Class, gender and marriage

This paper estimates the contributions of differential fecundity, social heterogeneity, assortative matching and search frictions to aggregate marriage behavior in 18th century Quebec. The reduced form estimates show that a simple random matching model of the marriage market, in which there are gains to assortative matching and women may leave the marriage market at a higher rate than men, can explain these data. The estimates also show that the marriage market was segmented by social status.     

The Market for Montreal Apprentices: Contract Length and Information

This paper examines the nature of apprenticing arrangements in Montreal around the turn of the nineteenth century, using apprenticeship contracts from a larger body of notarial records found in Quebec. The principal question addressed is what determined apprenticeship length? I find that the characteristics of both masters and their boys were important. For example, older (more productive) boys served shorter terms, as did those training under masons and butchers. There is also evidence that the precision of a master's estimate of a boy's future value was important. Masters often relied on probationary periods to better gauge a boy's worth before signing a contract. Probations, all else equal, were associated with shorter contracts. Because masters anticipated fewer “failures” when they were better informed, matches which began with probations were associated with apprentices of higher expected value.     

Islamic Ethics and the Implications for Business

As global business operations expand, managers need more knowledge of foreign cultures, in particular, information on the ethics of doing business across borders. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to share the Islamic perspective on business ethics, little known in the west, which may stimulate further thinking and debate on the relationships between ethics and business, and (2) to provide some knowledge of Islamic philosophy in order to help managers do business in Muslim cultures. The case of Egypt illustrates some divergence between Islamic philosophy and practice in economic life. The paper concludes with managerial implications and suggestions for further research.     

Investor protection and convertible debt design

An important issue that firms consider when designing convertible debt is to specify security features such as conversion ratio, maturity date and call period. Following Lewis et al. [Lewis, M., Rogalski, R., Seward, J., 2003. Industry conditions, growth opportunities and market reactions to convertible debt financing decisions. Journal of Banking and Finance 27, 153–181], we employ a single measure that simultaneously considers all of these features: the expected probability (measured at issue date) that the convertible will be converted to equity at maturity. We find that firms in countries with stronger shareholder rights issue convertible debt with a higher expected probability of converting to equity. The positive association between the expected probability of conversion and shareholder rights is less pronounced in firms for which ownership structures create potentially high managerial agency costs. Specifically, in countries with stronger shareholder rights, firms with higher separation of control rights and cash flow rights tend to issue convertibles with lower probability of conversion. Furthermore, we find that large non-management block ownership strengthens the likelihood of issuing convertible debt with higher probability of conversion in countries with stronger shareholder rights. In contrast, firms in countries with stronger creditor rights issue convertibles with lower probability of conversion. We also document that the negative association between creditor rights and probability of conversion is more pronounced in firms with higher separation of control rights and cash flow rights.     

Antecedents and outcomes of promotion systems

This study tests the Ferris, Buckley, and Allen (Human Resource Planning, 15, 47–68) model of promotion systems in organizations assessing the promotion systems in Fortune 500 companies in six industry groups. Relationships were found between characteristics of organizations (e.g., the extent of their career planning and their affirmative action practices and organizational outcomes including numbers of grievances filed, industry rank on sales, and employee attitudes concerning promotion opportunities. These results suggest that the Ferris, Buckley, and Allen (1992) model provides a useful framework for the study and development of organizations' promotion systems. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Compensatory Ethics

Several theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical first choice, people acted significantly more ethically in their subsequent choice. These findings provide the basis for a model of compensatory ethics.     

Investigating productivity change and hospital size: a nonparametric frontier approach

The study obtains measures of the productive efficiency of ‘larger’ and ‘smaller’ Northern Ireland hospitals during the 1986–92 pre-Trust period. The measures provide insights into how these hospitals were responding to the pressures for increased efficiency prior to Trust status. They also constitute a useful benchmark for evaluating productivity change under the post-1992 Trust status environment. A nonparametric frontier approach is used to measure productivity change and to decompose this into technical change (or shifts in the best practice frontier) and efficiency change (or change in how far a hospital is from the frontier). The latter change in efficiency is also decomposed into changes in scale efficiency, pure technical efficiency and input congestion. The findings indicate that smaller hospitals, starting from a less efficient base, achieved greater productivity gains than larger hospitals over 1986–92. For smaller hospitals, this was due to progressive shifts in the best practice frontier outweighing a substantial decline in efficiency. This decline was found to be due to a deterioration in scale efficiency over the period. The results overall support the current policy view that larger hospitals are more efficient than smaller hospitals in providing health care services.     

The material-semiotics of fatherhood: The co-emergence of technology and contemporary fatherhood

Using actor–network theory (ANT), this paper examines the role of caring technologies in the complex transition to new fatherhood. The study explores the ambivalent role these objects play in the family setting to co-enable different forms of fathering and masculinity. The paper explores the processes through which these objects, together with emerging fatherhood, enact a material-semiotic struggle over identity, processes, and action. In doing so, the paper derives insights of potential value to marketers, technological innovators, and policy makers alike.