Employment predictions in social impact assessment: An analysis of some unexplored variables

Social scientists investigating the impacts of energy development are increasingly searching for predictive models of the employment benefits to locals. This issue is of extreme importance not only because of the benefits to locals but because of the issue of local benefits as well as the connection with population growth and boom town development. Unfortunately, some of the recent investigations and predictive models are of little utility as a result of certain analytical and methodological faults, including improper assumptions about local labor supply and local preferences. In addition to the assessment of previous investigations, a framework for predicting local employment impacts is suggested. This framework utilizes characteristics and preferences of the local population.     

PERSPECTIVE: Ten Years Of Experience Teaching A Multi‐Disciplinary Product Development Course⋆⋆

Integrated Design for Marketability and Manufacturing (IDMM at Stanford) is an Integrated Product Development course (IPD at Michigan) that is distinguished by hands‐on manufacture of customer‐ready prototypes executed by cross‐disciplinary teams of students (MBAs and graduate Engineering and Design students) in a simulated economic competition against benchmark products and against each other. The course design is such that teams can succeed only by performing well in each of the marketing, manufacturing, engineering, and design dimensions. Student failure modes include adopting the wrong product strategy, failure to execute a sound strategy of producing a product that meets market needs, failure to drive costs down, poor product positioning and/or communication, poor forecasting and inventory management, and poor team dynamics. Instructors adopting this course model will face challenges that derive from its definitively cross‐functional nature. The course involves faculty from Business, Engineering, and Design in a world where teaching load, compensation and infrastructural support is most often tallied on a unit‐specific basis. The course requires faculty with broad interests in a world in which narrow academic depth is often more highly valued. Other challenges the course presents include maintaining a sense of fairness in the final product competition, so that students can move beyond the anger of a potential failure to learn from their experience. Also, in its current manifestations on the Stanford and Michigan campuses the course requires expensive general‐purpose machine tools and instruction for students to build fully functional (customer‐ready) product prototypes. We provide our current resolutions to these challenges, and the rewards for making the effort. In the end, the course's survivability can be traced to the benefits it provides to all stakeholders: students, faculty, and administrators. These benefits include a course that integrates disciplines in a way that students believe will increase their integrative skills and marketability, a course that faculty can embrace as a vehicle for their own development in teaching and research, and that administrators find sufficiently novel and engaging to attract the attention of outside constituencies and the press. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

The role of risk in contract choice

Structuring contracts to share risk in light of incentive problemsis the central premise of contract theory, yet the risk-sharingimplications have rarely been thoroughly tested using micro-levelcontract data. In this article we test the major implicationsof a principal-agent model of contracts using detailed dataon more than 4000 individual contracts from modern North Americanagriculture. On a case-by-case basis, our evidence fails tosupport the standard principal-agent model with risk aversionas an explanation of contract choice in modern North Americanfarming. At the same time, we find some support for models thatassume risk-neutral contracting parties and stress multiplemargins for moral hazard and enforcement costs.