Factors influencing United States comparative advantage

One of the more famous results in international trade is Leontief's demonstration that the conventional wisdom of trade theory—the two-factor Heckscher-Ohlin model, coupled with the empirical judgement that the U.S. is capital-rich—does not appear to provide an explanation of the composition of U.S. trade. A major conclusion of many recent studies is that an adequate model of comparative advantage will be, of necessity, a multi-factor one. This paper examines the implications of a modified multi-factor-proportions model by measuring the simultaneous impact of a variety of factor intensities on the comparative advantage of all U.S. (trading) industries, classified and disaggregated by the 1958 input-output table. The novelty of the study lies in using a binary measure of comparative advantage. In order to by-pass several econometric difficulties, logit analysis is used to estimate the model. The principal conclusion of the paper is that capital-intensity has a significantly positive impact on the comparative advantage of U.S. manufacturing industries and, therefore, that the U.S. is, in fact, relatively capital-rich.     

Health Policy and Equity of Health Care Financing in Australia: 1973–2010

Using data from Australian Taxation Statistics and Household Expenditure Surveys we analyze the distribution of health care financing in Australia over almost four decades. We compute Kakwani Progressivity indices for four sources of health care financing: general taxation, Medicare Levy payments, Medicare Levy Surcharge payments, and direct consumer payments, and estimate the effects of major policy changes on them. The results demonstrate that the first three of these sources of health care financing are progressive in Australia, while the distribution of direct payments is regressive. Surprisingly, we find that neither the introduction of Medicare in Australia in 1984 nor the Extended Medicare Safety Net in 2004 had significant effects on the progressivity of health care financing in Australia. By contrast, the Lifetime Cover scheme—introduced in 2000 to encourage people to buy and hold private health insurance—had a progressive effect on health care financing.     

A personal construct analysis of adaptive selling and sales experience

Customer orientation is a key to successful marketing strategies. In personal selling, customer orientation has been shown to be related to the quality of the customer-salesperson relationship (Saxe & Weitz, 1978). Adaptive selling (Weitz, Sujan, & Sujan, 1986) is a theoretical perspective that suggests sales performance is related to salespeople's ability to shift their customer orientation, by adapting their behavior to different customers in different situations. This article presents personal construct theory (Kelly, 1955) as a framework for understanding how sales personnel perceive and adapt to customers. An interview technique known as laddering (Gutman, 1982; Hinkle, 1965) is used to elicit these constructs from sales personnel. Results of the interviews are compared across levels of sales experience. Consistent with the Sujan, Sujan, and Bettman (1988) findings relating sales effectiveness and breadth of knowledge structures, we find that the number of years of sales experience is related to the breadth of constructs obtained from the laddering interviews. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A decomposition of repeat buying

The authors decompose repeat buying for frequently purchased nondurables. The results are very similar for two categories each over a different city and time period. A factor analysis of 18 measures of repeat buying obtains four principal factors that explain 79–85% of the variance: Preference, Inertia, Coupon Proneness and Impulse Buying. A cluster analysis of factors on these dimensions yields four segments, with distinct behavioral characteristics.The authors thank IRI for the data.     

Time allocation during higher education: A study of Brazilian,French, and Spanish students

Conclusion The results we present enable us to highlight common features and disparities in the way students from the three countries organize their time. While the lecture attendance time varies little from one country to another, it is different for other elements of time use. The Spaniards in particular seem to spend more time on personal work and the Brazilians more often have paid employment. The initial comparison should however be regarded as provisional in that no systematic correlation was made with educational policies in each country. Certainly, the lack of grants system in Brazil is linked to the significant amount of available time spent on salaried work but it would be advisable to include elements allowing us to link time allocation to the inherent productivity of the educational systems (drop-out rate, repetition rate, time necessary to graduate) as well as to their administrative organization.