Determinants of employee willingness to use feedback for performance improvement: cultural and organizational interpretations

This study was designed to identify determinants of employee willingness to use feedback for performance improvement. The proposed determinants included objectives of appraisal, supervisor's knowledge of subordinate's job, agreed plan for performance improvement, trust in supervisor and perceived fairness and accuracy of performance evaluation. Data were collected in two phases. The first phase consisted of a questionnaire survey among 100 Hong Kong Chinese employees working in public and private sector organizations. Regression analysis of questionnaire data indicated that agreed plan for performance improvement and perceived fairness and accuracy of performance evaluation had significant positive effects on employee willingness to use performance feedback. In the second phase, focus group interviews were held to triangulate survey findings. Interview data suggested that Chinese cultural characteristics of paternalism and personalism influenced the underlying dynamics of the evaluation process. Findings are interpreted in the context of employees cultural and organizational background.     

A Fractional Cointegration Approach to Testing Mean Reversion Between Spot and Forward Exchange Rates: A Case of High Frequency Data with Low Frequency Dynamics

This paper applies a relatively new but generalised concept of fractional cointegration to shed some light on the validity of a long-run relationship between high frequency daily spot and the lagged forward Australian-US dollar exchange rate. An investigation of the stochastic properties of these rates reveals that, while the relationship is not cointegrated in their logs, they appear to be fractionally cointegrated if we allow for mean reverting processes that are CI (1, d ) with 0< d <1. The paper demonstrates that relaxing the condition that the residual from the cointegration equation must be a I (0) process, captures a much wider class of mean-reversion behaviour. This result is interpreted in the context of the speculative EMH between the spot and forward exchanges rates, as having some empirical support. Furthermore, an analysis of the short-run dynamics propelling the long-run relationship tends to imply that in both the short- and long-term, the forward rate is led by the spot rate. In the longer term, the spot rate is found to be the initial receptor of any exogenous shock to the equilibrium and it is the forward exchange rate that bears the brunt of short-run adjustment to re-establish the long-run equilibrium relationship. The approach illustrated in this paper is shown to hold enormous potential for tests of mean reversion involving hypotheses popular to financial econometrics in general, where the dynamics of high frequency data are under scrutiny.     

Better to give than to receive? Altruistic provision of a global public good

Developed countries may gain more than developing countries from the provision of a global public good: the greater their valuation of the good, the higher the productivity of developing countries’ contributions and the more developed countries derive satisfaction from altruism.     

Macroeconomic consequences of increased productivity in less developed economies

This paper examines the impact of improvements in productivity on prices, output, the real wage rate and the balance of payments. Within the context of the model used in this paper, an improvement in productivity can take two alternative forms: (1) a cost saving for a given output and (2) an increase in production without a direct decrease in employment. The results presented are based on a simple model of a small open economy that includes some key features of less developed economies. It is shown that, in the presence of monetary and fiscal restraints, an improvement in productivity leads to increases in output, employment and the real wage and the effect on the balance of payments, in the short and the medium runs, is also positive. We find that whether or not improvement in productivity is import saving plays a crucial role in both comparative static and simulation exercises.     

Institutional development,financial deepening and economic growth: Evidence from China

There have been profound changes in both political and economic institutions in China over the last 20 years. Moreover, the pace of transition has led to variation across the country in the level of development. In this paper, we use panel data for the Chinese provinces to study the role of legal institutions, financial deepening and political pluralism on growth rates. The most important institutional developments for a transition economy are the emergence and legalization of the market economy, the establishment of secure property rights, the growth of a private sector, the development of financial sector institutions and markets, and the liberalization of political institutions. We develop measures of these phenomena, which are used as explanatory variables in regression models to explain provincial GDP growth rates. Our evidence suggests that the development of financial markets, legal environment, awareness of property rights and political pluralism are associated with stronger growth.     

Engineered nanomaterials: risk perception,regulation and insurance

Concerns surrounding the health risk of engineered nanomaterials, effective regulation and the lack of specifically tailored insurance products for the nanotechnology sector are putting the industry’s long-term economic viability at risk. From the perspective of the underwriter, this article speculates on the relationship between risk perception, regulation and insurability. In the nanotechnology sector, regulators are currently failing to keep pace with innovation, and insurers generally lack guiding principles for underwriting occupational risk from nanomaterial exposure. Such vulnerabilities when combined with misguided risk perceptions can lead to the overpricing of risk transfer and ill-conceived regulatory initiatives, thus potentially exhausting resources and stifling innovation in the sector. In the absence of well-developed regulatory protocols, the insurance industry has, and will continue, to occupy a key role as an effective lobby in terms of improved risk management practice. We suggest that the insurance industry will increasingly rely on control banding frameworks and ‘risk mitigation at source’ methods developed in conjunction with their clients to manage severe acute diversifiable risks. Long tail risk will continue to represent a serious challenge to insurers and regulators. In the meantime, insurers will have to bridge their current needs with improvised solutions. As an example of one possible solution, we outline a framework that utilizes financial instruments to hedge an insurer’s exposure to uncertain estimates of these long-term risks.     

Statistical inference for multidimensional inequality indices

We use the delta method to derive the large sample distribution of multidimensional inequality indices. We also present a simple method for computing standard errors and obtain explicit formulas in the context of two families of indices.