Origins of the financial crisis and requirements for reform

This paper examines the causes of the global financial crisis (focusing in particular on why residential mortgage-backed securities and credit default swaps exploded from around 2004) and the policy reform agenda. Arbitrage opportunities in capital rules and the tax system were available, and changes in regulations affecting the leverage of international banks (IBs) played a key role in allowing these opportunities to be exploited on a greater scale. Changes to the Basel rules also actively contributed to the sharp rise in toxic securities. The policy agenda focuses on the need to deal with toxic assets, and for broader reforms to incentive structures, not only of capital rules, but also of corporate governance and banking structures. Specific policy reform recommendations are made. Recent numbers on the capital needs of banks suggest that we are not very far into the process of dealing with the crisis, and lack of transparency in this respect is a major issue in Europe. The longer-run reform process too is not focusing on the ideal building blocks.     

Menopause and the workplace: New directions in HRM research and HR practice

This paper offers two key arguments. The first is that HRM scholars and HR practitioners need to pay a good deal more attention to the bi‐directional relationship between menopause and the workplace—how menopausal symptoms can affect women's experience of work and how work can exacerbate a woman's symptoms. We outline the social responsibility, demographic, legal and business cases which explain the urgency of more research and more concerted practice in this area. Our second argument concerns the importance of future research and practice adopting an intersectional political economy approach, in order to better understand the considerable differences between how women going through menopause transition experience work. Here, we offer arguments ranging from the macro‐ through the meso‐ down to the micro‐level of these differences, in so doing setting an agenda for the work to come on this very significant issue.     

Profit versus Cost Frontier Estimation of Price and Technical Inefficiency: A Parametric Approach with Panel Data

We develop two panel data models, based on the assumption of shadow-profit maximization, to obtain firm-specific parametric estimates of allocative, scale, and technical inefficiency. One is a restricted shadow-profit system with additional equations for quasi-fixed inputs that allow testing for the efficiency of their utilization. The other is a shadow-cost system augmented with an equation to capture deviations from marginal-cost pricing. We show that with the translog functional form, the shadow-profit system may encounter computational difficulties that the shadow-cost system avoids. An application of the shadow-cost system to the U.S. airline industry is provided.     

Planning Retirement Income in Australia: Routes through the Maze

Individual retirees face a daunting task when they consider how best to invest their accumulated superannuation account and non-superannuation savings. This article highlights the fact that there is rarely an obvious decision in this choice and that the optimal decision depends on a number of factors. These factors include the valuation criterion adopted, the level of benefits, the individual's income level, the means-tests, the tax rates on income and superannuation benefits and the person's life expectancy. The optimal behaviour at retirement is significantly affected by the individual characteristics of relative lifetime earnings and post-retirement rates of mortality.     

On the switch from direct to indirect taxation

The paper is concerned with the inter-relationship between the theoretical specification of household behaviour and the application of econometric results to the analysis of public policy. The first part of the paper discusses the relationship between the optimum tax literature and econometric specification of point labour supply and commodity demands. The second part introduces an ‘activity model’ of the allocation of money and time, which generalises the standard linear expenditure system, and describes the preliminary results of estimating the model for the United Kingdom Family Expenditure Survey data for 1973. The remainder of the paper uses the estimates to examine the effect of reducing income taxation and increasing value added tax on both labour supply and welfare.     

The distribution of ncome in the UK and OECD countries in the twentieth century

Distributional changes are an important part of the economichistory of the OECD countries over the twentieth century. Inthe UK, income inequality in the 1970s was substantially lowerthan 40 years earlier, and is now much higher than in 1979.The pattern of change in the USA has similarities to that inthe UK, but other countries have exhibited significant differences.In order to explain diversity of experience over time, and differencesin income inequality across countries today, we need to recognizethat the distribution of income is subject to a variety of forces,affecting earnings, wealth, and income. These forces includethe policy choices made by governments affecting market incomesand fiscal redistribution. What we need to explain is why insome periods a number of these forces combine to produce episodesof rising, or falling, inequality. Any single theory, such asthat based on a global shift of demand away from unskilled workers,cannot provide a fully adequate explanation.     

The importance of an internal marketing orientation in social services

• The current research takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the role of emotions in the successful delivery of social services. Survey data collected from 533 frontline social service providers were subjected to regression analyses. Findings reveal that emotional intelligence mediates the relationship between emotional labor and job stress, which in‐turn impacts job performance. The findings suggest that an internal marketing orientation is needed to better match the organization's products (i.e., jobs) with its internal customers (employees), and in‐turn improve the quality (job performance) of its offerings to its external customers.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shadow directional distance functions with bads: GMM estimation of optimal directions and efficiencies

Because of its greater flexibility, the directional distance function (DDF) has been employed with increasing frequency to estimate multiple-input and multiple-output production, where inputs and outputs can be good or bad. However, typically researchers make three restrictive assumptions. First, they assume a direction of movement of firm production toward the frontier. Second, they assume that actual quantities of inputs and outputs are allocatively or price efficient. Third, they assume exogeneity of all inputs and all outputs, except for the normalized one. The first contribution of this paper is to include parameters to estimate optimal directions which correspond to the firm’s profit-maximizing (PM) position. The second contribution is to generalize the DDF to a shadow-quantity DDF. This entails adding distortion parameters to each input and output quantity of the DDF, creating shadow quantities. To estimate the shadow quantities and the structural parameters, we form the shadow DDF system, which includes the shadow DDF and all the first-order price equations from the shadow-PM problem. These include prices for bad inputs and bad outputs, where we approximate their missing prices for use in their first-order price equations. The third contribution is that we estimate the shadow DDF system using a Generalized Method of Moments approach, where all variables are potentially endogenous. This approach is simpler than the Bayesian one employed in Atkinson et al. (Estimating efficient production with bad inputs and outputs using latent prices and optimal directions. Working paper, University of Georgia, Athens, 2016), which estimated shadow prices and optimal directions. Using the same data set, both sets of results are qualitatively very similar, although they differ somewhat quantitatively.