Flexible Working,Individual Performance,and Employee Attitudes: Comparing Formal and Informal Arrangements

In the context of a wider trend to individualize human resource management, this article examines the relationship between flexible working arrangements and individual performance. Drawing on a range of theories, this article also examines potential indirect effects on employee performance via job satisfaction and organizational commitment and analyzes whether these relationships vary according to whether the arrangement was set up through a formal process or negotiated informally between the employee and his or her line manager. Extant research has tended to focus on formal arrangements, however, informal arrangements are widespread and may better accommodate work‐life preferences, thereby potentially fostering more positive attitudes from employees. Survey data from 2,617 employees in four large organizations with well‐established flexible working policies are analyzed. Results from structural equation models show average positive indirect effects from informal flexible working, but also negative direct effects from formal flexible working. When two forms of flexible working amenable to being set up by both formal and informal means are examined separately, formal arrangements for flexibility over working hours are found to be negatively associated with performance, but also a source of greater job satisfaction; informal remote working arrangements have positive indirect effects via organizational commitment and job satisfaction on worker performance. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The shape of small sample biases in pricing kernel estimations

Numerous empirical studies find pricing kernels that are not-monotonically decreasing; the findings are at odds with the pricing kernel being marginal utility of a risk-averse, so-called representative agent. We study in detail the common procedure which estimates the pricing kernel as the ratio of two separate density estimations. In the first step, we analyse theoretically the functional dependence for the ratio of a density to its estimated density; this cautions the reader regarding potential computational issues coupled with statistical techniques. In the second step, we study this quantitatively; we show that small sample biases shape the estimated pricing kernel, and that estimated pricing kernels typically violate the commonly believed monotonicity at the centre even when the true pricing kernel fulfils these. This contributes to an alternative, statistical explanation for the puzzling shape in pricing kernel estimations.     

Life Cycle Price Trends and Product Replacement: Implications for the Measurement of Inflation

The paper explores the extent to which products follow systematic pricing patterns over their life cycle and the impact this has on the measurement of inflation. Using a large U.S. scanner data set on supermarket products and applying flexible regression methods, we find that on average prices decline as items age. This life cycle price change is often attributed to quality difference in the construction of CPI as items are replaced due to disappearance or during sample rotations. This introduces a systematic bias in the measurement of inflation. For our data we find that the life cycle bias leads to the underestimation of inflation by around 0.30 percentage points each year for the products examined.     

Information diffusion and the predictability of New Zealand stock market returns

This paper examines the impact of international predictors from liquid markets on the predictability of excess returns in the New Zealand stock market using data from May 1992 to February 2011. We find that US stock market return and VIX contribute significantly to the out‐of‐sample forecasts at short horizons even after controlling for the effect of local predictors, while the contribution by Australian stock market return is not significant. We further demonstrate that the predictability of New Zealand stock market returns using US market predictors could be explained by the information diffusion between these two countries.     

Investment Horizon and Repo in the Over‐the‐Counter Market

This paper presents a three‐period model featuring a short‐term investor in the over‐the‐counter bond market. A short‐term investor stores cash because of a need to pay cash at some future date. If a short‐term investor buys bonds, then a deadline for retrieving cash lowers the resale price of bonds for the investor through bilateral bargaining in the bond market. Ex‐ante, this hold‐up problem explains the use of a repo by a short‐term investor, the existence of a haircut, and the vulnerability of a repo market to counterparty risk. This result holds without any uncertainty about bond returns or asymmetric information.     

经理任期、声誉效应与过度投资*——U型理论与经验证据

声誉效应可以缓解代理冲突并抑制过度投资,但其效果却随任期期限临近而衰退。本文理论分析了企业过度投资与经理任期之间的U型关系。以中国A股上市公司为样本,运用门限自回归实证模型,进行实证分析。本文研究发现：作为声誉效应的代理变量,经理任期对过度投资的影响呈U型。在经理任期达到特定门限值42个月之前,经理任期与过度投资呈负相关关系。在门限值之后,声誉效应逐渐失去作用,随着经理任期的增加,过度投资程度提高。     

Do family farms really converge to a uniform size? The role of unobserved farm efficiency*

We analyse the growth of family farms in Israeli cooperative villages during a period of economic turmoil. We use instrumental variables to account for the endogeneity of initial farm size, and correct for selectivity as a result of farm survival. We also include a technical efficiency index, derived from the estimation of a stochastic frontier production model, as an explanatory variable. Our aim is to check whether ignoring efficiency could have been the reason for convergence results obtained elsewhere in the literature. We found that technical efficiency is an important determinant of farm growth, and that not controlling for technical efficiency could seriously bias the results. In particular, larger farms are found to grow faster over time, while without controlling for technical efficiency the farm growth process seemed to be independent of initial farm size. The increasing polarisation of farm sizes in Israel has ramifications for the inefficiencies induced by the historical quota system, for the political power of the farm sector and for the social stability of farm communities.     

上市公司经营性现金流操纵实证研究

本文在已有研究思路的基础上,改进了实证方法,考察了1999-2004年再融资的554家A股公司的经营性现金流操纵行为.1998、2001年虽然有现金流量表的规范文件出台,但经营性现金流操纵仍是我国A股上市公司的普遍行为.文章在跨期5年的实证考察中也印证了公司再融资时确实通过获得一次性的税费返还、收回被股东单位占用的资金、拖延支付货款以及其他与经营活动有关的支出等手段操纵上市公司的现金流.     

正确把握经济走势实现平稳快速增长

2003年中国经济增长存在有局部过热的特点。新一轮经济增长周期是我们在社会主义市场经济体制下宏观调控中遇到的第一个重要关口。局部过热会引起局部的、结构性物价上涨。而若发展到全局过热,仍会引起全面的通货膨胀。因此,要适时适度地进行宏观调控,保持经济继续平稳、较快地增长;在微观层面上,企业要有应对市场的安全应急机制。     

支持向量机在航材供应模型中的研究

针对部队航材供应量预测过程中,样本采集数目较少的实际情况,采用了一种新的预测方法—支持向量机。该方法基于统计学习理论的原理,较好地解决了小样本的学习问题。并以某部队2000～2007年某项航材供应量为学习样本,建立了该项航材的供应量预测模型。计算结果表明,这种方法比传统的方法具有更少的误差和更好的预测精度。