Quantifying the benefits of entry into local phone service

Local telecommunications competition was an important goal of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. We evaluate the consumer welfare effects of entry into residential local telephone service in New York State using household‐level data from September 1999 to March 2003. We address the prevalence of nonlinear tariffs by developing a discrete/continuous demand model that allows for service bundling and unobservable provider quality. We find that the average subscriber to the entrants' services gains a monthly equivalent of $2.33, or 6.2% of her bill, in welfare from competition. These gains accrue primarily from firm differentiation and new plan introductions rather than from price effects.     

U.S. Monetary Policy and Herding: Evidence from Commodity Markets

Atlantic Economic Journal - This paper investigates the presence of herding behavior across a spectrum of commodities (i.e., agricultural, energy, precious metals, and metals) futures prices...     

How Strategic Focus Relates to the Delivery of Leadership Training and Development

Despite progress in the development of leadership development models over recent years, these models fail to account for the differentiation in leadership training and development (LTD) practices found between organizations. We conducted an exploratory, multiple case study of formal leadership training and development in 10 organizations, in different business sectors in the United Kingdom. We show that the strategic focus of LTD was shaped by the business goals pursued by these 10 organizations. We also found the strategic focus of LTD to be a broad contingency factor differentiated by level of impact, which then influenced the pattern of LTD delivery. The findings offer support for a contingency perspective in explaining how leadership training and development is configured in differing organizational contexts. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Explaining Bank Productivity in Ghana

The objective of this paper is to examine productivity changes among Ghanaian banks. The Malmquist productivity index is employed to estimate total factor productivity changes and its components on a panel of 18 banks from 2003 to 2011. The results indicate that productivity growth was attributable to the catch‐up effect of efficiency changes. We also find productivity growth across three categories of bank size to be driven by efficiency changes. From a panel regression analysis, we identify size, concentration, income diversification and risk as the factors that explain productivity differences among Ghanaian banks. Recommendations for improving bank productivity are derived from the results. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Retailing Post-1992

This article examines the attitudes of the UK's leading retail operations to the establishment of the EC's internal market, planned for 1992, and to expansion within that market.     

Integration in European retail banking: Evidence from savings and lending rates to non-financial corporations

The aim of this paper is to investigate the integration process in the European Union retail banking sector during the period 2003–2011, by analysing deposit and lending rates to non-financial corporations. An important contribution of the paper is the application of the recently developed Phillips and Sul (2007a) panel convergence methodology which has not hitherto been employed in this area. This method analyses the degree as well as the speed of convergence, identifies the presence of club formation, and measures the behaviour of each country's transition path relative to the panel average. In addition, this is the first empirical paper that analyses the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on the European retail banking integration process. The empirical results point to the presence of convergence in all deposit and lending rates to non-financial corporations up to 2007. In contrast, the null of convergence is rejected in all deposit and credit markets after the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. Although we still find slow convergence in a few sub-clusters of countries, the transition paths become very divergent, with the credit market being far more heterogeneous than the savings market.     

Emotional intelligence and its relationship to transformational leadership and key project manager competences

Key dimensions of project manager behaviors considered to be associated with successful project outcomes have included both appropriate collaborative behaviors and transformational leadership. More recently, emotional intelligence has been suggested as a unique area of individual differences that is likely to underpin sets of behaviors in this area. Based on a sample of 67 UK project managers, it was found that emotional intelligence ability measures and empathy explained additional variance in the project manager competences of teamwork, attentiveness, and managing conflict, and the transformational leadership behaviors of idealized influence and individualized consideration, after controlling for cognitive ability and personality.