US firms' evaluation of employee credentials in international business

This paper updates a 1991 survey of salaries and careers among US-based international business professionals and managers. These employees typically offer a high level of both international and functional qualifications, implying that aspiring workers need substantial credentials to compete in this market. International credentials directly increase salaries only modestly, suggesting a rough balance of supply and demand for these qualifications. Larger salary premiums are commanded by functional specialties utilizing new information technology. Comparisons of the 1999 and 1991 surveys document partial convergence in employers' treatment of men and women but remaining 'glass ceiling' barriers to women's advancement.     

Mortgage Credit Availability, Housing Starts and the Integration of Mortgage and Capital Markets: New Evidence Using Linear Feedback

This paper employs linear feedback measures to examine the relationship between housing starts and the availability of mortgage credit. Estimates are obtained using monthly data with samples ending with May 1978 and beginning with June 1978. The results indicate that mortgage credit availability contributed significantly to short-run cycles in housing starts in the earlier sample. Such feedback is considerably smaller, however, in the later sample. The results suggest the housing finance sector has become integrated with the overall capital market as the result of the deregulation of thrift deposit rates and the development of the securitized mortgage market.     

Changing a management information system: managing resistance by attending to the rights and responsibilities of employees

The purpose of this article is to explore the human issues related to the redesign of a management information system. When a management information system is implemented or changed, the responsibilities of organizational members can be drastically altered. Employee resistance is one outcome of this process. However, resistance can be reduced, if not eliminated, by attending to the rights of employees through engagement in the active participation in all aspects of the implementation process — a position often overlooked by management. The reader is familiarized with components of the change process as well as characteristics of innovation adoption encountered during redesign of the computer-based information system. Further, behavioral strategies are provided for overcoming the resistance frequently encountered during change.     

How Varying Levels of Knowledge and Motivation Affect Search and Confidence during Consideration and Choice

Using a pull-down menu search technique, we study how ability (knowledge level) and motivation (accountability) interact with decision phase (consideration vs. choice) to affect consumers' search costs (amount of search), benefit (confidence) and efficiency (benefit for a given amount of search). We find that consumers adapt their search strategies across phases and that these adaptations occur in different ways and at different rates for consumers with different levels of knowledge and accountability.     

Energy use in convenience foods : Tracing inputs from primary through final product

Ready-to-heat or ready-to-eat foods do not necessarily take more energy than similar foods prepared at home. Less waste and more efficient ovens can give the processor an energy advantage. Tracing these foods from fishing or agriculture through home use shows that a major energy saving could be made by substituting vegetable proteins for animal or fish proteins. Reduced use of conventional home ovens and freezers would also make a contribution to energy conservation. Metal packages, grocery shopping and energy to make processing machinery add significantly to the total energy input only in certain circumstances.     

Reward strategies for attracting,evaluating, and retaining professionals

A typology of the design of organizational reward systems that explicitly addresses attraction, evaluation, and retention of valued professionals is offered within four cultural contexts: the Apathetic Culture, the Caring Culture, the Exacting Culture, and the Integrative Culture. The strategic design of reward systems is one of the most critical but least understood phenomena in corporate America today. The special case of the autonomy-seeking professional is discussed and implications for strategic reward system change efforts are made.     

Involuntary layoffs and rigid wages

This paper develops a model of the firm to explain rigid wages and involuntary layoffs as aspects of rational behavior under uncertainty. Although the two are related, rigid wages do not cause involuntary layoffs. Both are likely when the employees of an enterprise are organized to bargain collectively. It is the ability of union to win high and stable wages for some members, together with constraints on the differences between wages and marginal products in the short run, that translates downswings in product demand into involuntary dismissals.     

PRINClPLES IN THE VALUATION OF HUMAN CAPITAL

Human capital concepts and measures have been applied and misapplied to an increasing variety of economic problem areas, two of which are examined. One of these is measurement of human capital gains and losses through migration. First requirements here are specification of the gaining or losing entities and of the relevant welfare functions. Alternatives in these respects are outlined. It is then argued that an appropriately adapted Fisherian present-value assessment of human capital is normally the correct measure. Replacement costs are a legitimate substitute only for young migrants with little cumulated learning through experience and even then they have usually been fallaciously applied. Probability adjustments for migration and re-migration are required in both cost and present-value assessments of human capital effects of migration-relevant policy alternatives, but the nature of those adjustments differs with the measurement approach used. For longitudinal analysis of contributions of human capital to economic growth, all measures of human capital stocks are inappropriate. A first principle of such analysis is measurement of resource inputs as flows. A coordinate principle requires that disaggregation be carried as far as necessary to distinguish essentially homogeneous categories of labor inputs. Though a way of separating out the schooling versus on-the-job-experience components of human capital is illustrated, it requires some strong assumptions. Splitting men into abstracted human capital components is better avoided in growth analysis. Furthermore, categorization of labor-force sub-groups could equally well provide the basis for rate-of-return assessments of marginal changes in the pace of investments in humans. Such assessments would incorporate the main elements of capital theory except valuation of the capital asset itself. Ultimately, human resource measurements for use in major public policy decisions relating to either growth or migration (or both) must incorporate modifications or error components that allow for development phenomena that elude marginal assessments. Among developing countries especially, a consideration of educational diffusion processes and dynamic productivity scale effects, for example, could have critical measurement and policy implications.