The driving force of successful organizations

What makes some organizations much more successful than their counterparts? Luck? More effective marketing strategies? Superior technology? Greater financial leverage? Perhaps all these, but beyond them, successful organizations possess two common properties, clarity and commitment, which provide the driving force to propel them to the forefront and help to keep them there.     

An intertemporal analysis of the shifting of FHA discount points to buyers

In this paper, hedonic regressions are used to analyze a seven-year sample of monthly sales of bungalows in Chicago. Even when sales are considered within individual sections of Chicago, the FHA dummyindependent variable and the ‘points’-independent variable usually have negative coefficients. In certain areas of Chicago there is an absence of conventional loans and conventionally qualified buyers. Consequently, sellers in these neighborhoods must sell using FHA-insured mortgages and may be prevented from fully shifting points to the FHA buyer in the absence of competing financing alternatives. The use of FHA mortgages in these transactions means that the standard hedonic approach cannot correctly measure the extent of point-shifting because the housing/demographic characteristics decrease sales-prices at the same time the point-shifting increases them. The estimated FHA coefficients reflect the net result of these effects.     

What of the youth? Aspirations and survival strategies from the Eastern Cape

A survey of black matriculants in Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown revealed that career aspirations were somewhat more modest than is popularly assumed and that these differed according to the immediate material circumstances and also the presence or absence of role models during the socialisation process. Such differences have important implications for unemployment relief programmes.