The influence of organizational context on the managerial turnover–performance relationship

This study performs a comprehensive examination of organizational context in the relationship between managerial turnover and organizational performance. Using theoretical frameworks of human and social capital, we focus on the moderating roles of entity size, employment system, industry brand, and location. To test our hypotheses, we worked with the company records of a multinational fashion retail group with more than 4,000 stores grouped into eight different brands and 100,000 employees in more than 31 countries. To estimate the causal contextual effects of the relationship between voluntary managerial turnover and organizational performance, we designed a quasi-experiment using propensity score matching analysis. Our results show that the dysfunctional side of managerial turnover is significant for stores that are large, for stores managed under a primary employment system, for brands operating with higher levels of service orientation, and for countries with more restrictive employment protection legislation. We discuss the implications of these findings for practice and for future research.     

Lost in transition?

Using data for Germany and 23 other economies in Eastern and Western Europe, this paper estimates the monetary returns to education acquired under communism more than 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We show that, in the 2000s, Eastern European workers who completed their education under communism earned in the 2000s similar returns to their education as did workers belonging to the same age cohorts who studied in Western Europe. This might suggest that education under communism is still as valuable as education attained in Western Europe. However, individuals educated under communism are more likely than their Western counterparts to be unemployed, retired or disabled, and therefore to earn lower or zero returns to their education. Moreover, when we allow the returns to pre‐ and post‐secondary education to differ, we find that senior males who have attained only primary or secondary education under communism are penalized in the post‐transition Eastern European labour markets, and that those who have completed post‐secondary education under communism enjoy in these markets higher payoffs to their education than similarly educated Western European individuals who are employed in the West.     

Managing electronic waste: a study of market failure

This paper analyses market based initiatives as solutions to techno‐scientific problems. It focuses on electronic waste to argue that market‐ based initiatives are key locations in which techno‐scientific work takes place. Such work is explored through recent ideas inspired by Actor‐Network Theory and the concept of performativity.     

The efficiency of immunization of infants by local government

The paper makes use of data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the cost and production efficiency of local government programmemes for childhood immunization in urban and rural settings in Australia. Model specification is tested for validity, methods are used for ranking efficient units and advanced statistical methods are used to establish confidence intervals around the efficiency estimates. Given the small data set, the cost and production models are valid, and it is concluded that while neither urban nor rural programmes are particularly efficient, there is more room for improvement in rural programmes. Ways of changing methods of delivery are suggested which may increase efficiency.     

Modelling bullying propagation in Spain: a quantitative and qualitative approach

Bullying in schools can be defined as a category of aggressive behaviour with an imbalance of power, and aggression event is repeated over time. Bullying occurs as a social process in nature, and takes place in groups. Attacks are mostly unprovoked, and can be physical or verbal, direct or indirect. This paper focuses on modelling the propagation of bullying in the Spanish school population aged [12, 18] during the period July 2015–January 2020, and on identifying and quantifying its main drivers. Thus, a population dynamics model is built to forecast and quantify the magnitude of the bullying problem in Spain over the July 2015–January 2020 period by taking into account qualitative and quantitative factors; e.g., demography, economy, socio-cultural behaviour, consumption of drugs and alcohol, social contagion and technology. The study provides recommendations to reduce and prevent the growth of this social problem, but to also mitigate a correlated problem, such as intimate partner violence among adults. In fact one of the main utilities of the built model is that new policies can be simulated and allow their effects to be seen.     

Last Minute Policies and the Incumbency Advantage

This paper models a purely informational mechanism behind the incumbency advantage. In a two‐period electoral campaign with two policy issues, an incumbent and a possibly more competent challenger compete for election by voters who are heterogeneously informed about the state of the world. Due to the asymmetries in government responsibility between candidates, the incumbent's statement may convey information on the relevance of the issues to voters. In equilibrium, the incumbent sometimes strategically releases his statement early and thus signals the importance of his signature issue to the voters. We find that, since the incumbent's positioning on the issue reveals private information which the challenger can use in later statements, the incumbent's incentives to distort the campaign are decreasing in his quality, as previously documented by the empirical literature. The distortions arising in equilibrium are decreasing in the incumbent's true competence; however, the distortions may be increasing in the incumbent's expected competence on his signature issue.     

Analysts herding: when does sentiment matter?

Herding among analysts emerges when analysts give priority to their peers’ opinions instead of their own beliefs or information. Some circumstances may enhance or restrain this type of behaviour. We postulate that market sentiment is one of them. This article analyses the effect that investor sentiment may have on analysts’ herding behaviour in the U.K. Our results suggest that ‘easy situations’ such as analysing easy-to-value securities and releasing optimistic information at times of high market sentiment clearly reduce herding practices, whereas herding clearly increases in difficult situations when analysts have to release negative information at moments of high investor sentiment.     

Comparative Statics for the Consumer Problem

This paper studies comparative statics in the consumer utlity maximization problem with two goods. The analysis can be global, and it allows for indivisibilities, discrete changes, and non-binding budget constraints. It does not rely either on topological or convexity assumptions. Instead, it uses lattice programming techniques. The conditions derived are superextremal variant properties on the utility function, in appropriately constructed lattices on the consumption set. Sufficient conditions are given for one or both goods to be normal, for one to be inferior, and for some cases of price effects, using what are called value orders and lattices.     

Liquidity biases in asset pricing tests

Microstructure noise in security prices biases the results of empirical asset pricing specifications, particularly when security-level explanatory variables are cross-sectionally correlated with the amount of noise. We focus on tests of whether measures of illiquidity, which are likely to be correlated with the noise, are priced in the cross-section of stock returns, and show a significant upward bias in estimated return premiums for an array of illiquidity measures in Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) monthly return data. The upward bias is larger when illiquid securities are included in the sample, but persists even for NYSE/Amex stocks after decimalization. We introduce a methodological correction to eliminate the biases that simply involves weighted least squares (WLS) rather than ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, and find evidence of smaller, but still significant, return premiums for illiquidity after implementing the correction.