Antecedents of employee involvement with the comparative model

Instead of discussing employee’s performance that previous researchers emphasized in their studies on the work behavior of employees, this study analyzes employee involvement from the viewpoint of their emotional labor, organizational culture, and the intimacy relationships between employees and their supervisors. Large-scale financial holding conglomerates in Taiwan and subsidiaries of Hong Kong-based conglomerates were selected as the populations for the research. The result of the empirical analysis indicates that emotional labor has a significantly positive effect on the involvement of employees; the stronger the intimacy relationship between employees and their supervisors is, the higher the employee involvement will be, strong culture has a significantly negative effect on the involvement of employees, and there is a significant difference in a number of dimensions among some Chinese enterprises in Taiwan & Hong Kong. This study has the following characteristics in comparison with the previous studies: (1) The theoretical structure of this study is formed based on an integrated prospect of internal organizational structure, personal factors of employees and their interpersonal relationship; (2) the study focuses on a comparative study of regional enterprises, which was seldom emphasized in literature; (3) the study uses the Non-Linear Fuzzy Neural Network Model and multivariate analysis approach as tools for the research and may contribute more to the theory in this field.     

The deregulation of international trucking in the European Union: form and effect

We describe the regulatory regime under which international trucking operated in Western Europe until the mid-1980s, the deregulatory process that followed, and the effect of this deregulation. We find that deregulation had a large positive effect on the growth of international trucking. We also find that shippers shifted toward more outsourcing of their trucking needs, but this occurred to an even greater extent in local and national road transport. We conclude that other factors beside the deregulation of international trucking affected the organization of the industry at the time. Finally, despite concerns voiced by member countries, we find no evidence that deregulation disproportionately favored carriers of countries that were initially more (or less) involved in international trucking, nor that it has favored low-wage countries.      

The economics of university computer provision: a case study in public production and cost

Is the provision of computer services in British universities provided efficiently? The pattern of expenditure in the last twenty years is explored and a study is made of current spending across universities. Variations in unit computing costs and the output of computing expreience is studied for British universities using conventional cost and production function estimation. In addition the three-demensional production surface for the output of computer provision is estimated using distance weighted techniques. This case study has more general applicability to other areas of public production and cost.     

On the multiplicity of option prices under CEV with positive elasticity of variance

The discounted stock price under the Constant Elasticity of Variance model is not a martingale when the elasticity of variance is positive. Two expressions for the European call price then arise, namely the price for which put-call parity holds and the price that represents the lowest cost of replicating the call option’s payoffs. The greeks of European put and call prices are derived and it is shown that the greeks of the risk-neutral call can substantially differ from standard results. For instance, the relation between the call price and variance may become non-monotonic. Such unfamiliar behavior then might yield option-based tests for the potential presence of a bubble in the underlying stock price.     

They're not employees, they're people

In this essay, business thinker Peter Drucker examines the changing dynamics of the workforce--in particular, the need for organizations to take just as much care and responsibility when managing temporary and contract workers as they do with their traditional employees. Two fast-growing trends are demanding that business leaders pay more attention to employee relations, Drucker says. First is the rise of the temporary, or contract, workers; 8 million to 10 million temp workers are placed each day worldwide. And they're not just filling in at reception desks. Today, there are temp suppliers for every kind of job, all the way up to CEO. Second, a growing number of businesses are outsourcing their employee relations to professional employee organizations (PEOs)--third-party groups that handle the ever mounting administrative tasks associated with managing a company's employees. (Managers can easily spend up to one-quarter of their time on employee-related rules, regulations, and paperwork.) Driving these trends, Drucker observes, is the shift from a dependency on manual labor to create wealth and jobs to a dependency on specialization and knowledge. Leaders are increasingly trying to keep up with the needs of many small groups of product or service experts within their companies. Temps and PEOs free up leaders to focus on the business rather than on HR files and paperwork. But if organizations outsource those functions, they need to be careful not to damage relationship with their people in the process, Drucker concludes. After all, developing talent is business's most important task--the sine qua non of competition in a knowledge economy.     

WHAT CAN CHANGES IN STRUCTURAL FACTORS TELL US ABOUT UNEMPLOYMENT IN EUROPE?

This paper examines the impact of temporal variation in labour market institutions and other structural factors on unemployment in Europe. A system comprising a labour demand and a wage equation is estimated on pooled time‐series data for the six largest EU countries for the 1980s and 1990s. The results suggest that changes in regional mismatch, trade union density and the ratio between consumer and producer prices are positively associated with structural unemployment. This result is robust to a wide variety of different specifications. No consistent role is found for other institutional factors (such as social security benefits, employment security and minimum wage).     

Technological innovation and real investment booms and busts

We investigate why new, high-risk technologies can attract excessive and often unprofitable investment. We develop an equilibrium model in which rational, risk-averse agents overinvest in a risky technology, possibly to the point that its expected return is negative. Overinvestment results from relative wealth concerns which arise endogenously from the imperfect tradability of future endowments. Competition over future consumption leads to an indirect utility for wealth with “keeping up with the Joneses” properties that can induce herding. Because overinvestment increases with the risk of the technology, our model can explain why new, risky technological innovations may promote investment bubbles.     

A New Typology for Economic Sectors with a view to Policy Implications

This paper is an attempt to tease out a typology of economic sectors based on a systems approach to innovation and economic growth that may be useful for policy analysis. The typology explored here revolves around novel products rather than ethereal knowledge-producing entities. This insight goes back to Allyn Young (1928) and Joseph Schumpeter (1934) who argued that the introduction of new goods was the engine of economic growth. More precisely, our typology of sectors focuses on novel products which are efficiency-enhancing within and between sectors through the market mechanism. The scheme revolves around the relationship between 'Enabling' and 'Recipient' sectors (which gives the typology its name: ER), and offers a lens for viewing and interpreting a substantive part of the mechanics of modern economic growth. The last part of the paper briefly discusses a few immediate policy implications, although it has the potential for greater use and value in this regard.     

R&D employment effects of financial slack generated by R&D tax exemption: The importance of firm-level contingencies

This paper focuses on R&D employment effects due to financial slack generated by an R&D tax exemption scheme in Belgium. The tax exemption is granted without firm-level requirements, which facilitates testing firm-level contingencies on the influence of the generated financial slack. We find that R&D employment effects increase with the level of the R&D tax exemption related to financial slack resources and that this positive relation is more outspoken for older firms and for firms with an intermediate share of R&D tax exemptions in the overall mix of R&D policy support. No effects are found for firm size and its R&D intensity. These findings suggest targeting the R&D tax exemption support according to firm characteristics to obtain longer term R&D employment effects. The focus on R&D employment adds to the literature on the evaluation of R&D policies which is largely oriented toward R&D expenditure and innovation outputs.