Software to support business teams

Organizations are increasingly using the business team concept to gain competitive advantage. Collaboration support software is gaining acceptance as a viable tool among both researchers and practitioners, and an opportunity exists to investigate the specific needs of teams: users working in longitudinal time frames on a variety of tasks. In this article, team software requirements are first derived from a theoretical perspective: office automation and task literature are used to identify a set of domain-independent individual tasks. Group process literature is then used to develop a set of collaborative tasks composed of these individual task components. These individual and collaborative tasks are aggregated with team task and communication support requirements to develop requirements for an integrated software environment that effectively supports business teams. Design considerations for a comprehensive team support system are outlined, a prototype implementation is described, and project contributions and key future research considerations are summarized.     

How Taxes and Welfare Benefits Affect Work Incentives: A Life‐Cycle Perspective

Personal taxes and benefits affect the incentive to work over the life cycle by altering income–age profiles, insuring against adverse shocks and changing the returns to human capital. In this paper, we show how a life‐cycle perspective alters our impression of how the UK tax and benefit system affects women's work incentives. Given that actual longitudinal data conflate age effects, cohort effects and policy effects, and, in the UK, are not available covering the full life cycle, we use simulated data produced by a rich, dynamic structural model of female labour supply and human capital that incorporates family formation and fertility. We find that individuals experience considerable variability in work incentives across life that outweighs the variability across individuals. Changes in the presence of children and a partner, as well as the level of any partner's earnings, are key to explaining these patterns: work incentives vary dramatically depending on family composition and the earnings of any partner, especially for the lower‐skilled, and most women experience a number of different family types during the course of their lives.     

Research and Technology Commercialization

This paper introduces the special themed section on organizational interactions involving universities and firms that result in the commercialization of research and technology. Our objective is to shed light on some of the most vexing, yet under‐researched predicaments research institutions encounter, despite their best efforts to advance commercialization. First, we synthesize and extend recent studies, including the papers in the special themed section. Next, we develop a taxonomy of modes of commercialization. Specifically, we consider internal approaches, quasi‐internal approaches (e.g. incubators), university research parks, regional clusters, academic spin‐offs and start‐ups, licensing, contract research and consultancy, corporate venture capital, and open science and innovation. We also identify areas for further research at the individual (e.g. heterogeneity of entrepreneurial teams and experience; incentives), organizational and intra‐university (e.g. corporate governance; nature of growth strategies; relationships with trading partners; boundary spanning activities) and technology levels (e.g. institutional context; reconfiguration of technology; valuation of technology).     

Corporate Governance in Emerging Economies: A Review of the Principal–Principal Perspective

abstract    Instead of traditional principal–agent conflicts espoused in most research dealing with developed economies, principal–principal conflicts have been identified as a major concern of corporate governance in emerging economies. Principal–principal conflicts between controlling shareholders and minority shareholders result from concentrated ownership, extensive family ownership and control, business group structures, and weak legal protection of minority shareholders. Such principal–principal conflicts alter the dynamics of the corporate governance process and, in turn, require remedies different from those that deal with principal–agent conflicts. This article reviews and synthesizes recent research from strategy, finance, and economics on principal–principal conflicts with an emphasis on their institutional antecedents and organizational consequences. The resulting integration provides a foundation upon which future research can continue to build.     

Regime-switching volatility of six East Asian emerging markets

This paper investigates regime-switching behaviour in the return-generating processes of six East Asian emerging stock markets over the period from 1970 to 2004 and examines the specific characteristics of each regime by utilizing Markov-switching variance models. The results show very strong evidence of more than one regime in each of these stock markets. In addition, the conditional probabilities of each regime derived from the model provide mixed evidence regarding the impact of financial liberalization on return volatility.     

Reinsurance and corporate taxation in the United Kingdom life insurance industry

There are two main tax-related arguments regarding the use of reinsurance – the income volatility reduction and the income level enhancement arguments. The income volatility reduction argument contends that firms facing convex tax schedules have incentives to hedge in order to reduce the volatility of their annual taxable income and thereby lower expected tax liabilities [Smith, C.W., Stulz, R.M., 1985. Optimal hedging policies. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 19, 127–140]. The income level enhancement argument, advanced by Adiel [Adiel, R., 1996. Reinsurance and the management of regulatory ratios and taxes in the property–casualty insurance industry. Journal of Accounting and Economics 22, 207–240], is more specific to hedging via reinsurance. This perspective holds that reinsurance enhances current reported earnings via the receipt of reinsurance commissions and so increases tax liabilities. Consequently, insurance firms with high marginal tax rates should use less reinsurance than those with low marginal tax rates if tax matters. Prior studies using data on financial derivatives have produced mixed results on the validity of the first argument, while Adiel (1996) finds the second argument insignificant in his study of the use of reinsurance by a sample of United States (US) property–liability insurance firms. This study tests the two tax-related arguments using 1992–2001 data for a sample of United Kingdom (UK) life insurance firms. We find that UK life insurers with low before-planning marginal tax rates tend to use more reinsurance; in contrast, tax convexity is found to have no significant impact on the purchase of reinsurance and so the volatility-reduction argument is not supported.     

A Different Look at Commercial Real Estate Returns

Commercial real estate makes up a relatively small percentage of most institutional portfolios, even though the existing literature has consistently reported attractive risk-return characteristics that would suggest much larger allocations. This discrepancy has been explained by a perceived lack of comparability between return series calculated for real estate and those calculated for other asset classes. Just as investors actively involved in the futures markets do not consider individual common stocks to be traded continuously, those active in the stock market do not consider real estate to be traded continuously. In both cases, adjustments to reported returns are necessary to achieve a degree of comparability. This study makes such adjustments, using sales data from properties that help comprise the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries / Frank Russell Company (NCREIF/FRC) Index to generate a "transaction-driven" commercial real estate return series. Examination of the risk-return characteristics of this series shows that it is quite different from traditionally reported real estate return series and far more consistent with risk-return characteristics that have been reported for other asset classes.     

An investigation into blood donation intentions among non‐donors

• In broad terms, the donation of blood along with organ and bone marrow donation is considered to be the ultimate act of humanity involving a voluntary and anonymous exchange between two people of a life saving commodity. Yet motivating people to donate blood is a significantly difficult task. The aim of this paper is to use the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) to examine non‐donors on the basis of their likely intention to donate blood in the future and to identify barriers on these more favourable non‐donors. This exploratory research finds that subjective norm, perceived behavioural control and time related barriers are related to intent to donate by current non‐donors. Differences between higher and lower intention donors are also explored.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Product-market strategy and underwriting performance in the United Kingdom’s property–casualty insurance market

Drawing on a framework from the organizational economics literature, we utilize a panel data design to examine empirically the effect of motor insurance and liability insurance business on the overall underwriting performance of insurers operating in the United Kingdom’s (UK) property–casualty insurance market. We find that participation in liability insurance contributes positively to underwriting performance, whereas motor insurance is associated with inferior underwriting performance. Additionally, we find that higher reinsurance ratio is associated with better underwriting performance, but reduced profit margins. Our results show that higher leverage too is associated with better underwriting performance. We conclude that our results could have potentially important commercial and/or policy implications.