Culture,industrialisation and multiple domains of employees' job satisfaction: a case for HR strategy redesign in India

This paper explores the link between cultural behavioural traits, the potential effect of industrialisation and multiple domains of job satisfaction, utilising survey data collected from public and private service sector employees in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya in the North East Region (NER) of India. Results from ordered probit regressions demonstrate a statistically significant impact of both, extrinsic and intrinsic moderating factors on Indian employees' job satisfaction. In view of India's widely reported collectivistic cultural traits, which are assumed to emphasise primarily the importance of extrinsic job aspects, our findings are surprising. They suggest that in the wake of India's significant economic developments the impact of intrinsic job rewards has played ‘catch-up’ with that of their extrinsic counterparts. As such, the study provides evidence in support of embracing human resource management (HRM) practices that incentivise Indian employees not only through their traditional methods aimed at extrinsic job rewards but also by explicitly addressing individual ambitions, needs and aspirations.     

Remittances and child labour in Ghana: Does the gender of the household head matter?

This study investigates the effect of remittance income on child labour and the role of gender in Ghana. Data were sourced from the Ghana Living Standards Survey Round 6. In order to solve the issue of endogeneity, we adopt the instrumental variable approach. The study finds evidence that, irrespective of whoever is the head of the household, the total effect of remittances on child labour is negative. However, the negative effect is much higher for female-headed households. It is recommended that more mobile money transfer outlets be established and the cost of transferring money be reduced to the barest minimum so as to enable households to maximise the benefits of the remittances they receive. Furthermore, financial transfers should be given to female household heads upon the condition of school attendance by their children so as to reduce child labour.     

Predicting stock returns in the presence of uncertain structural changes and sample noise

The predictive power of the dividend-price ratio has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Most studies on return predictability assume that predictor variables follow stationary processes with constant long-run means. Following recent evidence on the role of structural breaks in the dividend-price ratio mean, we propose an estimation method that explicitly incorporates uncertainty about the location and magnitude of structural breaks in the predictor that extracts the regime mean component of the dividend-price ratio. Adjusting for structural changes in the ratio’s mean and estimation error significantly improves predictive power of the dividend-price ratio as well as other standard predictors in sample and out of sample.     

Some unresolved issues in the location theory of the firm

This paper presents a generalized location theory of the firm in linear space. Location outcomes are examined by utilizing a general as well as a particular transport rate structure for output and inputs and using a general concave production as well as a homogeneous production function, of the firm. The effect of a change in demand on the location is also investigated.     

Stochastic dominance, efficiency and separation in financial markets

A portfolio problem exhibits separation when all of its solutions can be expressed as affine combinations of a small number of mutual funds. The concept of separation is one of the cornerstones of modern portfolio theory, underlying everything from the mean-variance portfolio selection rule of [7. and 8.] and [11.] to the equilibrium pricing model of [10.], [6.] and [2.]. A great deal of effort has been put into investigating conditions which validate separation assumptions: [3.] as well as [4.] study this problem in terms of utility functions while [9.] takes a distributional approach. The purpose of this note is to show that for the distributional approach, the so-called weak and strong forms of separation are actually equivalent.     

Using the Delphi method to assess community health needs

Comprehensive health planning must ultimately be based upon information about the people to be served. Their needs as potential patients or clients of the various service systems being planned must be identified and evaluated. Regional cooperation on meeting these health care needs is premised on some agreement amongst the population as to the existing problems and their relative priorities. In order to investigate how such a health needs assessment might be undertaken a study was conducted using a panel of citizens selected from a 10-country central Texas region. The results demonstrate the fesibility of employing the Delphi method for achieving consensus on some health care issues; the information obtained can become valuable input to the overall health planning process.     

A simple algebraic estimation procedure for innovation diffusion models of new product acceptance

A simple algebraic estimation procedure is developed to estimate the parameters of diffusion models of new product acceptance. The procedure required knowledge of the occurrence of the point of inflection (based on actual data, analogous products, or management judgments). It is conceptually easy to use and can be implemented by using a hand calculator. Since the procedure does not employ period-by-period time-series diffusion data, it is not expected to provide the best fit to the data as compared to the maximum likelihood and nonlinear least squares estimation procedures. However, the procedure can provide very reasonable estimates about the relative magnitudes of the parameter estimates. In that respect, the procedure can be used to generate good starting values for the maximum likelihood and nonlinear least squares estimation procedures. In the absence of data, using management judgments about the point of inflection, the procedure can be implemented in a decision-support system to develop conditional diffusion curves for a new product. Data from four diverse innovations are used to illustrate the procedure.