How employee perceptions of HR policy and practice influence discretionary work effort and co-worker assistance: evidence from two organizations

Drawing on social identity theory and organizational justice research, we model the impact of employee perceptions of human resource (HR) policies and practices on two important outcome variables – discretionary work effort (DWE) and co-worker assistance (CWA). Results based on 618 full-time employees in two organizations show that HR practices are positively related to procedural and distributive justice and that organizational identification mediates the relationship between procedural and distributive justice and DWE and CWA, respectively. Distributive justice is also shown to have direct effects on the two outcome variables suggesting the relevance of a social exchange perspective as a complement to social identity explanations. Implications for research and practice are briefly discussed.     

The Load Model: an alternative to QALY

Background: QALYs are widely used in health economic evaluation, but remain controversial, largely because they do not reflect how many people behave in practice. This paper presents a new conceptual model (Load Model) and illustrates it in comparison with the QALY model.

Methods: Load is the average annual weight attributed to morbidity and mortality over a defined period, using weightings based on preference judgements. Morbidity Load is attributed to states of illness, according to their perceived severity. When people are in full health, Load is zero (no morbidity). Death is treated as an event with negative consequences, incurred in the year following death. Deaths may be weighted equally, with a fixed negative weight such as ?100, or differ according to the context of death. After death, Load is zero. In a worked example, we use the standard gamble method to obtain a weighting for an illness state, for both Load and QALY models. A judge is indifferent between certainty of 1.5 years’ illness followed by death, or a 50/50 chance of 1.5 years’ full health or 1-year illness, each followed by death. The weightings calculated are applied to a hypothetical life, 72 years in full health followed by 3 years with illness then death, using both models. Three other hypothetical outcomes are also compared.

Results: For an example life, the relative size of the morbidity component compared with the mortality component is much higher in the Load model than in the QALY model. When comparing alternative outcomes, there are also substantial differences between the two models.

Conclusions: In the Load model the weight of morbidity, relative to mortality, is very different from that in the QALY model. Given the role of the QALYs in economic evaluation, the implications of an alternative, which generates very different results, warrant further exploration.     

Pre‐sale information and hammer prices for Australian Indigenous art

Using sales data from 1987–2011 we investigate the role that pre‐sale price information plays in determining hammer prices for Australian Indigenous artworks. Importantly, we control for the degree of market concentration as this might influence buyers’ perceptions of fairness in relation to price estimates which are provided by auction houses. Auction houses therefore act as important intermediaries between art sellers and art buyers. The results suggest that pre‐sale estimates and market concentration have a differential impact on hammer prices, depending on the point in the conditional realised price distribution under examination.     

A proposal for a more objective measure of de facto constitutional constraints

In this paper we propose two new indicators of de facto constitutional constraints. The indicators are based on the presence or the absence of easily observable political events. This makes the proposed measures relatively objective and easy to verify relative to the most widely used indicators of de jure and de facto constitutions. This paper describes the indicators and demonstrates their usefulness for research on economic development.     

The impact of environmental regulation on Chinese spatial development

We examine the relationship between environmental regulation and spatial development in China. Exploiting changes in national pollution standards for three industries, ammonia, paper and cement, we measure the impact of environmental regulation on industry productivity. Our results suggest that national pollution standards do not affect industry productivity, but they reallocate productivity spatially. We show that regulated industries located in developing cities increase their productivity compared to similar industries in other cities. This means that environmental regulation affects the spatial distribution of technology in China and might influence long‐term spatial development by reducing geographical disparities.