Wages and foreign ownership A comparative study of Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States

This paper explores the relationship between wages and foreign investment in Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States. Despite very different economic conditions and levels of development, we find one fact that is robust across all three countries: higher levels of foreign investment are associated with higher wages. However, in Mexico and Venezuela, foreign investment is associated with higher wages only for foreign-owned firms — there is no evidence of wage spillovers leading to higher wages for domestic firms. The lack of spillovers in Mexico and Venezuela is consistent with significant wage differentials between foreign and domestic enterprises. In the United States, where the evidence suggests some wage spillovers from foreign to domestic enterprises, wage differentials are smaller.     

Healthcare costs for Crohn’s disease patients treated with infliximab: a propensity weighted comparison of the effects of treatment adherence

Objective:

The objective for the research was to evaluate the direct healthcare costs for Crohn’s disease (CD) patients categorized by adherence status.

Methods:

Adult patients with ≥1 claim for infliximab and ≥2 claims for CD who were continuously insured for 12 months before and after their first infliximab infusion (index date) were identified in a 2006–2009 US managed care database. Patients were excluded if they had rheumatoid arthritis claims, received infliximab billed as a pharmacy benefit, or received another biologic drug. Patients were categorized as being either adherent or intermittently adherent to infliximab using a pre-defined algorithm. Total and component direct costs, CD-related costs, rates of surgery, and days of hospitalization were estimated for the 360-day post-index period. Propensity weighted generalized linear models were used to adjust the cost estimates for potential confounding variables.

Results:

The total propensity weighted cost for infliximab adherent patients was $40,425 (95% CI?=?[$38,686, $42,242]), compared to $41,082 (95% CI?=?[$38,163, $44,223]) for the intermittently adherent (p?=?0.71). However, adherent patients had lower total direct medical costs, exclusive of infliximab, that were $13,097 (95% CI?=?[$12,141, $14,127]) compared with $20,068 (95% CI?=?[$17,676, $22,784]) for intermittently adherent patients as a result of substantially lower hospital and outpatient costs (p?Conclusions:

Greater drug-related costs for infliximab adherent patients were offset by lower costs from hospitalization and outpatient visits. These findings indicate that adherent patients have improved clinical outcomes, at a similar aggregate cost, than patients who are only intermittently adherent to therapy.     

Self-employment of older Americans: do recessions matter?

As high unemployment rates linger following the latest recession, job opportunities can be sparse, especially for older workers. This might prompt older Americans to seek out opportunities in self-employment. Alternatively, recession-related decreases in economic activity might make self-employment less attractive. Using the Health and Retirement Study, we find that unemployed respondents are more likely to enter self-employment and that these decisions are clearly affected by recessions, although the effects differ by recession and gender. Unlike men, women’s self-employment decisions are very sensitive to other sources of household income, and women are less likely to become self-employed the deeper the recession.     

Does servant leadership foster creativity and innovation? A multi-level mediation study of identification and prototypicality

The purpose of this multi-level study is to examine how servant leadership affects both employee creativity and team innovation. Drawing from social identity, in particular, relational identification theory, we found on the basis of a two-nation Asian sample of 154 teams that servant leadership promotes individual relational identification and collective prototypicality with the leader which, in turn, fosters employee creativity and team innovation. In addition, our study suggests that the mediated effect of leader identification is strongest when team climate for innovation is high.     

The moderating effects of gender and inside versus outside sales role in multifaceted job satisfaction

Two key trends in B2B sales organizations are increased representation by females in sales roles and a shift toward more inside sales positions than has been true in the past. Prior work on multifaceted job satisfaction among salespeople has not fully taken these elements into account. This study furthers the literature by examining the moderating role of gender and inside versus outside sales role on multifaceted job satisfaction. Results provide opportunity for provocative discussion among sales organizational leadership of more customized approaches to improve the satisfaction of the sales force.     

The interplay of salesperson’s job performance and satisfaction in the financial services industry

Research has not yet provided conclusive confirmation or disconfirmation of any model that discusses the relationship between job satisfaction (JS) and job performance (JP). This article reviews the relationship in the financial services industry setting and examines in line with the precedents (perceived organizational support, role ambiguity, role conflict (RC), work-family conflict (WFC), emotional exhaustion (EE)) and the consequences (organizational commitment). Findings suggest that, in the financial services industry, JP causes JS and has a positive effect on organizational commitment. This study also finds that WFC serves as an antecedent to RC, EE and JS. Most importantly, the finding that WFC is significantly related to RC is new and thus needs to be confirmed in different industry settings.     

2013 Nobel Prize Revisited: Do Shiller's Models Really Have Predictive Power?

The authors take a critical view of the investment approach advocated by recent Nobel laureate Robert Shiller. A critic of efficient markets theory, Shiller has proposed that investors, when attempting to determine whether the S&P Index is under‐ or overvalued, should use a P/E ratio whose denominator is the 120‐month moving average of the company's EPS. But the authors find that such an approach does not provide consistently superior insights to those provided by conventional PEs—and that, for example, the use of both conventional and Shiller PE multiples would have indicated a highly overvalued S&P not only in early 2000—before the bursting of the dotcom bubble—but also in 1996, when Fed Governor Greenspan spoke prematurely of “irrational exuberance.” The authors also show that both the Shiller PE and the conventional PE ratios fail a critical statistical test: they are not mean‐reverting—and as a consequence, both ratios can be expected to indicate either undervaluation or overvaluation for very long periods of time. Complicating matters, current earnings are useful to investors in predicting future stock prices only insofar as they provide a reliable guide to future earnings and cash flows. And as one would expect in competitive capital markets, even perfect foreknowledge of future earnings is not likely to be much help since, according to the authors' analysis, five‐year earnings explain on average less than 20% of the variation in prices over consecutive five‐year periods.     

Audit committee performance: ownership vs.independence – Did SOX get it wrong?

This study documents a positive relationship between audit committee stock ownership and firm performance in large US firms from 1998 to 2008. This study also finds a positive relationship between changes in ownership and performance. These results persist throughout the sample period, do not weaken after Sarbanes–Oxley and are robust to controlling for endogeneity between ownership and performance. After testing shows that there is no relationship between audit committee independence and firm performance, these findings suggest that audit committee stock ownership is an important corporate governance mechanism and potentially a more relevant variable than audit committee independence from a policy perspective.