Protecting the privacy of personal information in employee benefit plans

The United States is not the only country dealing with privacy of health information. In the absence of clear legislative direction, this paper focuses on the common privacy principles that underlie Canadian privacy legislation and recommends a plan of action. The objective is to give plan administrators and trustees sufficient transition time to develop and implement the appropriate privacy strategies, thereby minimizing both the potential burden of compliance and the potential risks of noncompliance.     

Diversity in organizations: Where are we now and where are we going?

A great deal of research has focused on workforce diversity. Despite an increasing number of studies, few consistent conclusions have yet to be reached about the antecedents and outcomes of diversity. Likewise, research on different dimensions of diversity (e.g., age, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and culture) has mostly evolved independently. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to examine each of these dimensions of diversity to describe common themes across dimensions and to develop an integrative model of diversity.     

Disaster relief routing: Integrating research and practice

Disaster relief presents many unique logistics challenges, with problems including damaged transportation infrastructure, limited communication, and coordination of multiple agents. Central to disaster relief logistics is the distribution of life-saving commodities to beneficiaries. Operations research models have potential to help relief agencies save lives and money, maintain standards of humanitarianism and fairness and maximize the use of limited resources amid post-disaster chaos. Through interviews with aid organizations, reviews of their publications, and a literature review of operations research models in transportation of relief goods, this paper provides an analysis of the use of such models from the perspective of both practitioners and academics. With the complexity of disaster relief distribution and the relatively small number of journal articles written on it, this is an area with potential for helping relief organizations and for tremendous growth in operations research.     

Corporate Ethical Values and Altruism: The Mediating Role of Career Satisfaction

This study explores the ability of career satisfaction to mediate the relationship between corporate ethical values and altruism. Using a sample of individuals employed in a four-campus, regional health science center, it was determined that individual career satisfaction fully mediated the positive relationship between perceptions of corporate ethical values and self-reported altruism. The findings imply that companies dedicating attention to positive corporate ethical values can enhance employee attitudes and altruistic behaviors, especially when individuals experience a high degree of career satisfaction.     

Financing municipal BOOTs in South Africa: The lenders' perspective

South Africa's first build‐own‐operate‐transfer (BOOT) project for municipal services was signed in late December 1998 by the city of Durban and a private project company associated with French conglomerate Vivendi. The project will treat waste water for sale to industrial customers who would otherwise use more expensive potable water in their manufacturing processes. The project structure, with its multiple contracts and supporting agreements, guarantees and complex shareholding relationships, represents a sophisticated analytical challenge for lenders, whose financing will ultimately be at risk in the deal. Development finance institutions, such as the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA), must review such projects in even greater detail because of their mandate to promote sustainable infrastructure development in the region. This article presents the DBSA ‘s analytical perspective on the Durban BOOT project in an effort to capture the complex, innovative and strongly developmental character of what, for South Africa, is a ground‐breaking public‐private partnership project.     

Strategic individual assessment: Issues in providing reliable descriptions

Individual assessment involves one psychologist making an assessment of an individual for personnel-related purposes. Individual assessment practice is reviewed, and research on reliability is presented. A study examining the comparability of conclusions reached by consumers is presented. Eighty-six students and thirty-eight managers read nine narrative assessment reports (three of each of three job candidates) and attempted to determine which reports described the same candidate. None of the subjects could correctly group the nine reports; a sizeable proportion did no better than chance in grouping the reports. Implications for assessors and consumers of individual assessments are discussed.     

Do borrowers know their mortgage terms?

We assess whether borrowers know their mortgage terms by comparing the distributions of these variables in the household-reported Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to the distributions in lender-reported data. We also examine the characteristics of SCF respondents who report not knowing these contract terms. Although most borrowers seem to know basic mortgage terms, borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages appear likely to underestimate or to not know how much their interest rates could change. Borrowers who could experience large payment changes if interest rates rose are more likely to report not knowing these contract terms. Difficulties with gathering and processing information appear to be a factor in borrowers' lack of knowledge.     

A Trinomial Logit Analysis of Household Composition

This article analyzes the effects on the marriage and household composition decisions of characteristics of the householder and of the place of residence. High housing costs reduced the probability of living alone. For female householders, increases in income decreased the probability of living alone rather than with unrelated individuals; the reverse was true for male householders. An increase in income decreased the probability of marriage for female householders over twenty-three years of age and increased the probability of marriage for male householders. Non-white householders over forty were less likely to be married than white householders over forty.     

Cross-border restaurant price and exchange rate interactions

Purchasing power parity suggests that international price ratios for identical goods should approximate nominal exchange rates for the currencies in which the prices are denominated. Deviations of the price ratios from exchange rates can occur for a number of reasons and mixed evidence has been recorded for how long those deviations last. Empirical evidence for international restaurant prices in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico confirms that menu item price ratios are strongly correlated with the peso/dollar exchange rate. An earlier exploratory study of eight individual products also indicated that half-life deviations in this market are very short. This study utilizes additional data from a larger and more extensive sample to examine if the prior results are confirmed.