A study into mechanisms of attitudinal scale conversion: A randomized stochastic ordering approach

Quantitative Marketing and Economics - This paper considers the methodological challenge of how to convert categorical attitudinal scores (like satisfaction) measured on one scale to a categorical...     

Estimating the return to training and occupational experience: The case of female immigrants

We formulate a dynamic discrete choice model of training and employment to measure the personal and social benefits from government provided training for a sample of high-skilled female immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Israel. We find that training has a significant impact on the mean offered wage in white-collar occupations, but not in blue-collar occupations. Training substantially increases the job-offer rates in both occupations. Counterfactual policy simulations show a substantial social gain from increasing the access to training programs, and the estimated model provides a good fit for within-sample, out-of-sample and aggregate trends using cross-sectional survey data.     

LABOR MOBILITY OF IMMIGRANTS: TRAINING,EXPERIENCE, LANGUAGE,AND OPPORTUNITIES*

This article analyzes the labor mobility and human capital accumulation of male immigrants from the former Soviet Union to Israel. We estimate a dynamic choice model for employment and training in blue‐ and white‐collar occupations, where the labor market randomly offered opportunities are affected by past choices. The estimated model accurately reproduces the patterns in the data. The estimated direct earning return to local training, local experience, and knowledge of Hebrew are very high, whereas imported skills have zero (conditional) return. The welfare gain from the impact of training on job offer probabilities is larger than its effect on wages.     

Managing the Intangible Aspects of a Project: The Affect of Vision,Artifacts, and Leader Values on Project Spirit and Success in Technology‐Driven Projects

Successful projects are often characterized by a unique spirit. Phase one results, based on 193 employees partaking in 60 projects across organizations, support a model positing that leader building activities affect employees' emotions, attitudes, and behavioral norms that are focused on expected project outcomes, termed project spirit. Spirit affects employees' contextual performance behavior, which in turn affects success as proposed. Phase two cases, designed to ground these results in technology‐driven project contexts, highlight the value of managing the project's intangible aspects captured by spirit. Quantitative and qualitative findings imply that leaders can be coached to execute behaviors that generate a project's spirit, which boosts contextual performance behavior and increases project success.     

Profit Without Copyright

An elite consensus appears to have formed around the strengthening of IPR regimes. At the same time, many people, particularly in developing countries, are questioning the idea of paying for what they intuitively sense might possibly be free. In view of the potential for global dissensus on this issue, businesses that produce and distribute explicit knowledge, or digital sequences, would be quite prudent to start making contingency plans for a new form of global capitalism: one characterised by much weaker IPR regimes. Competitive business strategies based upon rival-complementarity (i.e. physical goods and human services that complement digital products) indicate the feasibility of a global economy-of-things, resting upon a freely accessible ecology of knowledge. This might be built in the future, in much the same way that an industrial economy was built, historically, upon a natural ecology of available land and biosystems. Such an arrangement conforms to several rather fundamental political intuitions.     

Agriculture in transition economies: from common heritage to divergence

The 23 former socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) started the transition in 1989–1990 from a common institutional and organizational heritage, represented by the Soviet agricultural model. Despite the common heritage in agriculture, the reform policies in CEE and CIS diverged from the start, as significant differences emerged between the two groups of countries in legal attitudes to private land ownership, transferability of land, the extent of agricultural privatization and individualization, and restructuring of farms. This divergence in the implementation of agricultural reform has led to divergence in standard development measures: the CEE countries are outperforming the CIS countries by growth in GDP and agricultural product since 1992; the productivity of agricultural labor in CEE is generally increasing, and in CIS it is decreasing. While the CIS countries at best can be characterized as reluctant reformers, the CEE countries have achieved significantly higher levels of economic and institutional reform. Better performance in CEE is associated with greater readiness of the governments in these countries to implement a comprehensive package of economic and social reform policies, including more radical land reform and deeper individualization and restructuring of agriculture.     

Justice Failure: Efficiency and Equality in Business Ethics

This paper offers the concept of “justice failure,” as a counterpart to the familiar idea of market failure, in order to better understand managers’ ethical obligations. This paper takes the “market failures approach” (MFA) to business ethics as its point of departure. The success of the MFA, I argue, lies in its close proximity with economic theory, particularly in the idea that, within a larger scheme of social cooperation, markets ought to pursue efficiency and leave the pursuit of equality to the welfare state. As a result, the core ethical responsibility of business actors is to avoid profiting off of market failure. After reviewing this approach I challenge its emphasis on efficiency. I argue that just as we note the suboptimal efficiency of actual markets (market failure), we should also take seriously the suboptimal equality of actual welfare states (what I call “justice failure”). Taking this idea seriously results in a whole other set of ethical responsibilities for businesses to take into account; in addition to market imperfections and regulatory lacunae, managers should also avoid profiting from, and exacerbating, structural inequalities and injustices. I offer an outline of the kinds of injustices and inequalities that would have bearing on business ethics, and the kinds of ethical responsibilities that this approach suggests that business actors should take into account.     

Efficient sets with and without the expected utility hypothesis

Consider a feasible set, X, of c.d.f.'s. Assume that the set of decision makers, who must choose from X, includes non-expected utility decision makers who are risk averse in some weaker notions. We show that in this case the efficient set of X expands relative to the expected utility case. We characterize the efficient sets for each notion of risk aversion including the expected utility case. It is also shown that the limited-coverage insurance policies, which are not efficient under the expected utility hypothesis, belong to the efficient set when weakly risk-averse non- expected utility functionals are assumed to exist.