Identifying the Effects of WIC on Food Insecurity Among Infants and Children

The Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program is considered a crucial component of the social safety net in the United States, yet there is limited supporting evidence on the effects of WIC on the nutritional well‐being and food security of infants and young children. Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, we apply recently developed partial identification methods to jointly account for unobserved counterfactual outcomes and systematic underreporting of WIC participation. Under nonparametric assumptions, we find that WIC reduces the prevalence of child food insecurity by at least 3.6 percentage points (20%).     

Leadership,Creative Problem‐Solving Capacity,and Creative Performance: The Importance of Knowledge Sharing

This article presents two studies that examine whether leader supportive behaviors facilitate knowledge sharing and employee creative problem‐solving capacity, thereby enhancing creative performance. The findings from both studies indicate that leader supportive behaviors are directly and indirectly related, through both internal and external knowledge sharing, to employee creative problem‐solving capacity. In addition, creative problem solving was related to the two dimensions of creative performance—fluency and originality. However, a test of the mediation model indicated that creative problem solving only mediated the relationship between internal knowledge sharing creative performance and originality. These findings highlight the complex process by which leaders facilitate both internal and external knowledge sharing and employee creative problem‐solving capacity, thereby improving employee creative performance.     

The impact of the Asian financial crisis on Japanese demand for travel to Hong Kong: A study of various forecasting techniques

The Asian financial crisis has drawn worldwide attention because of its significant economic impact on local economics, especially on the economy of a tourism‐dependent destination. Unfortunately, there have been very few articles about the relationship of the Asian financial crisis and tourism demand forecasting. This relative lack of prior studies on the Asian financial crisis and tourism demand forecasting is particularly true in the context of Hong Kong. This article reports on a study that utilized officially published data to test the accuracy of forecasts of Japanese demand for travel to Hong Kong, measured in terms of the number of Japanese tourist arrivals. Seven commonly‐used tourism forecasting techniques were used to determine the forecasting accuracy. The quality of forecasting accuracy was measured in five dimensions. Experimental results indicated mixed results in terms of forecasting accuracy. Overall, artificial neural network outperformed other techniques in three of the five dimensions.     

Dynamics of judicial service supply chains

Behavioral issues, coupled with temporary capacity imbalances, dictate the characteristics that a service supply chain assumes in the long run. The paper looks at a service chain in which two factors, backlogs and incentives, influence human agent processing times and, hence, service supply chain capacity. The paper finds that servers within the supply chain change their processing speeds in order to maintain a backlog of cases that is acceptable and credible. The backlog must not be too small, so as to avoid the impression that work is scant and there is idleness; but it must not be too large, so as to avoid the impression of laziness. Simultaneously, the paper finds that there are implicit incentives in the formal hierarchy that impinge upon throughput rates at certain stages of the supply chain: agents upstream try not to overwhelm their bosses' stations downstream with excess work. Hence, this paper looks at the effects of perceived backlogs within service supply chains and also at capacity unbalances that stem from such incentives. The study explores these issues in the context of a managerial intervention in a judicial service supply chain. The study identifies the structure of a seemingly unstructured decision execution that leads to the observed outcomes. The research results in a preliminary system dynamics model that suggests several operational steps to overcome bottlenecks and incompetency.     

What's in a broken promissory obligation? Developing and testing a multiple component form measure of psychological contract breach

While the literature has suggested the possibility of breach being composed of multiple facets, no previous study has investigated this possibility empirically. This study examined the factor structure of typical component forms in order to develop a multiple component form measure of breach. Two studies were conducted. In study 1 (N = 420) multi-item measures based on causal indicators representing promissory obligations were developed for the five potential component forms (delay, magnitude, type/form, inequity and reciprocal imbalance). Exploratory factor analysis showed that the five components loaded onto one higher order factor, namely psychological contract breach suggesting that breach is composed of different aspects rather than types of breach. Confirmatory factor analysis provided further evidence for the proposed model. In addition, the model achieved high construct reliability and showed good construct, convergent, discriminant and predictive validity. Study 2 data (N = 189), used to validate study 1 results, compared the multiple-component measure with an established multiple item measure of breach (rather than a single item as in study 1) and also tested for discriminant validity with an established multiple item measure of violation. Findings replicated those in study 1. The findings have important implications for considering alternative, more comprehensive and elaborate ways of assessing breach.     

Predicting Corporate Bankruptcy: An Evaluation of Alternative Statistical Frameworks

Corporate bankruptcy prediction has attracted significant research attention from business academics, regulators and financial economists over the past five decades. However, much of this literature has relied on quite simplistic classifiers such as logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis (LDA). Based on a large sample of US corporate bankruptcies, we examine the predictive performance of 16 classifiers, ranging from the most restrictive classifiers (such as logit, probit and linear discriminant analysis) to more advanced techniques such as neural networks, support vector machines (SVMs) and “new age” statistical learning models including generalised boosting, AdaBoost and random forests. Consistent with the findings of Jones et al. ( 2015 ), we show that quite simple classifiers such as logit and LDA perform reasonably well in bankruptcy prediction. However, we recommend the use of “new age” classifiers in corporate bankruptcy modelling because: (1) they predict significantly better than all other classifiers on both the cross‐sectional and longitudinal test samples; (2) the models may have considerable practical appeal because they are relatively easy to estimate and implement (for instance, they require minimal researcher intervention for data preparation, variable selection and model architecture specification); and (3) while the underlying model structures can be very complex, we demonstrate that “new age” classifiers have a reasonably good level of interpretability through such metrics as relative variable importances (RVIs).     

Nontraded Goods and Real Exchange Rates in a Multi‐Good Ricardian Model

The two‐country Ricardian trade model with discrete goods and uniform transport costs for tradable goods is applied to the decomposition of the real exchange rate into traded and nontraded components. The real exchange rate is driven almost entirely by changes in the productivity differentials in nontraded goods and also explains the Balassa–Samuelson effect of a lower cost of living in poor countries, but extraordinary transport costs for some nontraded goods are necessary to easily explain the Balassa–Samuelson effect.     

Press Freedom

In this important study, commissioned by the International Federation of the Periodical Press, Lord McGregor analyses the controversy surrounding the possibility and desirability of a new world information and communication order. Drawing critically from research into mass communications, he argues forcefully that the policies which are being promoted through UNESCO are a grave threat to press freedom. As it is, the number of nations enjoying freedom in the dissemination of news, ideas and knowledge has declined to a figure now variously estimated pessimistically at little more than 20 and even optimistically at below 40. Lord McGregor comments sardonically that by regretting this decline and arguing in favour of press freedom his contribution to the debate will be widely seen as ‘heavily biased’.     

The impact of sourcing enterprise system use and work process interdependence on sourcing professionals’ job outcomes

We examine sourcing professionals’ work context to conceptualize how they use sourcing enterprise systems (SESs) and to understand when SES use results in positive/negative job outcomes. We differentiate between SES use for supplier selection and supplier governance, identify sourcing professionals’ work process interdependence as a moderator for the impacts of SES use on job satisfaction, and suggest job satisfaction mediates the impacts of SES use on job performance. We conducted a field study of sourcing professionals’ SES use at one of the largest consumer product companies in the United States, which has implemented an SES to innovate its sourcing professionals’ work processes. Based on our analysis of the survey and qualitative data we collected, we found the impacts of both types of SES use (1) to be negative on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was high, (2) to be positive on job satisfaction when work process interdependence was low, and (3) to be mediated by job satisfaction for job performance. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literature at the intersection of information systems and operations management as well as for the information technology enabled innovation of sourcing processes and, more generally, complex business processes.