Beyond belief: A benchmark for human resources

Many Human Resource (HR) professionals feel and believe that they have made progress during the 1980s. Unfortunately, without data to benchmark progress, assessments must depend on perception rather than evidence. To move beyond belief towards a national HR database, this article reports research on over 10,000 individuals in 1200 businesses in 91 firms. It establishes a benchmark for HR practices and HR professionals. It also highlights areas where HR professionals may focus attention to become more successful as business partners.     

GROUP EFFECTS AND BETA NONSTATIONARITY

Recent evidence indicates that while random diversification can lead to the elimination of the majority of systematic risk, the systematic selection of securities can result in significant group effects blocking this dissipation of unsystematic risk. The group effects associated with investment in growth, cyclical, stable and oil stocks found by Farrell and Martin and Klemkosky were reexamined while allowing for beta nonstationarity. It was found that the beta nonstationarity effect, while quite large for individual stocks and small portfolios tended diversify away quite quickly. It was further found that much of what has in the past been termed a group effect is actually the result of beta nonstationarity.     

Integer goal programming model for the implementation of multiple corporate objectives

The problem of long-range planning and investment project evaluation is complicated by the presence of multiple conflicting goals measured in incommensurable units, indivisibility of alternative projects, and the desire of management to consider mutually exclusive marketing-pricing strategies. The model proposed in this study attempts to allow for these complexities through the use of integer goal programming. It is the hope of the authors that this model will provide management with an additional decision-making tool for implementation of multiple corporate objectives.     

On the Possibility of Profitable Self-Selection Contracts in Competitive Insurance Markets

Several studies extend the Rothschild–Stiglitz model of competitive insurance contracting with adverse selection by incorporating additional dimensions of private information and conclude that some insurers may earn positive profit in a separating, self-selection equilibrium, provided each insurer is restricted to making a single contract offer. The main result of this article is that these profitable configurations are not sustainable when individual insurers can offer multiple contracts. It is also shown that the ability to offer multiple contracts overturns equilibria that have applicants from different risk classes pooled as well as those where profits are dissipated by a fixed entry cost.     

康涅狄格州纽海文大学商学院 “中国价格”源于补贴

很多人认为中国制造业的价格优势得益于低廉的劳动力成本。但我们对中国钢铁业的研究表明，其低价格和政府大量的能源补贴密切相关。     

'MONEY MEANS NOT MONEY'– REFLECTIONS ON THE MEANING OF MONEY 1909–2009

Hartley Withers' classic book, The Meaning of Money , sees its centenary this year. Although the financial landscape has substantially changed since 1909, Withers' book remains insightful, informative and readable. A symposium is being held in late 2009 to explore what echoes can be heard today.     

Underwork,Work‐Hour Insecurity,and A New Approach to Wage and Hour Regulation

When it was passed in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sought to address the “evils” of underpay and overwork by establishing an hourly minimum wage and requiring premium overtime pay. However, today's low‐wage, hourly workers more often face underwork than overwork, as well as fluctuating, unstable schedules, neither of which is addressed by the FLSA. This paper presents and assesses the effectiveness of an alternative approach to wage and hour regulation, the “reporting pay” guarantee. We begin by examining the problem of work‐hour insecurity, particularly employers’ practice of sending workers home early from scheduled shifts. We then move to a detailed assessment of state laws that require reporting pay, as well as reporting pay guarantees in union contracts and private‐employer practices that attempt to address the problem of work‐hour insecurity. We conclude by considering paths for strengthening such protections in law.     

Retirement Expectations and Satisfaction with Retirement Provisions

This paper investigates the relationship between subjective expectations regarding the replacement rate of income at retirement and several measures of pension satisfaction. We use panel data on Dutch employees, analyzed with fixed effects models, allowing for correlation between unobserved heterogeneity in satisfaction and optimism or pessimism in expectations. The level of the expected replacement rate is found to be positively related to satisfaction: respondents who revise their expectations of the level of their replacement rate upwards tend to become more satisfied with their pension provisions, in particular with the level of the expected benefits. We do not find robust evidence for a relationship between uncertainty and pension satisfaction.