The “Brain Drain” from Hong Kong

At one time, the top jobs in subsidiaries of Western companies located in Hong Kong were held by Westerners. Only recently have companies moved to fill professional positions with local talent. But as the localization process has speeded up, the once plentiful supply of talent is shrinking dramatically. Hong Kong Chinese professionals are leaving from fear of what repatriation with the PRC will bring.     

The effects of television advertising execution on recall,comprehension, and persuasion

The present study fills a gap in the advertising effects literature for a large-sample comprehensive study of the impact of general message factors on recall and persuasion measures of advertising performance. An analysis of executional factors in 1059 television commercials revealed that the presence of a brand differentiating message accounted for more variance in persuasion than other executional factors. Recall and persuasion performance were more closely related for new products than for established products. A brand differentiating claim in the commercial was the most important single executional factor affecting advertising effectiveness.     

The Learning Tourism Destination: The potential of a learning organisation approach for improving the sustainability of tourism destinations

Globalisation, increasing complexity, and the need to address triple-bottom line sustainability have seen the proliferation of Learning Organisations (LO) who, by definition, have the capacity to anticipate environmental changes and economic opportunities and adapt accordingly. Such organisations use system dynamics modelling (SDM) for both strategic planning and the promotion of organisational learning. Although SDM has been applied in the context of tourism destination management for predictive reasons, the current literature does not analyse or recognise how this could be used as a foundation for an LO. This study introduces the concept of the Learning Tourism Destinations (LTD) and discusses, on the basis of a review of six case studies, the potential of SDM as a tool for the implementation and enhancement of collective learning processes. The results reveal that SDM is capable of promoting communication between stakeholders and stimulating organisational learning. It is suggested that the LTD approach be further utilised and explored.     

Employee Involvement And Pay At Us And Canadian Auto Suppliers

We use survey data and field research to investigate the effects of employee involvement practices on outcomes for blue-collar workers in the auto-supply industry. We find these practices raise wages by 3–5%. The causal mechanism linking involvement and wages appears to be most consistent with efficiency-wage theories, and least consistent with compensating differences. We find no evidence that employee involvement affects plants' survival or employment growth.     

Prose, Psychopaths and Persistence: Personal Perspectives on Publishing

The process of attempting to publish a paper in a refereed journal can be rather stressful. This paper presents a number of personal reflections on the publishing process, with the aim of helping aspiring journal authors to appreciate the nature of the challenge, and some of the requisites for success. The challenges in dealing with referees include the element of luck involved in securing sympathetic referees, the poor quality of the reports prepared by some referees, and the slowness of the review and editorial process. A number of examples from my experiences in agricultural economics journals are presented. These reveal that one of the most important characteristics that a journal author needs is persistence.
Publier un article dans un périodique scientifique s'avère parfois une tâche éprouvante. L'auteur nous fait part de ses réflexions sur le monde de l'édition, le but étant d'aider les auteurs en herbe à apprécier la nature du défi et de comprendre certaines conditions préalables au succès. Trailer avec un comité de lecture anonyme suppose une certaine intervention du hasard. En effet, il faut non seulement dénicher des lecteurs bienveillants mais aussi composer avec la piètre qualité de certains comptes rendus et la lenteur du processus de lecture et de correction. Suivent maints exemples tirés de périodiques d'économie agricole. Ces exemples révèlent qu'une des principales qualités des auteurs d'articles pour périodique scientifique est la ténacité.     

Forecasting Employment Growth in Indonesia

This note discusses the dangers of using the employment-output elasticity to forecast employment creation in Indonesia. It demonstrates the unreliability of employment-output elasticity estimates for Indonesia obtained using various methods, and argues, that, in addition to the estimation problems, the elasticity method has inherent weaknesses that should preclude its use to forecast employment growth in a dynamic world.     

THE BLACK-SCHOLES EQUATION REVISITED: ASYMPTOTIC EXPANSIONS AND SINGULAR PERTURBATIONS

In this paper, novel singular perturbation techniques are applied to price European, American, and barrier options. Employment of these methods leads to a significant simplification of the problem in all cases, by reducing the number of parameters. For American options, the valuation problem is reduced to a procedure that may be performed on a rudimentary handheld calculator. The method also sheds light on the evolution of option prices for all of the cases considered, the results being particularly illuminating for American and barrier options.     

Access to training and its impact on temporary workers

Does temporary work provide a way for individuals to improve their skill levels? Using a sample of more than 4,000 employees of US temporary staffing agencies, we analyse whether blue, white and pink‐collar temps get access to company training, and the impact of skill development on wages and employee retention. We find that less than 25 per cent of temps take part in training. Educated and experienced individuals are more likely to be offered training, but lower‐skilled individuals are more likely to take training when it is offered and spend more hours on it. Office workers who took part in training were more likely still to be with the agency a year later and experienced significant wage growth, while training had no effect on wage growth for blue‐collar workers. Skill development that took place on the job was associated with greater wage growth for all types of temps.