Civil Service Reform in the Republic of Ireland

This article sets out the background to the current management reforms in the Irish civil service, and identifies some of the key features of the programme 'Delivering Better Government'. It explores how the programme relates to international developments in public service provision, and describes some of the challenges to be faced if the programme is to become reality.     

On computing mean returns and the small firm premium

The mean return computational method has a substantial effect on the estimated small firm premium. The buy-and-hold method, which best mimics actual investment experience, produces an estimated small-firm premium only one-half as large as the arithmetic and re-balanced methods which are often used in empirical studies. Similar biases can be expected in mean returns when securities are classified by any variable related to trading volume.     

Government-Owned Businesses: Market Presence, Competitive Advantages and Rationales for Their Support by the State

A bstract . In the aggregate, within industries and within non-socialist countries, the market presence of State-owned businesses is large and growing. Such concerns accounted for 15 percent of world trade in 1979 and they produced 70 percent of world oil production , 40 percent of world iron and bauxite and they accounted for 40 percent of the world's banking assets. Certain governments tend to accord them competitive advantages. Reasons given for doing so range from the belief that they foster economic growth and employment , that they equalize the domestic businesses' power to compete with big multinational companies , that they make national planning possible, to the idea that government favor should not go to benefit private owners , even domestic ones, and that the country, rather than the corporation, is the relevant unit of competition.     

The NOW account experiment and the demand for money

The authors use the NOW account experience in New England from 1972 to 1978 to estimate the responsiveness of the demand for money to interest payments on checkable accounts. Such an estimate is important in considering the effects on the demand for money of nationwide NOW's and of variations in interest rates on transactions balances in the future. With New England as the experimental region and the rest of the United States as a control group, the authors develop a cross-section, time-series framework to isolate and to estimate the interest rate responsiveness of money demand while accounting for effects of income, interest rates, and gradual adjustment.     

The effect of enduring,situational, and response involvement on preference stability in the context of voting behavior

A conceptual model of the relationships between enduring, situational, and response involvement is proposed and tested in the context of decision-making associated with a political election. Specifically, the model concerns relationships between involvement, knowledge, confidence, and the stability of preference for a specific candidate over time. Empirical support for the proposed model is found, and implications for involvement researchers and political marketers are offered.     

A new look at the relationship between time-series and structural econometric models

This paper examines the relationship between dynamic structural econometric models (SEM) and time series (TS) models. It extends the work of others by suggesting a reconciliation of SEM and TS models based on classical linear parameter restrictions in regression models rather than on time series methods. The paper demonstrates that in a number of common economic contexts there exist sets of plausible restrictions on the stochastic properties of the disturbances and on the dynamic adjustment processes in a SEM such that familiar structural models take on the form of univariate TS models. Consequently, it is argued that TS models should not be arbitrarily dismissed as being devoid of economic content.     

OPTIMAL PORTFOLIOS: MARKOWITZ FULL COVARIANCE VERSUS SIMPLE SELECTION RULES

Two major problems faced by portfolio managers are estimating the risk and return characteristics of individual securities and combining individual security risk and return estimates into optimal portfolios. The second problem is investigated in this paper by using the simple ranking criteria suggested by Elton, Gruber, and Padberg (EGP). The empirical results indicate that the EGP procedure is effective in estimating Markowitz efficient portfolios and can be an effective screening procedure for large numbers of securities.     

The impact of grand strategy and planning formality on financial performance

An empirical study involving 97 manufacturing firms that averaged $20 million in annual sales yielded a strong positive correlation between the degree of planning formality and firm performance. Additionally, interactive analysis disclosed that this relationship pervaded various grand strategies; the implication being that formalized strategic planning was consistently a positive factor associated with high levels of organizational performance.