The Morality of “new” CEO Activism

Journal of Business Ethics - CEOs’ social and environmental activism attracts significant public and research interest. Positioned as an expression of personal morality, such activism is...     

Globalization,recruitments, and job mobility

Previous research indicates that firms pay a premium to poach workers from exporting firms if experience working for an internationally engaged firm reduces trade costs. Because international experience is less valuable to non-exporters, we would expect to see differences in recruitments between firms that are internationally engaged and those that serve only the domestic market. Moreover, increased openness might lead to higher job-to-job mobility if more globalization raises both the share of exporters and the number of workers with skills that make them attractive for other exporters. Using linked Swedish employer–employee data for the period 1997 to 2013, we find systematic differences between the way exporters and non-exporters recruit workers: exporters have a relatively high share of recruitments from other exporters as hypothesized. We also find some suggestive evidence that increased openness correlates positively with upward mobility for occupations that play a major role in international commerce, such as professionals and managers.     

Graphic Geopolitics: An Interview with Comics Artist Joe Sacco

Joe Sacco is best known for works that blend journalism with the format and structure of comic books. Sacco’s prior work has considered themes of political conflict, legacies of violence, and marginalization across a range of geographic contexts, including Bosnia, the Middle East, and the United States. This interview, conducted by the authors with Joe Sacco on 16 November 2015, explores these and other themes in an attempt to situate the positionality and choices of the creator of geopolitical narratives in the broader literature on critical geopolitics. We consider the themes of subject, representation, audience response, and stylistic influences, among others, in our conversation.     

New insights into an old problem – enhancing student learning outcomes in an introductory statistics course

Many students enrolled in first year introductory statistics courses believe learning statistics is a waste of time and fear they will fail. In this study, we explored the impacts on learning outcomes for students in an introductory statistics course by allowing students to arbitrarily choose their own sequence of learning from three key learning activities, namely tutorials, Peer-Assisted Study Sessions and Computer-Managed Learning quizzes. Unlike the old regime where the learning activities followed a strict, rigid sequence, a new regime allowed students to freely choose when, where and how they engaged with the course learning activities. This allowed increased opportunities for students to receive relevant and timely feedback. Using a total of 1187 students enrolled in semester 2 of 2011, 2012 and 2013, data were collected on students’ scores from 7 assessment tasks. Our experimental design ensured as many course features as possible remained constant between the control cohorts (of 2011 and 2012) and the experimental cohort (2013), thereby avoiding potential sample selection problems. The findings showed student learning outcomes in the new regime improved significantly. Interestingly, the effects were found to be greatest in the lower percentile of the score distribution.     

Income and Price Elasticities of Demand in South Africa: An Application of the Linear Expenditure System

This paper investigates the expenditure patterns of South African households using detailed cross‐sectional expenditure and price data that varies across region and time. Linear expenditure system parameter estimates are used to calculate income and price elasticities for a number of product categories at different points of the income distribution. We find substantial variation in the price and income elasticities of demand for items across the income distribution, with the bottom quartile being extremely sensitive to increases in the price of food and clothing items, and the top quartile being as sensitive as households in developed countries.     

Optimal Real Estate Portfolios

In recent years, increasing attention has been paid the problem of analyzing, evaluating and selecting real estate investments within the context of a portfolio. Most approaches simply attempt to adapt existing theory and models from the well-developed literature of securities investments. Most adaptations or extensions to real estate are not without serious problems, however, because of several fundamental difficulties relating to optimization technology inadequacies and a general lack of reliable and consistent market data.
This article deals with the major problems of utilizing some of the classic securities investment models for real estate. Further, a risk-return model is advanced which overcomes most of the fundamental problems outlined earlier in the article.     

The upgrading effect of voluntary export restraints

Summary Given that a volume-defined VER is introduced on two differently priced varieties of a good,(i) the transfer of the VER-rent to the exporting country will cause imports of both varieties to fall,(ii) the relative price change in favour of the high cost variety counteracts this import fall and could in fact outweigh it,(iii) an ad valorem tariff restoring the original relative price of the two varieties would increase welfare and that welfare increase could in fact outweigh the welfare loss due to the VER-transfer to the exporting country.     

On delineating the domain of public sector consumer problems A comment on Young's paper in JCP, 1, 1977/3

Journal of Consumer Policy -