Recognizing the benefits of diversity: When and how does diversity increase group performance?

Diversity does not only bring positive consequences. It has often been recognized that heterogeneity in teams can reduce intra-group cohesiveness, and that it can lead to conflicts and misunderstandings which, in turn, can lower employee satisfaction, citizenship behaviors and increase turnover. On the other hand, there is also evidence for performance-increasing effects of diversity because it can improve creativity and innovation through the team members' greater variety of perspectives. Little is known, however, about the conditions and the psychological mechanisms required for increasing group performance under diverse settings. Answers to research questions such as how and when diversity influences performance at work are still limited. The purpose of the paper is to provide theoretical answers to these questions by proposing a model of managing diversity which draws on social psychology theories. The model brings a new perspective by identifying the process of learning from one another's identity within a group. This process underlies two different levels of mechanisms (individual and group level). The model proposes that when these social psychological mechanisms are activated, diversity will lead to an increase in group performance. The model also suggests that collective identity is salient and when psychological safety climate are the psychological conditions that activate these mechanisms.     

Good research and bad teaching? A business school tale

The paper presents a simultaneous differential game between rich and poor Business Schools (BS) that yields an equilibrium in which either type of BS may end up with bad teaching and good research, without resorting to informational problems. The necessary condition for this is that the BS’s impatience is smaller than the growth rate of research, which may arise as a result of the school’s lack of vision and ambition in becoming a leading school, or due to the fact that after a given critical mass of human capital is achieved in a BS, research grows fast, making BS managers underuse the available human capital for teaching. Policy implications are discussed.     

An assessment of the equality of access and no-regulation approaches to next generation networks

The European Commission believes that for the regulation of next generation fixed telecommunications networks the continuity approach is preferable to the equality of access approach and the no-regulation approach. According to the European Commission, (i) functional separation eliminates discrimination and promotes competition, but should only be used as a measure of last resort because it involves various complex trade-offs, whereas (ii) the no-regulation approach fosters investment, at the cost of sacrificing competition. The article agrees that functional separation involves complex trade-offs but disputes the assertion that functional separation necessarily eliminates discrimination and promotes competition. In addition, the article also establishes conditions under which the no-regulation approach does not reduce competition.     

DYNAMIC HEDGE FUND STYLE ANALYSIS WITH ERRORS‐IN‐VARIABLES

We revisit the traditional return‐based style analysis in the presence of time‐varying exposures and errors‐in‐variables (EIV). We apply a benchmark selection algorithm using the Kalman filter and compute the estimated EIV of the selected benchmarks. We adjust them by subtracting their EIV from the initial return series to obtain an estimate of the true uncontaminated benchmarks. Finally, we run the Kalman filter on these adjusted regressors. Analyzing EDHEC alternative index styles, we show that this technique improves the factor loadings and allows more precise identification of the return sources of the considered hedge fund strategy.     

Long-run equilibrium and short-run dynamics between risk exposure and highway safety

Based upon monthly California data, this exploratory analysis uses vector error correction methods and associated statistical tests to identify the long-run relationship and the short-run dynamics between highway exposure and crashes. The analysis finds that there is a cointegrating relationship between exposure and crashes, and for fatal, serious injury, and materials crashes, could not reject the hypothesis that crash exposure and frequency move proportionately. The analysis indicates that vector error correction models may be an important tool for improving our understanding of highway crashes and the near and longer term impacts of alternative safety policies.     

Assessing economic complexity as interindustry connectedness in nine OECD countries

Economic complexity can be defined as the level of interdependence between the component parts of an economy. In input–output systems interindustry connectedness is a crucial feature of analysis, and there are many different methods of measuring it. Most of the measures however, have important drawbacks to be used as a good indicator of economic complexity, because they were not explicitly made with this purpose in mind. In this paper, we present, discuss and compare empirically different indexes of economic complexity as intersectoral connectedness, using the inter-industry tables of nine OECD countries. According to most of the measures of connectedness large economies (USA, Japan) tend to be more complex than small economies (for example, Denmark). But if another type of measures is considered, the opposite conclusion is drawn, signalling a hidden characteristic of interdependence that so far has not been detected by conventional measures. This result should qualify the widespread idea that more interconnected productive structures propagate more intensely exogenous shocks and/or economic policy measures.     

The relationship between regional value-added and public capital in Finland: what do the new panel econometric techniques tell us?

This article applies recently developed panel estimation techniques to estimate the elasticity of private production with respect to public capital in a regional framework. We use the widely applied production function approach and regional data from Finland for the 1975–2004 period. In contrast to many previous studies about the productivity of public capital, we focus especially on panel estimation techniques, showing that the results from commonly applied fixed effects OLS are probably biased and sensitive to a change of estimator. To get more reliable results, we use the panel DOLS and panel DSUR estimators. The results suggest that public capital has had a positive impact on private production.     

Travel and activity time allocation: An empirical comparison between eight cities in Europe

A study of daily time allocation to travel and out-of-home activity is conducted across eight European cities over three countries: France (Lyon, Grenoble, Strasbourg and Rennes), Switzerland (Geneva, Bern and Zurich) and Belgium (Brussels), based on individual travel survey data collected between 1997 and 2006. The effects of socio-demographic, spatial context, transport availability and city-specific variables are investigated thanks to the Cox proportional hazard model. The results indicate that socio-demographic characteristics and city (or country) specific effect play a major role while residential density and proximity to high level road or public transport networks have a very limited impact on time budgets for travel and out-of-home activities.     

Whites,Blacks, and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Brown</Emphasis> in the Labor Market in Brazil: A Study About Inequalities

This paper examines inequalities between white and black and brown populations in Brazil within occupations that require university degree. The main result confirms that once reached the university degree, blacks/brown usually obtain smaller but comparable income to that of whites. Although some racial discrimination in labor market may exist, such result corroborates other studies that identify schooling differentials as the main reason for the high income inequality found in Brazil.