'High-performance' Management Practices, Working Hours and Work–Life Balance

The effects of selected high‐performance practices and working hours on work–life balance are analysed with data from national surveys of British employees in 1992 and 2000. Alongside long hours, which are a constant source of negative job‐to‐home spillover, certain ‘high‐performance’ practices have become more strongly related to negative spillover during this period. Surprisingly, dual‐earner couples are not especially liable to spillover — if anything, less so than single‐earner couples. Additionally, the presence of young children has become less important over time. Overall, the results suggest a conflict between high‐performance practices and work‐life balance policies.     

中国现阶段的工业品市场营销模式初探

随着中国市场经济的快速发展、科技水平的提高以及中国加入WTO,工业品的市场竞争将更加激烈。对于中国现阶段的工业品来讲,由于行业、企业、产品特点及销售对象不同,各公司的营销策略各有不同,尤其对市场营销模式需要进一步探索。     

Intraday Lead-Lag Relationships Between the Futures-, Options and Stock Market

In rational, efficiently functioning and complete markets, returns on derivative and underlying securities should be perfectly contemporaneously correlated. Due to market imperfections, one of these markets may reflect information faster. The use of high-frequency data and the choice for a small unit time interval to measure these lead-lag relations comes at the cost of some or many missing observations, causing traditional estimators to either under- or overestimate covariances and correlations. We use a new estimator to estimate lead-lag relationships between the cash AEX index, options and futures. We find that futures returns lead both options and cash index returns by approximately 10 minutes. The relationship between options and the cash market is not completely unidirectional.     

Small Firm Growth: Intentions, Implementation and Impediments

Recent evidence suggests that many small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK experience difficulty growing from the start-up phase into larger well established firms. This research uses survey data from UK instruments, printing and software SMEs to explore the attitudes of SME managers towards growth, to identify the strategies they pursue to achieve growth, and to establish the main factors they perceive to be limiting their growth. We find that although most managers profess to value growth and follow expansionary strategies, the main limits on the growth of SMEs are the intensity of competition stemming from the recession, and the inability or unwillingness of management to deal with the increased administrative burden arising from expansion.     

Programme Evaluation with Unobserved Heterogeneity and Selective Implementation: The Mexican PROGRESA Impact on Child Nutrition

This paper considers the impact of Programa de Educación, Salud y Alimentación ( PROGRESA ), a large Mexican rural anti-poverty programme that had an evaluation sample in which overall treatment was randomly assigned to some communities but not others, on child nutrition. When we examine the impact of PROGRESA based on the presumption of randomized allocations, we find that PROGRESA had no or even a negative impact on child nutrition. However, not all children designated to receive nutritional supplements actually did so. Our preferred estimates – child fixed-effects estimates that control for unobserved heterogeneity that is correlated with access to the supplement – indicate a significantly positive and fairly substantial programme effect of the nutritional supplements on children 12–36 months. They imply an increase of about a sixth in mean growth per year for these children and a lower probability of stunting. Effects are somewhat larger for children from poorer communities but whose mothers are functionally literate. The long-term consequences of these improvements are non-trivial; its impact working through adult height alone could result in a 2.9% increase in lifetime earnings.     

Relationship of Planning and Control Systems with Strategic Choices: A Closer Look

The study finds that relative to others, firms pursuing the Prospector-like strategy (high innovation) have lower financial results uncertainty, a more long-term orientation for decision making, and more decentralized control. As well, the tightness of budgetary control is found to be negatively correlated with financial results uncertainty. Thus, we are able to reproduce in our study the result that Prospector type firms have tighter budgetary control, which many have found puzzling previously, and point to the relation between strategy and financial results uncertainty as an explanation for the result.Based on a sample of large firms in Singapore, the study also finds the impact of the 1997–1998 Asian crisis is correlated with the intensity with which the Prospector-like strategy was pursued.     

Two Dimensions of Convergence: National and International Wage Adjustment Effects of Cross-border Outsourcing in Europe

The paper proposes a distinction between the two dimensions of convergence—within and between countries—when analyzing the impact of cross‐border outsourcing on real wage rates in the EU‐15 and the CEEC. In the CEEC, international outsourcing has not affected the adjustment of average real wage rates at the manufacturing industry level, but it has led to a closure of the gap within a typical EU economy. Between‐country convergence is likewise fostered by cross‐border outsourcing, supporting the hypothesis that outsourcing facilitates international factor price equalization.