Selection in the Workplace: Whose Rights Prevail?

The selection process involves a very difficult balancing act for employers who have to weigh the rights and concerns of applicants, current employees, the organization itself, and society as a whole. Each of these perspectives brings with it its own set of concerns and issues that need to be considered in the broader hiring arena. Applicants assert the right to be treated fairly while being evaluated for a position; current employees assert the right to productive coworkers who will not harm them on the job, organizations assert the right to hire qualified employees while remaining cognizant of the legal issues that surround the hiring process; and society as a whole asserts the right to a process that benefits the greater good. But, with each of these groups pursuing these rights, an important question arises as to whose rights prevail when there is a conflict. This paper, through the use of a true scenario, explores the difficult balancing act between rights and concerns of applicants, current employees, organizations, and society as a whole and discusses whose rights should take priority when they conflict.     

Entrepreneurship Research Today and Beyond: Hidden in Plain Sight!

The field of entrepreneurship and its research has reached an critical and invigorating juncture. Researchers are challenged to be comprehensive, varied, and innovative in their approaches to the study of entrepreneurship. New and emerging future research must met this challenge to impact and sustain our complex world in which entrepreneurship plays such a vital role. The Entrepreneurship Research Journal provides a new and exciting venue for researchers to share and interact among their respective disciplines in new and different ways and to meet the research challenges now and in the future.     

Towards a differentiated modeling of origin effects in hedonic analysis: An application to auction prices of specialty coffee

Origin matters. This has been shown by numerous studies using either discrete choice or hedonic approaches to derive implicit prices for origin as a product attribute. In most of the hedonic studies, intercept dummies were introduced for specific regional origins and statistically significant coefficients of those variables were seen as an indication of either a superior or inferior reputation, compared to products from other origins. We argue that hedonic pricing models of this type may be too simple to detect the true origin effects if assessments of a product’s sensory quality are available and interact with prior beliefs about reputation. Based on a supply-and-demand framework to explain auction prices, a reduced-form hedonic pricing model is suggested that includes intercept- as well as slope-dummy effects of the regional origin. Because reputation and the objective product quality are particularly important for markets of differentiated, high-quality foods and beverages, we analyze electronic auction markets for specialty coffees. The findings for the Cup of Excellence data reveal that it is important to distinguish reputation, sensory quality, and their interaction as determinants of coffee auction prices, as well as varying origin impacts across market segments.     

The role of banks in the monetary policy transmission in the new EU member states

This paper aims to enrich the knowledge on the monetary policy transmission mechanism in the new European Union member states with empirical evidence on the impact of monetary policy on bank lending. This work is based on individual bank balance sheet data and covers a sample of commercial banks from 10 Central and Eastern European countries over the period 1998–2006. We follow the approach suggested by Kashyap and Stein (1995) and control for cross-section heterogeneities among banks. The results indicate the existence of asymmetric adjustment of loan quantities with respect to specific bank characteristics. Our findings indicate the existence of a functioning bank-lending channel through small banks. This applies in the short-run to several, but not all, of the analysed banks.     

The exchange rate pass-through in the new EU member states

This paper aims to complete our understanding of the relationship between changes in nominal effective exchange rates and prices in the new EU member states. I investigate the exchange rate pass-through to import, producer and consumer prices for ten Central and Eastern European countries with quarterly data from January 1996 to December 2011. In a first step, the pass-through estimates are derived from a dynamic panel data model through the generalized method of moments. A statistically significant exchange rate pass-through to consumer, producer and import prices is found, both in the short and long run. In a second step, I proceed to an individual analysis, country by country, and find support for an increased heterogeneity in the exchange rate pass-through estimates. In a third step, I assess the drivers of the estimated exchange rate pass-through coefficients and find support for a significant impact of exchange rate volatility, inflation volatility, import dependence, and the output gap, as well as the global outlook.     

Law of large numbers and large deviations for dependent risks

We analyse the mathematical structure of models for large risk portfolios, especially for credit risk models. These risk portfolios are modelled using a multivariate mixture model for the dependence structure between the risks. The dependence structures are characterized by latent variables Θ, which play the role of systematic risks. We show that, depending on the choice of the distribution of Θ, there are different asymptotic behaviours for the aggregated risk portfolio, namely law of large numbers/central limit theorem behaviour and large deviation behaviour.     

Emergency department: improving patient satisfaction

A process improvement initiative aimed at decreasing emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) and thereby improving patient satisfaction was implemented. Any attempt to improve ED LOS requires intense focus on the goal and involvement of many departments of the hospital. While the LOS targets were not met, decreasing the LOS to the achieved levels resulted in the highest levels of patient satisfaction ever achieved and sustained in the ED.     

Estimating the Value of Proximity to Water,When Ceteris Really Is Paribus

Proximity to water is appreciated by households. Hedonic analyses that try to measure the value of this amenity are potentially biased by omitted variables because locations close to water may be selected by households with higher incomes who construct more luxury houses. Because it is difficult to observe all the relevant characteristics, the coefficient for proximity to water may be biased upwards. We circumvent this problem by exploiting a specific characteristic of the Dutch system of planned residential development: often a number of exactly similar houses are constructed close to each other. By comparing the values of such identical houses, we can measure the effect of proximity to water under almost ideal circumstances. Introduction of these fixed effects lowers the estimated impact of this amenity, thereby confirming the conjectured presence of an omitted variable bias.