The role of experience in six sigma project success: An empirical analysis of improvement projects

Recent learning-by-doing research highlights the importance of examining multiple measures of experience and their relationship to the performance of work teams. Our paper studies the role of individual experience, organizational experience, team leader experience, and experience working together on a team (team familiarity) in the context of improvement teams. To do so, we analyze successful and failed six sigma improvement team projects at a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer with multiple business groups. Such improvement project teams focus on deliberate learning, which differs from the primary focus of work teams.Our analysis uses archival data generated by these improvement project teams over a six year time span. Of the four experience variables we study, we find that team leader experience exhibits the strongest relationship with project success, followed by organizational experience. Further, in contrast to prior-related research on work teams, we find no relationship between individual experience or team familiarity and project success beyond that explained by team leader and organizational experience. These results suggest that a well-developed and deployed structured problem-solving process—characteristic of effective six sigma deployments—may reduce the importance of team familiarity in the context of improvement teams.     

DELAYED OVERSHOOTING AND REAL EXCHANGE RATE PERSISTENCE IN AN IMPERFECT INFORMATION MODEL

Recent studies have pointed out that monetary shocks in sticky price models cannot generate real exchange rates that exhibit delayed overshooting and are highly persistent. This paper demonstrates that such exchange rate dynamics can be generated by incorporating incomplete information about the true nature of the monetary shock into a standard New Keynesian model of a small open economy.     

Extent of diversification and company performance: The New Zealand evidence

This paper confirms the relative superiority of related-diversification in terms of the financial performance of New Zealand companies, companies which are much smaller and less diverse than those which normally feature in this literature. To facilitate comparisons with other studies, financial performance is measured in three ways: return on equity; return on assets; and sales growth. Other independent variables controlled for are company size; risk; leverage; technological opportunity; and industry concentration. The effective rates of protection afforded manufacturing industries (export subsidies and import tariffs) are also confirmed as having had some positive bearing on company performance.     

Leader-member exchange,employee performance,and work outcomes: an empirical study in the Chinese context

In this study, we employed the multidimensional view of LMX (LMX-MDM) to develop a model that captured different antecedents and outcomes of task and contextual performance. We tested this model with a sample drawn from subjects from the People's Republic of China. The results indicated that the affect dimension of LMX-MDM was positively associated with task performance and contextual performance. The contribution dimension of LMX-MDM was positively related to the job dedication dimension of contextual performance. Supervisory ratings of the task performance and the interpersonal facilitation dimension of contextual performance predicted the promotability of subordinates, and task performance influenced subordinates' intention to quit. Limitations and future research are discussed.     

Inferences about the parameters of a time series model with changing variance

Summary We consider the problem of making inferences about the parameters of a time series model when there is the possibility of a discrete variance change at an unknown time point. For this we obtain the posterior distributions of the parameters and of the variance ratio.     

The limits on bond financing of government deficits under pptimal fiscal policy

Limits on perpetual bond financing of deficits without increased taxation or inflation are analyzed by juxtaposing the bond creation rate against the interest rate on bonds and the economy's growth rate. Sargent and Wallace (1981) and Barro (1976) argue that the bond creation rate must be smaller than the economy's growth rate. McCallum (1984) finds that the bond creation rate can exceed the economy's growth rate but must be smaller than the interest rate. McCallum's conclusion obtains under lump-sum taxation. We show that if lump-sum taxation is not feasible the bond creation rate cannot exceed the economy's growth rate. It is not possible to substitute bond financing for distortionary taxation in order to improve the level of welfare indefinitely.     

Is Marriage Poisonous? Are Relationships Taxing? An Analysis of the Male Marital Wage Differential in Denmark

Differences in the pattern of marriage, cohabitation, childbirth, and intrahousehold specialization between the United States and Denmark, as well as a rich, register-based panel sample of about 35,000 young Danish men, are exploited to shed light on the nature of the male marital wage differential. The results indicate that failing to control for cohabitation can seriously bias estimates of the marital wage differential, that marriage is a more selective state than cohabitation, and that specialization may explain some of the marital wage differential in the United States but not in Denmark. In Denmark, by contrast, there is evidence that fatherhood has a significant impact on earnings.