Safety Reloaded: Lean Operations and High Involvement Work Practices for Sustainable Workplaces

Starting from the recent quest to investigate the human side of organizational sustainability, this study applies a variety of regression analyses to investigate the effects of Lean Operations, High Involvement Work Practices, and management behaviors on occupational safety. It tests and finds support for the hypotheses that Lean Production systems, High Involvement Work Practices, and two specific management behaviors—workers’ capability development (coaching and teaching of workers) and empowerment (autonomy and participation of workers in developing their own job standards)—positively affect occupational safety. Furthermore, empowering behaviors positively moderate the effect of Lean Operations on workers’ safety. The study bridges sustainable operations literature with theories related to the ethical side of safety management, sustainable HRM, ethical leadership, and empowerment. In doing so, it contributes to the understanding of occupational safety as constitutive aspect of organizational sustainability.     

EXPLICIT IMPLIED VOLATILITIES FOR MULTIFACTOR LOCAL‐STOCHASTIC VOLATILITY MODELS

We consider an asset whose risk‐neutral dynamics are described by a general class of local‐stochastic volatility models and derive a family of asymptotic expansions for European‐style option prices and implied volatilities. We also establish rigorous error estimates for these quantities. Our implied volatility expansions are explicit; they do not require any special functions nor do they require numerical integration. To illustrate the accuracy and versatility of our method, we implement it under four different model dynamics: constant elasticity of variance local volatility, Heston stochastic volatility, three‐halves stochastic volatility, and SABR local‐stochastic volatility.     

Preemption contests between groups

We consider a preemption game between competing groups; firms lobbying individually for their groups' interests provide an empirical example. Among symmetric groups, the first firm to take action bears an (unobserved) cost and wins the prize on behalf of its group. In equilibrium, the firm with the lowest cost takes action, but with delay. More competition and a smaller ratio of costs to benefits reduce delay. Firms in larger groups wait longer, but group action can occur earlier, as the probability of a low-cost firm is higher. Asymmetries in group size or strength of externalities also matter.     

Industrial policy and manufacturing targeting in the US: new methodological tools for strategic policy-making

The economic crisis has pushed several countries to adopt selective industrial policies to promote manufacturing and some selected strategic sectors. Despite this new activism, the process of defining strategic targets risks being carried out with poor rigour on a political level, setting governments up for failure. This paper discusses the notion of strategic sector and proposes a new methodology to increase transparency and effectiveness in the identification of what can be defined as ‘strategic’. Focusing on the analysis of the US manufacturing system, we develop a composite indicator – the Strategic Sector Index (SSI) – to rank manufacturing industries on the basis of their strategic significance. Furthermore, we apply an uncertainty analysis methodology to the SSI to evaluate the robustness of the ranking and to minimise the degree of policy-makers’ discretionality in influencing the results.     

On efficient partnership dissolution under ex post individual rationality

This paper studies ex post individually rational, efficient partnership dissolution in a setting with interdependent valuations. We derive a sufficient condition that ensures the existence of an efficient dissolution mechanism that satisfies Bayesian incentive compatibility, ex post budget balancedness, and ex post individual rationality. For equal-share partnerships, we show that our sufficient condition is satisfied for any symmetric type distribution whenever the interdependence in valuations is non-positive. This result improves former existence results, demonstrating that the stronger requirement of ex post individual rationality does not always rule out efficiency. We also show that if we allow for two-stage revelation mechanisms, in which agents report their realized payoffs from the allocation, as well as imposing penalties off the equilibrium path, efficient dissolution is always possible even when the interdependence is positive. We further discuss the possibility of efficient dissolution with ex post quitting rights.     

A general equilibrium analysis of corporate control and the stock market

This paper studies a general equilibrium model with an investor-controlled firm. Shareholders can vote on the firm??s production plan in an assembly if they dislike management??s decision. Prior to that they may trade shares on the stock market. Since stock market trades determine the distribution of votes, trading is strategic. There is always an equilibrium, where share trading leads to an ownership structure that supports competitive behavior. But there may also be equilibria, where monopolistic behavior prevails.     

Spatial price discrimination in the unidirectional Hotelling model with elastic demand

The unidirectional Hotelling model is extended to allow for elastic demand functions. A two-stage Bertrand-type model and a two-stage Cournot-type model are considered. If firms choose location and then set prices, agglomeration never arises; instead, if firms choose location and then set quantities, agglomeration arises at one endpoint of the segment when the transportation costs are low enough. Instead, when the transportation costs are high enough, a dispersed equilibrium arises in Cournot. The equilibrium distance between the firms is lower in Cournot than in Bertrand. When the transportation costs are high (low) the Bertrand equilibrium is welfare superior (inferior) to the Cournot equilibrium.     

IPO pricing: growth rates implied in offer prices

This paper studies the valuation of companies going public and defines a methodology to infer the growth expectations implicit in the prices of their Initial Public Offering (IPO). The proposed reverse-engineered DCF model is operable by individual investors, as it does not require access to private information or sell-side analysts’ forecasts. Applying the procedure to a sample of IPOs in three European countries (France, Italy, and Germany), we estimate the cash flow growth implied by offer prices and examine the bias of implied growth in comparison to the realized. We find that the estimated growth in cash flow is much higher than its actual realization, with the median IPO firm overvalued at the offering by 74%. Estimation errors increase with IPO firms’ leverage and underpricing, and decrease with age, size, and book-to-market ratios. Further tests find that post-IPO stock returns are lower for issues whose implied growth is more upward biased.     

Reducing the mean supply delay of spare parts using lateral transshipments policies

Lateral transshipment has been studied lately as a promising policy for increasing the performances of multi-echelon spare parts inventory system. By lateral transshipment spare parts can be moved from one location with excess inventory to another location, at the same echelon, in shortage, with the aim of reducing supply delays of spare parts. This paper will examine the relative effectiveness of two lateral shipments approaches in reducing the mean supply delay (MSD) of a non-repairable item, with respect to a classical policy of no lateral shipments. A simulation model of a two echelon supply network has been implemented and an experiment has been performed by varying different parameters of the supply network, such as the number of warehouses (locations at the lower echelon), the supply lead time from the central depot, the spare parts demand uncertainty, and the size variability of the warehouses. Results show appreciable reductions of MSD when lateral shipments are allowed with respect to the classical policy, in almost every network configuration.