Explaining The <Emphasis Type="Italic">Hump</Emphasis> In Life Cycle Consumption profiles

Summary  This paper documents life cycle (or age) profiles of (log) household income, durable and non-durable consumption for Dutch households after explicitly controlling for time (or business cycle) effects and birth cohort effects. We find that both measures of consumption as well as income is clearly hump shaped over the life cycle. Hence, real consumption per household seems to track income over the life cycle. This empirical regularity is hard to reconcile with basic specifications of the life cycle model. We further document life cycle profiles of demographic and labor supply variables. We argue that part, but not all, of the hump in consumption may be explained by household composition variables. Durable consumption per adult equivalent stays approximately flat until age 60 after which it drops dramatically. This phenomenon may be partly explained by a decrease in work related durable expenditures after retirement. Non-durable consumption per equivalent adult increases steadily until age 55 and stays approximately flat after that.      

The relationship between attitudes toward diversity management in the Southwest USA and the GLOBE study cultural preferences

This study investigates the importance of diversity management as it relates to the GLOBE study cultural preferences. A survey of 225 students in undergraduate and graduate programs at a private Texas University concluded that collectivism was a strong predictor of how positively participants rated their organizations support for diversity, diversity recruitment efforts, diversity training for mentors, and employees with disabilities. The participants were nontraditional students who were also employed in a wide array of organizations. Collectivism and assertiveness were both strong predictors with regard to participant's ratings of chief executive officer (CEO) support of diversity and the organization's overall diversity training. With regard to leadership dimensions, humane-oriented leadership was a positive predictor of preference for a collective culture, which predicts diversity management ratings. Team-oriented leadership also predicted ratings of diversity management. The results of the study indicate that promoting a more collectivist rather than individualistic culture is associated with the increased rating of organizational diversity practices. Furthermore, it strengthens the argument that with the increase in globalization, organizations must be prepared to re-evaluate their policies and know when to adapt to changes in organizational culture.     

Personality similarities and differences between Mexican and American business leaders

A study was conducted to investigate personality similarities and differences for a group of 200 business leaders, 100 each from Southern Mexico and the United States. Mexican and American leaders were administered the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF) in their native language (Spanish or English). A demographic questionnaire solicited information about age, education, and gender. These variables were used as covariates in some analyses. After controlling for the effects of age, gender, and education level, the authors found that Mexican leaders scored higher than their American counterparts on the warmth, emotional stability, social boldness, and openness to change scales. American leaders scored higher on the abstractedness and self‐reliance scales. On scales related to leadership there were between‐nationality differences on emotional stability, social boldness, abstractedness, and self‐reliance. Additional studies are suggested to illuminate cross‐nationality similarities and differences.     

A study of follower's personality,implicit leadership perceptions,and leadership ratings

This research was designed to test the theoretical relationship between personality, implicit leadership, and leadership style suggested in past studies. Specifically, it was designed to link traits from the five‐factor model of personality (the Big Five), by utilizing the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), to a follower's perception of the leadership style of George W. Bush, based on Bass and Avolio's (1997) MLQ5X. A voluntary sample was taken consisting of undergraduate and graduate students from three universities in southern Texas in 2006, with a sample size of N = 303. Respondents who scored high in neuroticism rated the leader as less transformational than those who did not. Also, the ancillary variable good leadership had a positive effect on the respondent's ratings of the leader as a transformational leader, and as a less passive leader, than subjects who did not rate the leader as being a good leader. There was a significant relationship found between respondents' political party affiliation and their transformational and passive leadership ratings. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of the Obama versus McCain presidential race.     

Aiding violence or peace? The impact of foreign aid on the risk of civil conflict in sub-Saharan Africa

This paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict. We improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using GDP levels of donor countries as instruments. A more structural addition to the literature is that we efficiently control for unobserved country specific effects in typical conflict onset and conflict continuation models by first differencing. The literature often overlooks the dynamic nature of these types of models, thereby forcing unlikely i.i.d. structures on the error terms implicitly.¹ As a consequence, malfunctioning institutions, deep-rooted political grievances, or any other obvious, yet unobserved and time persistent determinants of war are simply assumed away. We find a statistically significant and economically important negative effect of foreign aid flows on the probability of ongoing civil conflicts to continue (the continuation probability), such that increasing aid flows tends to decrease civil conflict duration. We do not find a significant relationship between aid flows and the probability of civil conflicts to start (the onset probability).     

A SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS APPROACH TO MODELING INDUSTRY STRUCTURE AND ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE

This paper presents a simultaneous equations model of profitability, concentration, advertising expenditures, and research and developed outiays. The data are subjected to regression diagnostics in an effort to ascertain the importance to the estimation of a subset of the data than can have a disproportional influence. The estimation results, especially for the advertising expenditures relationship and the research and development outlays equation, do change when a truncated data sample (based on the omission of the outliers) is used. This serves as a partial explanation of why there is disagreement in the literature on market structure and economic performance.     

The effects of risk‐taking tendency on risk choice and pre‐ and post‐decisional information selection

Ideally, people seek and select information about unfamiliar risks with which they are confronted, before they make a risk choice. This study investigated what happens when people do not have this opportunity. The main question was how risk‐taking tendency influences intuitive risk decisions and how this impacts subsequent information search and subsequent choices. In the present study, participants had to make a choice about an unfamiliar risk, either before or after they had had the opportunity to search for (risk‐promoting or risk‐averse) information. In the condition where they could only seek for information after they had made a choice, they had to reconsider their first choice and make a second risk choice. We expected that (1) risk‐taking tendency would impact people's risk choices, but only in the situation where they have little information. On the basis of cognitive dissonance theory, it was furthermore predicted that (2) risk‐taking tendency and (3) initial risk choice would affect risk information selection. Furthermore, we predicted that (4) the first risk choice and (5) the risk information selected would influence the subsequent risk choice. The results suggest that if people make a first, intuitive decision about an unknown risk, risk‐taking tendency has an effect on the choice, but that this does not happen when people can first select information. Risk‐taking tendency did not influence information selection, but initial choice did (although in another way than we expected). Furthermore, both the first risk choice and the risk information selected affected subsequent risk choices. These findings suggest that people often make initial intuitive decisions that are influenced by personality characteristics, and that are subsequently difficult to change.     

Security or opportunity: the influence of risk‐taking tendency on risk information preference

It has been suggested that risk avoiders and risk takers differ in the extent to which they focus on the worst and best outcomes of a risky activity. By implication risk avoiders and risk takers should also differ in their risk information preferences. Specifically, as risk avoiders focus more on the worst outcomes, it was hypothesized that they would prefer negative information about the risk. In contrast, as risk takers focus more on the best outcomes, it was hypothesized that they would prefer positive information about the risk. In an information selection task, subjects could select newspaper headlines that indicated negative and positive information about a variety of risks. Contrary to the hypothesis, risk avoiders selected more positive information than risk takers. The results are discussed in relation to the influence of personality on risk taking. One tentative explanation is that differences in anxiety between risk avoiders and risk takers account for these results in that risk avoiders try to find reassurance by seeking positive information. Another is that the participants were seeking reassurance in a relatively involuntary confrontation with risks.