been developed and evaluated after performing a spatial analysis. The results obtained indicate that the system is capable of extracting high-quality and actionable information in the case company.     

Strategic human resource management,firm performance,and employee relations climate in China

We examined strategic human resource management (SHRM) and human resource practices in the People's Republic of China to assess the impact of these practices on firm performance and the employee relations climate. We also tested whether firm ownership moderates the above relationships. Empirical results from a sample of Chinese firms from various industries and regions showed that the levels of adoption of SHRM and HR practices were lower in state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) than in foreign‐invested enterprises (FIEs) and privately owned enterprises (POEs). Both SHRM and HR practices were found to have direct and positive effects on financial performance, operational performance, and the employee relations climate. However, the moderating effect of ownership type was significant for financial performance only. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.