Evaluating the employability paradox: When does organizational investment in human capital pay off?

Abstract

The paper explores the notion of the employability paradox which notes that while organizations investing in the career and competency development of their workforce can benefit from higher performance, they also risk losing more employable staff to competitors. Building on contributions from social exchange theory and signalling theory, we develop a model exploring the circumstances under which investment in career development benefits employees and organizations. We test our model in a longitudinal study following graduates entering the labour market. Our results show that when organizations signal that they care about employees by investing in their career development and individuals are receptive to such signals and proactively seek to manage their careers, investment in career development has a positive impact on organizational commitment and intention to stay with one’s employer. Our findings indicate that the idea of the employability paradox is simplistic and lacks theoretical and empirical support.     

Seeing and Doing: the Concept of Causation

This note is an extended review of the book by Judea Pearl (2000) on causality, in which the basic concepts therein are explained in a form that statisticians will hopefully appreciate, including some comments on their relevance to inference and decision-making.     

Unsettling aspects of voting theory

Summary. Voting procedures are known to be plagued with a variety of difficulties such as strategic voting, or where a voter is rewarded with a better election outcome by not voting, or where a winning candidate can lose by receiving more support. Once we know that these problems can occur, the next objective should be to completely understand how, why, and where they arise. Namely, for each election procedure, the new goal is to determine when such problems can occur, all voter types who can cause these difficulties, and the actions they must take. This paper develops an easily used approach to handle all of these issues for standard voting methods. New intuitive explanations for these various oddities follow from this approach. Received: August 14, 2002 ; revised version: September 4, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"My thanks to Richard Barrett and, in particular, to Hannu Nurmi for corrections, several useful comments, and suggestions they made about earlier versions. Also, my thanks to a referee for calling some excellent references to my attention. An earlier draft was presented at the 2002 Public Choice Society meeting. This research was supported by an NSF grant.     

Network topology and the efficiency of equilibrium

Different kinds of networks, such as transportation, communication, computer, and supply networks, are susceptible to similar kinds of inefficiencies. These arise when congestion externalities make the cost for each user depend on the other users' choice of routes. If each user chooses the least expensive (e.g., the fastest) route from the users' common point of origin to the common destination, the result may be Pareto inefficient in that an alternative choice of routes would reduce the costs for all users. Braess's paradox represents an extreme kind of inefficiency, in which the equilibrium costs may be reduced by raising the cost curves. As this paper shows, this paradox occurs in an (undirected) two-terminal network if and only if it is not series-parallel. More generally, Pareto inefficient equilibria occur in a network if and only if one of three simple networks is embedded in it.     

论生态工业园悖论、成因及其解决之道

首先将生态工业园建设迅猛发展的客观实际和其现阶段经济环境效益严重不足之间的矛盾,称之为生态工业园悖论。然后探讨了其成因,并指出其解决之道在于提高生态工业园的竞争力。进而指出,在构建生态工业园的全过程中必须通过技术创新和制度创新等手段,充分进行技术经济论证,要努力使生态工业园各投资主体获得不低于其社会平均收益率的经济效益,真正实现通过合理的、甚至是部分超额的经济利益来驱动各投资主体投资“资源节约型、环境友好型”项目,进而实现良性推动循环经济的目的,这是我们解决生态工业园悖论的根本之举。     

中国体制转轨中的政府权力悖论——认识中国转轨进程的一个独特视角

在我国体制转轨过程中，政府权力是一把“双刃剑”，既发挥了积极的、不可替代的作用，又对市场化改革产生了消极的影响，可以说是“诺斯悖论”在我国的一种表述。这一悖论的实质，是我国体制转轨时期特有的政府权力与个人权利的博弈，是政治与经济的冲突与协调，也是政府对市场的侵犯与保护。从政府权力悖论这一角度出发。能够更深刻地理解我国的体制转轨进程。     

IT投资的"生产力悖论"研究

近二十年来，在有关信息技术的研究问题中，“生产力悖论”是研究的焦点之一。本文从宏观经济层面、行业层面和公司层面这三个角度，对有关“生产力悖论”的研究进行梳理和探讨，并对我国的IT投资提出几点启示。     

马克思主义计划经济论的道德意蕴与实践悖论

被马克思主义经典作家寄予极高道德期望的“计划经济”．因被误解误用而使社会主义道德建设付出代价,造成崇高的道德理想与经济社会发展状况之间、道德的人性预设与人的物质存在之间、先进的政治理念与官僚主义极权现实之间的重大落差。重新思考计划经济的道德代价得到如下启示：先进的理论不能脱离现实的实践．不能不顾现实任意修订或者恶意篡改理论;不能放弃计划经济理念的道德理想意蕴,应充分发挥“计划”要素在市场经济中的引导作用;要借助于经济体制的完美设计,而不是用政治意识形态的理想化宣传来解决道德问题。     

从“信贷悖论”谈商业银行信贷资产的信用风险管理

摘要：从商业银行信用风险管理过程中引发的“信贷悖论”出发,基于信用风险抑制论和信用风险转移论的视角,比较、分析信用风险管理的方法与工具,阐述信贷资产转让交易、信贷资产证券化和信用衍生品三种交易模式,并从信用风险转移视角,说明我国商业银行信用风险管理发展情况并提出有关建议。     

盈余信息相关性悖论

悖论分为两个层次：逻辑不一致和信号选择偏误。盈余信息满足以下条件时具有相关性：（1）合理地诠释了经济利润;（2）符合各契约主体的信息要求。盈余信息满足条件（1）时,具有基础相关性;盈余信息满足条件（2）时,具有博弈相关性;同时满足两个条件时,盈余信息具备完备的相关性。提出了博弈相关性的两种形式：显式相关性和隐式相关性。引入显式相关性和隐式相关性后,解决了相关性的逻辑不一致,完善了盈余信息相关性理论。