Getting the Smaller Picture: Small‐Area Analysis of Public Expenditure Incidence and Deprivation in Three English Cities

This paper examines public expenditure incidence at small‐area level in cities. The motivations for such research are briefly reviewed. The article reports on an attempt at measuring public expenditure across the majority of programmes down to the level of Census wards and the actual results obtained for three urban local authorities in England. The relationship between spending, income and deprivation is examined overall and for particular spending programmes, using a number of approaches including regression‐based expenditure models. The conclusions suggest that spending is indeed targetted on poorer areas but raise questions about both the strength of this relationship and how best to measure deprivation and the need to spend.     

A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONTEXT AND STRUCTURE OF A LARGE BRITISH FINANCIAL INSTITUTION

This study represents an analysis of the changes in the environment, context and structure of an organization, using the full Aston Interview Schedule.² The limitations of generalizing from a single case are acknowledged, but the longitudinal analysis provides support for the notion that organizations can and do develop self-evaluative capacities when threatened by external change. The results of the process of self-evaluation on the part of the organization are shown as changes in the organization's scores on the various scales of organizational context and structure developed by the Aston school, at two points in time. These changes provide support for a number of conjectures arising from previous analyses of the relationships among the structural dimensions of organizational form displayed by the Aston methodology; notably the relationship between size/standardization and centralization/standardization. The analysis also suggests that the centralization scale can be viewed as having two components – one related to policy decisions, the other to operational decisions.     

Persistence and Change at the Top of the IT Sector

We use the DATAMATION index of the top 50 domestic IT companies (1975–1995) to track persistence and change at the top of the sector. The trends that we uncover are increasing instability, rejuvenation (declining average age of entrants coupled with increasing average age of quitters), democratization (diminishing revenue inequality at the top) and growing supply‐side intertwining of sub‐sectors and industries within IT due to diversification by long‐term survivors.     

Earnings and Welfare after Downsizing: Central Bank Employees in Ecuador

This article measures the earnings and welfare losses experiencedby displaced employees of the Central Bank of Ecuador. It linksthese losses to individual characteristics such as gender, education,seniority, and salary in the public sector. Data are from asurvey of displaced employees that included subjective evaluationsof well-being in addition to information on activity and earnings.The welfare losses of separated employees are not highly correlatedwith their earnings losses, partly because some of them (especiallywomen) withdrew from the labor force after separation. Earningsand welfare losses also vary depending on the nature of displacement,which was voluntary for roughly half the employees and involuntaryfor the rest. Overall, the losses were larger for employeeswith less education and more seniority, but not necessarilylarger for employees with higher salaries. However, compensationfor displacement was based on a rule of thumb that involvedonly salary and seniority and was applied across-the-board.For those employees who left voluntarily, the resulting compensationpackage was, on average, about 20 percent higher than the welfareloss. The article derives the implications of these findingsfor the design of assistance programs for displaced workersand, more specifically, for the tailoring of compensation packagesto their individual characteristics.     

Intermediation Can Replace Certification

We consider a market in which consumers do not have perfect information about product quality. Producers can perfectly reveal that a good is of high quality through certification, which entails socially wasteful costs. Firms can choose whether to sell through an intermediary or to sell independently (vertical integration). We show that multibrand retailing, which leads to a redistribution of profits but not to social costs, can fully or partially replace certification by signaling product quality. Renting the image of a competing high-quality brand is shown to be an outcome that can be sustained through intermediation.     

An application-oriented guide to R&D project selection and evaluation methods

The purpose of this paper is to provide managers with a set of guidelines to help them to choose the project evaluation and selection model that best suits their business environments. To this end the authors have surveyed the literature of the subject and used contacts made in training workshops with Swiss industry.
From this information the authors have identified five key issues — signposts that mark the route towards the appropriate project selection method. Once a sufficiency of project proposals has been identified — more than could be implemented with the resources available — then one takes into account successively how far the selection parameters can be quantified, how far one project interferes with or depends on the completion of another, whether a project has one or more than one objective, and the degree of acceptable risk. The procedure is presented in the form of a binary decision tree the various branches of which lead ultimately to twelve archetypal groups of methods. Each group is in principle suited to a practical situation represented by some combination of the key issues recognizable by a manager.
The paper discusses the strengths, weaknesses, limitations and practicality of the methods falling into each group. It concludes with suggestions about how a framework could be extended and refined. Keywords: Research and Development, Project Selection.