Changes in Household Welfare,Poverty and Inequality During the Crisis

This study provides evidence about changes in the distribution of living standards among Indonesian households during the economic crisis. It uses consumption expenditure data from a panel of households that were surveyed in May 1997, just before the onset of the crisis, and then again in August 1998, about a year after the crisis began. A household-specific deflator is used to make nominal consumption expenditures comparable across this period. The results suggest that there was a considerable drop in household welfare during the economic crisis. Average per capita expenditures fell significantly, and at the same time inequality increased. The poverty rate also appears to have doubled from the pre-crisis level. However, transitions into and out of poverty before and after the crisis reveal remarkable fluidity.     

Rules- versus judgement-based accounting disclosure in the UK

In the wake of recent corporate debacles, considerable debate has ensued on the relative merits of rules-based versus judgement-based accounting disclosure. This note contributes to the debate by examining disclosure practices in the UK where a well-established regulatory framework nevertheless upholds the right of corporate managers to exercise discretion.A specific template is developed to examine simultaneously the content of the segment report and the operating and financial review (OFR) to detect disclosure patterns. The findings indicate that companies which provide the fullest and most relevant segment reports provide less voluntary additional disclosure in the OFR than those companies that, superficially, provide less extensive disclosure in their segment reports. It is unclear, therefore, that changes to more rules-based disclosure regimes will automatically lead to an increase in the level of overall disclosure.     

Organizational Culture: A ten Year, Two-phase Study of Change in the UK Food Retailing Sector

This paper argues that much of the current motivation for the study of organizational culture is fuelled by research which finds an association between culture and performance as well as by studies which suggest that culture is comparatively easily changed. However, much of the research upon which these claims are based is largely firm-specific with little critical evaluation of industry macrocultures and the impact that such cultures may have on both the performance of individual firms and the management of organizational culture. Through assessing separate change programmes spaced ten years apart, this paper documents and analyses the similarities and differences in the rationale, form, substance and impacts of two separate culture change initiatives in the same macroculture spaced ten years apart. These analyses suggest a number of conclusions and implications for both theorists and practitioners. In particular, the study argues that researchers examining organizational culture should devote significantly greater attention towards studying the effects of sector or industry macrocultures.     

On the Targeting and Redistributive Efficiencies of Alternative Transfer Instruments

The distributional characteristic provides an attractive alternative to conventional approaches used to evaluate the targeting performance of transfer programs. We decompose it into two components that are useful both conceptually and empirically; one capturing the targeting efficiency of the instrument, the other its redistributive efficiency . The redistributive index can also be generalized for the purposes of evaluating the degree of progressivity in tax-benefit structures. For illustrative purposes, we present an empirical application of the distributional characteristic and its decomposition using Mexican data. The welfare gains from using categorical targeting and means testing reflect improvements in redistributive and targeting efficiency respectively.     

The Political Economy of the "Minimum-Wage Institution" in an Internationally Integrated Market

The paper explores the political economy of the “minimum‐wage institution (MWI)” in an internationally integrated product market. The authors consider a two‐sector Economic Union (EU) with a perfectly competitive agricultural sector and a unionized oligopolistic manufacturing sector in which there exist productivity asymmetries across firms. It is shown that efficient firms have an incentive to strategically opt for intercountry minimum‐wage agreements high enough to raise their inefficient rivals’ costs and thus gain business in equilibrium. The unions of workers in all countries also find these agreements in their best interest. As a consequence, the MWI may emerge as the equilibrium institutional resolution of alternative political processes (i.e., an EU‐wide referendum or special‐interest politics), despite its negative effect on aggregate employment.     

Using DEA to estimate potential savings at GP units at medical specialty level

The aim of this paper is to identify benchmark cost-efficient General Practitioner (GP) units at delivering health care in the Geriatric and General Medicine (GMG) specialty and estimate potential cost savings. The use of a single medical specialty makes it possible to reflect more accurately the medical condition of the List population of the Practice so as to contextualize its expenditure on care for patients. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the potential for cost savings at GP units and to decompose these savings into those attributable to the reduction of resource use, to altering the mix of resources used and to those attributable to securing better resource ‘prices’. The results reveal a considerable potential for savings of varying composition across GP units.     

Yield and income risk-efficiency analysis of alternative systems for rice production in the Guinea Savannah of Northern Ghana

Risk efficiency of rice grain yield and returns to farm operators' household resources generated from an improved short‐duration cover crop fallow system were compared with (traditional) natural bush fallow, and continuous rice‐cropping systems. The improved fallow system involved maintaining Calopogonium mucunoides, seeded into a natural bush fallow for 2 years before planting to rice. With no chemical fertilizer application, which reflects farmers' practice in the area, average grain yield for continuous rice (1,185 kg/ha) and the cropping sequence incorporating a natural bush fallow (1,175 kg/ha) did not differ, but were higher for the improved fallow system (1,304 kg/ha). This suggests that nutrient contribution from the leguminous cover crop made up for critical crop N requirements in the improved fallow. Stochastic dominance of grain yield distributions from the improved fallow system, relative to the other two cropping systems, was more dramatic with no N fertilizer application compared to treatments with 30 kg/ha N. Average returns were highest for the improved fallow system, followed by the natural bush fallow‐cropping system, and then continuous rice, under the no N fertilizer treatment regime. With 30 kg/ha N fertilizer, income risk efficiency was less clear (compared to treatments with no N fertilizer), especially between continuous rice and the improved fallow treatment, because of faster N mineralization effects on continuous rice. In contrast, the improved cover crop fallow system completely dominated the natural bush fallow treatment under both fertilizer regimes. Rice production systems that incorporated the leguminous cover crop fallow were superior to the natural bush fallow system, based on both grain yield and average farm income risk‐efficiency considerations.     

Essential supremum and essential maximum with respect to random preference relations

In the first part of the paper, we study concepts of supremum and maximum as subsets of a topological space X$X$ endowed by preference relations. Several rather general existence theorems are obtained for the case where the preferences are defined by countable semicontinuous multi-utility representations. In the second part of the paper, we consider partial orders and preference relations “lifted” from a metric separable space X$X$ endowed by a random preference relation to the space L⁰(X)$L^0\left(X\right)$ of X$X$-valued random variables. We provide an example of application of the notion of essential maximum to the problem of the minimal portfolio super-replicating an American-type contingent claim under transaction costs.