Designing your health benefit plan

A health care benefit plan should meet the needs and expectations of your organization and its insureds. Each organization is unique, so a health care benefit plan shouldn't be "off the shelf" but be uniquely tailored for your organization. Analyze current demographic, utilization and other data to determine which services members and their families are using and what type of services may be needed in the future.     

International Franchising Practices in Mexico: Do Franchisors Customize Their Contracts?

The contracting practices of franchisors outside their domestic market have received little attention in the empirical literature on franchising to date, largely because of lack of data. We exploit a novel data set that allows us to describe the contracts offered by a number of US and Canadian franchisors operating in Mexico and also compare them to contracts employed at home. Our analyses reveal a series of stylized facts that we hope will prove useful in guiding future empirical and theoretical research on contracting and especially on cross-border contracting practices. These are as follows: (1) The overwhelming majority of franchisors seeking franchisees in Mexico offer exactly the same contract to potential Mexican franchisees as that employed in the home market; (2) Among those franchisors that already have established outlets in Mexico, nearly half use the exact same fees in Mexico and at home; (3) The majority of those franchisors that make changes only alter the fixed fee component of the contract; (4) There is no evidence that franchisors use franchising more or less in Mexico compared to home as an alternative to royalty rate customization—in fact, the extent of franchising (versus company-owned units) of these firms in Mexico is not different systematically from that observed in their domestic market or worldwide; and (5) There is no evidence of increased customization over time—if anything, the evidence suggests increased similarities in contracting practices over time.     

Perceptions of casino dealers toward organizational justice: Are there any gender differences?

The emphasis on equity and diversity is vital for businesses to flourish. Promoting workplace equality, essential to enhance employees' satisfaction in delivering excellent service quality, requires understanding of the perception of employees as well as the problems they face. This study examines whether gender equality exists among frontline casino employees, the degree to which inequality is experienced and the consequence of such perceptions, through face-to-face, in-depth interviews with the dealers in Macao. The theory of organizational justice is adopted. Results revealed that perceived inequality and injustices were stronger among the male dealers. Male dealers perceived stronger distributive and procedural injustices than females, while female dealers perceived stronger interactional injustice than males. The perceived injustices resulted in various negative work attitudes among employees. Recommendations to improve work attitudes and counterbalance the inequities are proposed.     

Does Sustainability Investment Provide Adaptive Resilience to Ethical Investors? Evidence from Spain

Although sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) has quite recently become a hot research topic, scarcely any systematic research has been paid to the performance of this non-conventional approach to investment during the financial crisis that emerged in mid-2008 when the resilience of the financial markets was sorely tested. Such real-world resilience in practice is the subject of the current research which tests whether environmental, social and governance screens provides ethical investors with adaptive resilience in bull and bear market conditions by focussing on the SRI equity index of one of the most active markets in Europe in terms of ethical investment, the FTSE4Good-Ibex in Spain. Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (M-GARCH) analysis indicates that ethical investors in the equity market examined with evidence that greater resilience in severe business cycle shocks could be attributable to SRI by companies. Although limited to a single country study, the results have implications for investors seeking resilience in crisis: when individual values and beliefs towards sustainability tie with personal investment strategy, the end result is adaptive financial resilience, social well-being and environmental defence.