Occupational health: offering a spectrum of services

Hospitals must continue to explore ways in which to meet the needs of the employer market. As health care costs (workers' compensation and otherwise) account for a larger portion of a company's total expense dollars, the employer will continue to have a greater voice in how those dollars are expended. Hospitals and occupational health programs that recognize this fact will not only survive, they will prosper.     

Does size matter? The influence of large clients on office-level auditor reporting decisions

Large clients create an economic dependence that may cause auditors to compromise their independence and report favorably to retain valuable clients. Economic dependence is measured as a client's size relative to the size of the office that contracts for the audit and issues the audit report. We find no evidence economic dependence causes Big Five auditors to report more favorably for larger clients in their offices. However, larger clients also pose greater litigation risk, and we do find that Big 5 auditors report more conservatively for larger clients, suggesting that reputation protection dominates auditor behavior.     

The Determinants of State-Level Antitrust Activity

While there has been a considerable literature exploring the determinants of antitrust enforcement in the United States, these studies have been based either on aggregate federal enforcement data over time (exploring cyclical influences) or cross-industry studies, usually for a single year or aggregated over several years. What has never been investigated is the pattern of state-level antitrust litigation. This is somewhat surprising, as this has been a major activity of many state attorneys general. In this paper, we explain state antitrust activity across states, examining a number of the economic and political determinants that have been proposed in the literature.     

Screening item effects in estimating the prevalence of nascent entrepreneurs

The use of human population surveys to estimate the prevalence of nascent entrepreneurs has become a major feature of both longitudinal studies of the firm creation process, such as the US Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) research program, as well as cross-national comparisons, as reflected in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) initiative. The basic procedure has been to use interview screening items to locate individuals that may be considered candidate nascent entrepreneurs; other criteria are then used to identify those considered active nascent entrepreneurs. In these human population surveys, little attention has been paid to the potential impact of variations in wording in the initial screening items, either across time in the same language or in different languages, on the final prevalence rates. Analysis of 134 independent samples in the US over the 1993–2006 period, where different screening items were employed, indicates a major impact of item wording. Once adjustments to account for item variation were made, there was no statistically significant change in the prevalence of active nascent entrepreneurs, from 5 to 6 per 100 over the 1998–2006 period. This pattern of temporal stability is consistent with three other national programs measuring U.S. new firm creation activity.

When is a Firm Born? Alternative Criteria and Consequences

There are a number of ways to determine the birth date of a new firm. These include the date of a start-up venture’s initial transactions, initial registry listing, initial labor input, and initial profits. Utilizing the responses from the second Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) cohort, it appears that different criteria for a firm’s birth date are associated with substantial differences in the proportion of start-ups that became new firms, the time required to become a new firm, survival following a new firm birth, and the provision of new jobs. This variation may help explain some inconsistent research findings related to firm births.     

Trade Liberalisation and Capital Spending by US Manufacturers

This is the first paper to study the impact of long‐term tariff reductions on capital spending by US manufacturers. We investigate fluctuations in investment for approximately 400 different four‐digit industries during the period 1974–2005. Our results indicate that the dismantling of tariff and quota protection has had a stimulatory effect on US manufacturing investment, despite the relatively low average tariff rate that existed at the start of our sample period. However, our findings reveal that reductions in input tariffs rather than output tariffs were the source of this effect, suggesting that better access to foreign inputs rather than increased foreign competition at the output level served as the primary stimulus for increased US manufacturing investment.     

Doing Bad to Feel Better? An Investigation of Within- and Between-Person Perceptions of Counterproductive Work Behavior as a Coping Tactic

Employee counterproductive work behavior (CWB, e.g., theft, production deviance, interpersonal abuse) is costly to organizations and those who work within them. Evidence suggests that employees are motivated to engage in CWB because they believe that these behaviors will make them feel better in response to negative workplace events. However, research has yet to consider the situational and individual factors that shape the extent to which employees view CWB in such a manner. In order to provide insight into the decision-making process surrounding the use of CWB as a coping strategy, this study leverages coping theory to examine the factors (both situational/within-person and individual/between-person) that contribute to employees’ beliefs that CWBs will be instrumental for emotion regulation aims in response to workplace stressors. In a repeated measures scenario-based study of 297 employees, we found that individuals’ perceived coping instrumentalities for CWBs are a function of the controllability and source of the stressor as well as a more stable learned response to stressful situations at work.