Segmenting corporate exporting activities: Sporadic versus regular exporters

The primary focus of this study is an examination of differences between characteristics and activities ofsporadic andregular exporters. This mode of classifying exporting firms, which has not previously been studied in a rigorous fashion is shown to be valid and has important policy implications. This classification is robust, with a high degree of convergent and internal validity. The two groups are shown to be similar along several key dimensions of exporting behavior such as size, age, and size of export orders. However, there are distinct differences with regard to such factors as initial market entry influences, export profit margins, export distribution channels, and information use. These critical differences relate to dynamism and level of exportmarketing activities undertaken. Conceptual, practical, and policy implications are discussed.     

When do better schools raise housing prices? Evidence from Paris public and private schools

In this paper, we investigate how housing prices react to the quality of education offered by neighboring public and private schools. The organization of secondary schooling in the city of Paris, which combines residence-based assignment to public schools with a well-developed and almost entirely publicly funded private school system, offers a valuable empirical context for analyzing how private schools affect the capitalization of public school performance in housing prices. Using comprehensive data on both schools and real estate transactions over the period 1997–2004, we develop a matching framework to carefully compare sales across school attendance boundaries. We find that a standard deviation increase in public school performance raises housing prices by 1.4 to 2.4%. Moreover, we show that the capitalization of public school performance in the price of real estate shrinks as the availability of private schools increases in the neighborhood. Our results confirm the predictions of general equilibrium models of school choice that private schools, by providing an advantageous outside option to parents, tend to mitigate the impact of public school performance on housing prices.     

Risk Aversion and Wages: Evidence from the Baseball Labor Market

We develop a bargaining model to assess how workers and employers might allocate wages inter-temporally in order to cope with risk. We then apply this model to 106 long-term contracts for major league baseball players’ services. Most of these agreements not only smooth employee compensation over time but suggest greater relative risk aversion for teams than players. Compared to the wages they might pay to retain these players on a succession of one-year contracts, teams often pay a premium on longer-term agreements to protect against market volatility and potential inability to replace a key player on the open market.     

Opportunities to work at home in the context of work‐life balance

Discussion of ‘work‐life balance’ and ‘family‐friendly’ employment is much in vogue among politicians and business leaders. Often, but not always, working at home is included within such practices. However, the concepts of work‐life balance and family‐friendly are commonly left ill‐defined by researchers and policymakers alike. In this article we outline formal definitions of these terms, which place spatial issues ‐ and hence working at home ‐ at the heart of the debate. This leads us on to examine working at home through the theoretical lens offered by attempts to explain the rise of work‐life balance arrangements. Twelve hypotheses emerge from the literature and are tested on the management data contained in the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey or WERS98. Many of these hypotheses pass weak statistical tests but fail on stronger logistic regression tests. The article shows that the option to work at home is more likely to be available in the public sector, large establishments and work environments in which individuals are responsible for the quality of their own output. These workplaces are typically less unionised but not especially feminised.     

Measuring the Marketing Knowledge of Accounting Professionals

The accounting profession advocates that its member professionals and practitioners have not only specialist accounting knowledge but also management and marketing skills. This paper reports a study of the level of marketing knowledge of three samples of Australian accountants of various seniority and experience. The results show that marketing knowledge of accountants increases with seniority. However, there is also evidence that accountants lack, in particular, conceptual marketing knowledge.