Line Managers’ Rationales for Professionals’ Reduced‐Load Work in Embracing and Ambivalent Organizations

This study examines line managers’ rationales regarding reduced‐load work (RLW), an emerging talent management practice allowing professionals to reduce their workload and take a pay cut, while actively remaining on a career path. Unlike flextime and telework, RLW addresses professionals’ core problems of rising work hours and workloads. Interviews with 42 managers in 20 North American employers suggested that managers were more likely to support RLW for employees whom they saw as (1) high‐performers, (2) flexible in their use of RLW, and (3) doing conducive jobs. Interviews with 20 HR experts and 24 senior executives revealed four dimensions of organizational support, two cultural (senior management support and discourse on career penalties) and two structural (adaptation of HR systems and organizational diffusion). In embracing organizations there was a higher frequency of more supportive managers than there was in ambivalent organizations. Managers’ rationales were connected to their organizational contexts, albeit loosely, suggesting managerial implementation agency. The same rationales were more likely to be used in supportive ways in embracing contexts and in less supportive ways in ambivalent contexts. This study suggests that managerial and organizational support for flexible talent management practices dovetail in nuanced and important ways. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Tariff,Growth, and Welfare

We develop a two‐country (Home and Foreign) by two‐good (consumption good and investment good) by one factor (capital) endogenous growth model with international knowledge spillover to study the relationship between an import tariff and economic growth and welfare. First, unlike the past literature, we do not need to make an assumption such that the growth rates between countries are identical in a balanced growth path (BGP). Second, we show that there exists a unique and saddle‐point BGP with both countries being incompletely specialized. Third, a higher import tariff on the consumption good in the domestic country may boost (reduce) the rate of economic growth when the foreign (domestic) country has an absolute advantage in the investment good. Finally, a rise in the tariff rate by one country may improve world welfare under some parameter spaces.     

Welfare-optimal pricing and capacity selection under an ex ante maximum demand charge

This paper deals with the simultaneous determination of welfare-optimal pricing and investment rules under a multi-period ex ante maximum demand charge by allowing the possibility of purchasing electricity from third party generators at some cost when excess demand occurs. I show that at the optimal size of capacity, expected short-run marginal shortage cost and long-run marginal capacity cost should be equal. The optimal maximum demand tariff does not entail marginal cost pricing. In general, it is shown that maximum demand charges are welfare superior to marginal cost pricing when tariffs must be set ex ante, before demand is known.     

Treatment effect analysis of early reemployment bonus program: panel MLE and mode-based semiparametric estimator for interval truncation

We use Korean data to find the effects of Early Reemployment Bonus (ERB) on unemployment duration; ERB is a bonus that the eligible unemployed receive if they find a job before their unemployment insurance benefit expires. A naive approach would be comparing the ERB receiving group with the non-receiving group, but the ERB receipt is partly determined by the unemployment duration itself (thus, an endogeneity problem). Interestingly, there were many individuals who did not receive the ERB despite being fully eligible, and this is attributed to being unaware of the ERB scheme. Taking this as a ??pseudo randomization??, we construct treatment and control groups using only the eligible. Our data set is an unbalanced panel with the response variable interval-truncated due to eligibility requirement of the ERB. We propose a panel random-effect MLE and a semiparametric ??mode-based?? estimator for the interval-truncated response. Our empirical finding is that the effect varies much, depending on individual characteristics. As for the mean effects, whereas the MLE indicates large duration-shortening effects, the semiparametric estimator shows much weaker and mostly insignificant effects.     

Strategic restructuring

Never before has there been so much organizational restructuring, in spite of consistently mixed results. This article argues that the reason organizational restructuring so often fails to increase productivity and profit is that it is not guided by business strategy. While most managers agree that structure should follow strategy, few have a process for moving from strategy to restructuring at the business level where most restructuring occurs. A number of businesses, however, have based restructuring decisions on a clear and well-understood strategy. This article describes what is common to the processes these businesses have followed. Human resource managers, whose role and competence should include the alignment of change processes with business needs, have often abdicated responsibility for ensuring that restructuring efforts are strategic and are competently implemented. © 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Environmental management accounting in Europe: current practice and future potential

Abstract

We examine the impact of managerial financial reporting incentives on accounting quality changes around International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption. A novel feature of our single-country setting based on Germany is that voluntary IFRS adoption was allowed and common before IFRS became mandatory. We exploit the revealed preferences in the choice to (not) adopt IFRS voluntarily to determine whether the management of individual firms had incentives to adopt IFRS. For comparability with previous studies, we assess accounting quality through multiple constructs such as earnings management, timely loss recognition, and value relevance. While most existing literature documents accounting quality improvements following IFRS adoption, we find that improvements are confined to firms with incentives to adopt, that is, voluntary adopters. We also find that firms that resist IFRS adoption have closer connections with banks and inside shareholders, consistent with lower incentives for more comprehensive accounting standards. The overall results indicate that reporting incentives dominate accounting standards in determining accounting quality. We conclude that it is unwarranted to infer from evidence on accounting quality changes around voluntary adoption that IFRS per se improves accounting quality.     

Crafting a Human Resource Strategy to Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the Chief Executive Officer of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change‐hardy”. This case study, while briefly addressing AEHN's approaches to business strategy and organization design, focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are—or will be—studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Monthly rent with variable deposit: A new form of rental contract in Korea

In this paper, we describe the structure of the monthly-rent-with-variable-deposit (MRVD) contract, a distinct type of rental contract in Korea. We demonstrate that the Chonsei contract is one variant of the MRVD contract. To explain the MRVD contract, we propose a leverage-effect-seeking hypothesis. Based on this hypothesis, we are able to elucidate a variety of rental market conditions in Korea. Our hypothesis is consistent with the simultaneous existence of several types of rental contracts and various combinations of monthly rent, as well as the up-front deposit in the MRVD contracts. We also focused on the deposit-to-monthly-rent conversion rate, a critical factor in the Korean rental housing market. Our hypothesis indicates that conversion rates vary across local markets depending on local market conditions, such as the expected house price appreciation rate. The results of our data analysis demonstrate that our hypothesis more adequately explains the observed trend in the conversion rate, as well as that in the MRVD contracts.     

Estimating distributions of potential outcomes using local instrumental variables with an application to changes in college enrollment and wage inequality

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil [Heckman, J., Vytlacil E., 2005. Structural equations, treatment, effects and econometric policy evaluation. Econometrica 73(3), 669–738] to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of potential outcomes. The newly developed method is illustrated by applying it to changes in college enrollment and wage inequality using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1979. Increases in college enrollment cause changes in the distribution of ability among college and high school graduates. This paper estimates a semiparametric selection model of schooling and wages to show that, for fixed skill prices, a 14% increase in college participation (analogous to the increase observed in the 1980s), reduces the college premium by 12% and increases the 90–10 percentile ratio among college graduates by 2%.