Customer concentration and loan contract terms

We study pricing and non-pricing features of loan contracts to gauge how the credit market evaluates a firm’s customer-base profile and supply-chain relations. Higher customer concentration increases interest rate spreads and the number of restrictive covenants featured in newly initiated as well as renegotiated bank loans. Customer concentration also abbreviates the maturity of those loans as well as the relationship between firms and their banks. These effects are intensified by customers’ financial distress, the level of relationship-specific investments, and the use of trade credit in customer–supplier relations. Our evidence shows that a deeper exposure to a small set of large customers bears negative consequences for a firm’s relations with its creditors, revealing limits to integration along the supply chain.     

“Remembrance of things past”: Gordon Tullock,the man and the bioeconomist

My tribute paper on Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) provides some memorable stories of Tullock as a person and as a founder of bioeconomics. I include my speech, “Toast and roast: Gordon Tullock,” delivered on the occasion of Tullock’s 80th birthday; also the same “Toast and roast....,” written in the form of a poem, “Ode to Gordon Tullock.” I also discuss Tullock’s contributions to bioeconomics. In a concluding section, I recall a couple of my poignant memories of Gordon Tullock.     

Human resource management,strategic involvement and e-HRM technology

Associated with the emergence of internet-based human resource management technology is rhetoric predicting that such technological advances (electronic human resource management technology or e-HRM) will make HRM in organizations more strategic. Yet such a prediction is contested in the literature on the role of technology in organizations. Using a large survey data-set consisting of 5665 companies that are located in 32 different countries, we use non-recursive simultaneous equation models with instrumental variables to empirically evaluate competing theoretical perspectives in this literature. We find and show that strategic HR involvement and greater e-HRM capability are both directly and reciprocally related supporting both theoretical perspectives but also showing each is not mutually exclusive. We discuss the implication of these results for human resource management theory, practice and future research.     

Bioeconomics of some nonhuman and human societies: new institutional economics approach

New institutional economics (NIE) has been very successful in explaining the role of institutions such as the firm, money, and contract law in facilitating production and exchange in human societies. In this paper, I will show that the NIE approach, which so far has been used by economists to analyze institutions and organizations in human society, including the ethnically homogeneous middleman groups, can also be extended to explain the high degree of cooperation and coordination of activities of honeybees, ants, and schooling fish. In addition, the paper emphasize the importance of identity in nonhuman and human societies in eliciting cooperation and in detecting cheaters or fakers. This paper thus contribute to the integration/consilience of economics and biology by providing a more unified view of aspects of the bioeconomics of nonhuman and human societies.     

Coping Strategies in Call Centres: Work Intensity and the Role of Co-workers and Supervisors

It has been observed that customer service workers often develop mutually supportive coping strategies to protect themselves from the emotional strain of overwork. These strategies can receive tacit support from supervisors, who may accept them as a means of getting the work done. The study explores the impact of a number of different forms of support on emotional exhaustion among a group of 480 call centre workers focusing, in particular, on the role of supportive behaviours relating to absence taking. The research shows that a supportive co-worker absence culture and team leader absence permissiveness can lessen the effects of job demands on emotional exhaustion and improve worker well-being. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Smoothing Mechanisms in Defined Benefit Pension Accounting Standards: A Simulation Study*

The accounting for defined benefit (DB) pension plans is complex and varies significantly across jurisdictions despite recent international convergence efforts. Pension costs are significant, and many worry that unfavorable accounting treatment could lead companies to terminate DB plans, a result that would have important social implications. A key difference in accounting standards relates to whether and how the effects of fluctuations in market and demographic variables on reported pension cost are “smoothed". Critics argue that smoothing mechanisms lead to incomprehensible accounting information and induce managers to make dysfunctional decisions. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these mechanisms may vary. We use simulated data to test the volatility, representational faithfulness, and predictive ability of pension accounting numbers under Canadian, British, and international standards (IFRS). We find that smoothed pension expense is less volatile, more predictive of future expense, and more closely associated with contemporaneous funding than is “unsmoothed” pension expense. The corridor method and market‐related value approaches allowed under Canadian GAAP have virtually no smoothing effect incremental to the amortization of actuarial gains and losses. The pension accrual or deferred asset is highly correlated with the pension plan deficit/surplus. Our findings complement existing, primarily archival, pension accounting research and could provide guidance to standard‐setters.     

Sourcing strategies of U.S. service companies: a modified transaction–cost analysis

Global procurement of services has been receiving an increasing amount of managerial attention in recent years. Service firms seem to have begun sourcing part of their service activities from abroad in much the same way as manufacturing firms have sourced components and finished goods in the past 30 years. However, little is known about the nature of service sourcing strategy. In this study, we employ a modified transaction–cost analysis to examine empirically the locational (domestic vs. global sourcing) and the ownership (internal vs. external sourcing) aspects of service sourcing strategy. In addition, performance implications on both the locational and ownership aspects of service sourcing are investigated. The results show that, similar to components and finished goods procurement, supplementary services are sourced globally, either internally or externally. Furthermore, the relationship between asset specificity and internal sourcing of supplementary services is moderated by the level of inseparability and transaction frequency. Finally, internal sourcing and foreign sourcing of supplementary services are negatively related to a service’s market performance. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Women's Leisure as Political Practice: A Feminist Analysis of Orange Is the New Black

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to examine representations of women's leisure portrayed on the popular Netflix television series Orange Is the New Black (OITNB). Using a feminist lens rooted in the notion of interconnectivity, we draw on four television tropes proposed by Pozner (2010 Pozner, J. L. (2010). Reality bites back: The troubling truth about guilty pleasure TV. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press. [Google Scholar]) that are commonly used to depict women characters on television to analyze representations of women's leisure in the first three seasons of OITNB. Our analysis reveals the complex and messy ways representations of women's leisure on OITNB can be used to discipline, reproduce, but also challenge power relations associated with common media tropes, acting as a form of political practice. We conclude by considering the implications of how these representations can influence the lives of women consuming this media content as part of their leisure.