WHO PAYS FOR WHEELCHAIRS?

The issue opened up by the 'Ryanair Case' is a wide and important one. Interest groups often press for special treatment at the expense of others. People often agree to give it, because they think the group is deserving and because they have not thought through how the service is to be paid for. By making the charging transparent, as Ryanair has done in this case, people will be forced to think about whether the interest group really is deserving, and if they decide that it is, face up to supporting that view with their own money.     

Human Resource Management and Performance in UK Call Centres

Using data from a sample of 145 UK call centres, the authors test the core propositions of the strategic human resource management (SHRM) approach that: (a) there are coherent links through the SHRM chain from strategy, through operational requirements, to work design and human resource management, and (b) the fit between the human resource practices and market factors determines organizational performance. Little support for these hypotheses is found as only (a) a few direct relationships between the elements of the SHRM chain are found, and (b) direct relationships, rather than those moderated by market factors, are found between human resource practices and performance. But key operational requirements are linked to work design, which is itself related to a limited number of human resource practices. The direct effects of work design on key performance indicators are more pronounced than those of human resource practices.     

Explaining value chain differences in MRIO databases through structural path decomposition

Many multiregional input–output (MRIO) databases are used to calculate consumption-based accounts. Results feature in climate policy discussion on emissions reduction responsibilities; yet studies show that outcomes produced by each database differ. This paper compares the emissions associated with value chains from Eora, EXIOBASE, GTAP and WIOD. Structural path analysis identifies the largest paths in each database and the differences in common paths are calculated. For the top 100 value chain paths that contain the largest difference, structural path decomposition is used to identify the contribution each part of the value chain makes towards the difference. The results identify and quantify key flows that are the cause of difference in the databases. From these, we can conclude that key MRIO database construction decisions, such as using the residence or territorial principle for emissions allocation and whether energy spends are reallocated based on physical data, are the major causes of differences.     

The Fallacy of Misplaced Leadership*

abstract The leadership literature typically talks about the discrete individuality of its subject and particularly the personal qualities and capabilities of a few key people occupying top positions in a hierarchy. Current leadership research now has begun to generate new knowledge about leadership practice in relations of interpersonal exchange. Nevertheless, there is an urgent need for the ramifications of this insight to be more sufficiently developed. The current discussion explores how a perspective of process studies challenges the dominance of the field by individual social actors and discrete schemes of relations. Its aims are twofold. First, it will show how both of these latter epistemologies are lacking and suggest that current leadership research and development activities must rise to the ontological challenge of processes rather than things. Second, it looks at some methodological implications of this way of thinking as a productive incitement to future management studies.     

Market Illiquidity and Conditional Equity Premium

We examine the time‐series relation between aggregate bid‐ask spreads and conditional equity premium. We document that average marketwide relative effective bid‐ask spreads forecast aggregate market returns only when controlling for average idiosyncratic variance. This control allows us to document the otherwise elusive relation between illiquidity and returns. The reason is that idiosyncratic variance correlates positively with spreads but has a negative effect on conditional equity premium, causing an omitted variable bias. Our results are robust to standard return predictors, alternative illiquidity measures, and out‐of‐sample tests. These findings are important because they provide strong support for the literature's conjecture that marketwide liquidity is an important asset pricing risk factor.