School Grants a Bar to Consumer Sovereignty

Is funding by schools a stage towards or an obstacle to payment by parents? Marjorie Seldon, Chairman of FEVER, maintains that, once the finance is controlled by schools, they will not readily agree to its transfer to parent-consumers.     

Reviews

TRANSPORT AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY.

Hepworth, M. and Oucatel, K. 1991: Transport in the Information Age: Wheels and Wires. London: Belhaven Press, £39.00 cloth.

THE SOUTH EAST AND EUROPE.

South East Economic Development Strategy, 1991: Continental Shift: The South East and Europe's Single Market. Stevenage: SEEDS,

£35.00.

DEFENCE CONVERSION.

Fife Regional Council and Fife Enterprise, 1991: A Study of the Fife Defence Industry. Glenrothes: Fife Regional Council, no price stated.

URBAN POLICY IN THE UK AND THE USA IN THE

1990S. Hambleton R. 1991: Another Chance for Cities? Issues for Urban Policy in the 1990s. Papers in Planning Research No 126, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Wales College at Cardiff, PO Box 906, Cardiff CF1 3Y, £6.00 paper.

Nyden, P.W. and Wiewel, W. (eds) 1991: Challenging Uneven Development: An Urban Agenda for the 1990s. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Clavel P. and Wiewel, W. (eds) 1991: Harold Washington and the Neighbourhoods: Progressive City Government in Chicago 1983-1987. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. $16.00 paper.

THE PARTNERSHIP DEBATE: CONTRACT ARRANGEMENTS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND VOLUNTARY SECTORS.

Gutch, R. 1992: Contracting Lessons from the US. London: NCVO

Publications, £5.00 voluntary organisations, £10.00 others.

THE FAST PROGRAMME.

Cooley, M. (ed) 1989: European Competitiveness in the 21st Century (A contribution to the “FAST”

proposal for an R&D programme on “Human work in advanced technological environments"). Commission of the European Communities. No price stated.     

Beyond rationality

Our most revered models of business processes are highly rational. But is this how business really works? Only in part. Many nonrational considerations are factors in promotions, client relations, or decision making. Managers and educational institutions should be aware of this fact.     

Cross-functional interface and disruption in CRM projects: Is marketing from Venus and information systems from Mars?

Because of the inherently cross-functional nature of customer relationship management, the use of cross-functional teams in CRM project implementations is virtually mandatory to achieve critical marketing and sales objectives. This study examines the effects of functional membership as well as team and individual performance evaluations on project members' perceptions of disruption and cooperation during CRM project implementations. The results show that IS project members are more likely to perceive internal volatility and manifest interfunctional conflict and less likely to perceive interfunctional cooperation than project members from either sales/marketing or general management. We also find that team performance evaluations are negatively associated with disruption and positively associated with cooperation, while individual evaluations are negatively associated with internal volatility.     

Predicting Failure of Savings & Loan Associations

Early-warning systems are intended to provide regulators with identification of problem institutions sooner than is possible with the present system of call reports and periodic on-site examinations. Given an earlier indication of potential problems, resources can be focused on those institutions most in need of monitoring, thus potentially reducing both the number of failures and FSLIC financial assistance in the remaining failures. While some early-warning systems were developed in the mid-1970s for use by commercial bank regulators, very little attention has been focused on developing similar systems for the thrift industry. To address this issue, multiple discriminant analysis was used to develop an early-warning system for savings and loan associations in the Boston district of the Federal Home Loan Bank system. The results suggest that use of this model would have given signals of impending trouble well before the actual failure occurred. Consequently, an early-warning system could provide information to regulators sooner, permitting scarce resources to be allocated more effectively. In addition, earlier intervention could reduce the amount of FSLIC financial assistance required. By intervening earlier, FSLIC may be able to arrest the failure-promoting activities in which the association is engaged.     

A note on the use of industry-relative ratios in bankruptcy prediction

The potential for industry-relative financial ratios to improve the prediction of firms in financial distress motivated this comparison of model specifications based on either unadjusted or industry-relative ratios. Both specifications yielded stable parameter estimates over the time periods examined. However, the industry-relative specification appeared to add incremental information not contained in the model based on the unadjusted financial ratios; the converse case did not hold. In addition, with the industry-relative specification, ex post forecast accuracy was slightly improved relative to the ex ante forecast, while with the unadjusted model specification, ex post forecast accuracy declined from that obtained ex ante.     

A Bayesian Approach to Understanding Time Series Data

This paper explores the use of Bayesian models to analyze time series data. The Bayesian approach produces output that can be readily understood by actuaries and included in their own experience studies. We illustrate this Bayesian approach by analyzing U.S. unemployment rates, a macroeconomic time series. Understanding time series of macroeconomic variables can help actuaries in pricing and reserving their products. For example, a change in the level and/or variance of the unemployment series is of interest to actuaries, because its movement can explain a changing pattern of lapse rates of incidence rates. Our Bayesian analysis, based on models developed by McCulloch and Tsay (1993, 1994), allows for shifts in the level and in the error variance of a process. We develop a measure of model fit, based on the Akaike Information Criterion, that can be used in choosing between alternative models. Posterior prediction intervals for the fitted values are also created to pictorially show the range of paths that could result from the choice of a particular model.