The Use of Person–Group Fit for Employment Selection: A Missing Link in Person–Environment Fit

Given an increased emphasis on work teams in organizations, it is important to select applicants based on their ability to make contributions to a given work team. This paper proposes that person–group fit should be useful to select applicants for work teams and suggests that effective use of person–group fit will create both more cohesive work units and more effectively functioning work units. It proposes ways to make valid and reliable assessments of person–group fit that could be used to minimize bias in the selection process. Finally, it addresses several implications of using the person–group fit paradigm for human resource management practice. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Dangers of Misclassifying “Employees”: Microsoft Litigation Emphasizes Distinctions Between Employees and Nontraditional Workers

In the past decade, businesses, for reasons such as greater flexibility and lower total costs, have increased their use of nontraditional workers such as independent contractors and temporary agency employees. The Internal Revenue Service's crackdown on misclassifying employees slowed this growth. Additionally, recent lawsuits by nontraditional workers against employers such as Microsoft Corporation have resulted in some client employers being forced to pay more benefits to nontraditional employees because of employment misclassification and coemployment rulings. Such rulings might reduce or even eliminate the use of some types of nontraditional employees. This paper analyzes the vast array of types of workers that have evolved into the nontraditional work force and the difficulty of defining employee with respect to entitlement to employer benefits. Possible recommendations for employers include auditing present use of nontraditional workers, accurately classifying employees, and taking proper actions to minimize problems in the future.     

Tax noncompliance: The role of tax morale in smokers' behavior

Measuring and predicting compliance with tax obligations is an important but challenging task. Survey data from California smokers show that several forms of tax avoidance and evasion were common. The analysis shows that 43% of smokers avoided taxes by purchasing cigarettes from out-of-state sources in the past year, 15% admitted to evading taxes through cross-border purchases, and 26% reported purchasing likely or certainly untaxed cigarettes in the state in the past month. Attitudinal factors related to tax morale explain much more of the variance in compliance rates than demographic or law-and-economics factors. The implications for policy are discussed.     

Applying human rights standards to employment rights in the USA: The Human Rights Watch Report 2000

This essay reviews the international human rights standards that the Human Rights Watch Report uses as standards for judgment, summarises with some commentary the Report’s major findings and recommendations, comments more fully on certain findings and recommendations, and, in conclusion, raises several issues that need to be addressed given the state of freedom of association and other related human rights in the USA.     

The Lowry Model Revisited: Incorporating a Multizonal Input-Output Model into an Urban Land Use Allocation Model

This paper formulates a new generation of Lowry-style models that combine a multizonal input-output model and an urban land use allocation model. Three different types of models are proposed: 1) an unconstrained model, 2) a primal of a linear programming approach that includes land supply constraints, and 3) a modified dual of the linear programming approach that allocates land based on additional conditions of economic efficiency. The modified dual formulation improves upon the limitations of Lowry models and their derivatives. First, the proposed model has sound theoretical underpinnings that incorporate the production theory of input-output models and the behavioral theory of optimization models. Second, the proposed model allocates land on the basis of economic efficiency by imposing a procedure that equalizes shadow prices. And third, the proposed model is an optimization model that fully accounts for the spatial and sectoral relationships of multiplier effects determining land use demand.     

On the interpretation of cointegration in the linear–quadratic inventory model

The traditional formulation of the linear–quadratic inventory model with unit roots predicts cointegration between inventories and sales. That formulation implies that marginal production costs and the marginal benefits of inventories are both tending to ∞, and the cointegrating coefficient reflects the optimal trade-off between these competing factors. This paper suggests a reformulation of the problem in which marginal production costs and marginal inventory benefits are both stationary and in which the cointegrating coefficient is the same as the value that characterizes the target inventory level in the cost function.     

Analysis and design of focused demand chains

The paper describes the evolution of focused demand chains over an extended period of time as a major UK lighting manufacturer has sought to remain an international player in a fast changing business environment. Analysis and design procedures make use of the concepts of Wickham Skinner and Marshall Fisher to answer the strategic questions “what facilities are required and how should they be laid out to enable the necessary focused demand chains?” and to answer the tactical question “which focused demand chain is appropriate for this product?” The case study then details how the company has been transformed from operating within a traditional supply chain to driving change via the engineering of four focused demand chains. The paper concludes with a comparison of operations enablers, customer choice, and business performance metrics covering the transition period culminating in the current focused demand chain scenario. By matching products to the appropriate value stream there is a consequential reduction in product development time of 75%; manufacturing costs reduction of up to 27%; and up to 95% reduction in delivery lead times.     

A model of fractional cointegration, and tests for cointegration using the bootstrap

The paper proposes a framework for modelling cointegration in fractionally integrated processes, and considers methods for testing the existence of cointegrating relationships using the parametric bootstrap. In these procedures, ARFIMA models are fitted to the data, and the estimates used to simulate the null hypothesis of non-cointegration in a vector autoregressive modelling framework. The simulations are used to estimate p-values for alternative regression-based test statistics, including the F goodness-of-fit statistic, the Durbin–Watson statistic and estimates of the residual d. The bootstrap distributions are economical to compute, being conditioned on the actual sample values of all but the dependent variable in the regression. The procedures are easily adapted to test stronger null hypotheses, such as statistical independence. The tests are not in general asymptotically pivotal, but implemented by the bootstrap, are shown to be consistent against alternatives with both stationary and nonstationary cointegrating residuals. As an example, the tests are applied to the series for UK consumption and disposable income. The power properties of the tests are studied by simulations of artificial cointegrating relationships based on the sample data. The F test performs better in these experiments than the residual-based tests, although the Durbin–Watson in turn dominates the test based on the residual d.