Business groups,the financial market and modernization*

Business groups are an important aspect of the industrial organization of many developing countries. This paper develops a theory suggesting that they may be organizations that facilitate modernization in the presence of financial market constraints. An important function of the stockmarket is the diversification of risk that comes with specialized, productive technology. But in the face of serious information problems a well functioning stockmarket may fail to emerge, relegating the economy to a low productivity‐poverty trap. Bilateral links between a firm and a group of others may be a more cost effective way to achieve risk‐sharing. Such business groups may be feasible when a full‐fledged stockmarket is not. As modernization takes place, either because information problems become less severe or more firms enter the economy, business groups actually expand in size before being abruptly rendered obsolete by the stockmarket. This is consistent with empirical results from a number of emerging economies.     

Spillover Effects of Real and Nominal Uncertainties in India

This paper examines the spillover effects and the causality between inflation, output growth and its uncertainties for India. Using monthly data for the period from April 1980 to April 2011, we estimated a bi-variate GARCH in mean with BEKK representations. This study differs from the earlier works where the parameters in the BEKK representations are estimated individually and the inferences are drawn on the basis of the individual lagged variance, covariance, and error terms from the respective equations. The empirical evidence suggests that inflation uncertainty seems to have significant negative impact on output growth and positive impact on output uncertainty and there is a positive influence of output uncertainty on the inflation. More importantly, there are spillovers and volatility transmission effects between the macroeconomic uncertainties where the volatility in output growth is significantly influenced by the shocks and volatility in inflation.

     

The burden of glory: Competing for nonmonetary incentives in rank‐order tournaments

In an environment in which elite, highly paid professionals compete for nonmonetary rewards, we find evidence of underperformance. Our analysis suggests that choking under pressure from high‐stakes nonmonetary rewards is behind the underperformance. This implies that high stakes nonmonetary rewards can create meaningful pressure on individuals and lead to worse performance, a distinct issue that has yet to be adequately examined. These findings come from an examination of the behavior of top U.S. golfers competing to earn a place on the U.S. Ryder Cup team via their performance in PGA Tour tournaments with differing allocations of Ryder Cup qualifying points.     

Stock of downstream complementary assets as a catalyst for product innovation during technological change in the U.S. machine tool industry

Research summary : We investigate the effect of incumbents' stock of downstream complementary assets on their product innovation during a disruptive technological change. We theorize that a firm's stock of downstream complementary assets, by providing critical information about shifting demand conditions, will play a catalytic role in firm adaptation during such a change. Using the advent of disruptive computer numerical control machine tools in the U.S. machine tool industry during the 1970s and 1980s as the context, we find that firms with greater stocks of downstream complementary assets are likely to be product innovation leaders during such a change. Managerial summary : Disruptive changes are challenging firms across industries. We concentrate on the U.S. machine tool industry during the 1970s and 1980s when Japanese manufacturers with disruptive computer numerical control systems challenged the U.S. manufacturers. We find that, under the threat of disruption, the greater the stock of downstream complementary assets a U.S. machine tool manufacturer has, the more likely it is to be the product innovation leader with the disruptive technology. Our findings provide novel insights for managers in companies that face disruptive changes and can help them avoid the consequences of such changes as predicted by prior research. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Technologically evolving industrial equipment fabricators: their foreign involvement

In the United States fabrication shops build equipment to client specifications. Once their growth and profitability were closely aligned with those of their clients who were generally the larger firms. Now that most of these clients import their needs from abroad, fabrication shops need to compete on their own in both domestic and foreign markets. In order to help them achieve their goal, we need to have some understanding of their internal development and further identify possible barriers to their foreign involvement. To this end, a conceptual model with several operational and planning variables, to discriminate fabrication shops that service foreign markets from those that do not, is postulated and empirically tested. Policy implications of the study findings are discussed briefly. Limitations of the statistical procedures and possible future work are outlined.     

How Ethical Leadership Shapes Employees’ Job Performance: The Mediating Roles of Goal Congruence and Psychological Capital

Drawing from research on ethical leadership, psychological capital, and social learning theory, this study investigated the mediating effects of goal congruence and psychological capital in the link between supervisors’ ethical leadership style and followers’ in-role job performance. Data captured from 171 employees and 24 supervisors showed that ethical leadership has a positive effect on followers’ in-role job performance, yet this effect is explained through the role of psychological capital and follower–leader goal congruence, providing evidence of mediation. These findings have significant implications for research and practice.     

Do political determinants affect revenue collection? Evidence from the Indian states

In a recent study, Dash and Raja (2013) have shown that the size and composition of public expenditure of Indian states are systematically linked with political determinants such as the extent of government fragmentation, strength of opposition, electoral years, and ideology. This study extends the questions to whether there are similar links to revenue collections by the governments that rule the different states in India. Using the same time period of the previous study, four revenue measures related to tax collection and internal debt are considered and four different sets of hypotheses are developed by linking the political determinants with each of the revenue measures. The overall findings of the study suggest that the government-specific political determinants are significant and robust determinants of revenue collections of the Indian states.     

Personality and balanced psychological contracts: The mediating roles of epistemic curiosity and rule‐following behavior

This study extends prior research on the relationships between personality constructs and types of psychological contracts by exploring how the Big Five traits predict balanced psychological contracts. Further, we determine whether epistemic curiosity and rule‐following behavior are key mediators of the proposed relationships. We tested our proposed hypotheses using three‐wave time‐lagged data from 469 respondents. The results indicated that openness to experience was positively associated and both conscientiousness and neuroticism were negatively associated with balanced contracts. Extraversion and agreeableness were not associated with balanced contracts. We also established the mediating role of epistemic curiosity in the relationships between personality traits and balanced contracts, but there was no support for the mediating role of rule‐following behavior in the present study. These findings have important implications for managers and organizations in terms of selecting the right person for a job (person‐job fit) and ensuring employee retention (person‐organization fit), hence having a bottom‐line effect on firm performance. Future research directions are also discussed.     

The impact of relative prices on tourism demand for Mauritius: An empirical analysis

The present study assesses the impact of relative prices on tourism flows in Mauritius. To account for dynamism in tourism flows modelling, a dynamic time series analysis – namely the vector autoregressive model – is employed. The results show that relative price measures have a long-run impact on international tourism flows, indicating that tourists are sensitive to price levels. The relative average cost in the different competing destinations is also reported to be positive and significant, indicating that the impact of relative price changes in foreign destinations competing with Mauritius tourism matters; thus indicating a certain degree of substitutability between Mauritian and its regional competitors’ tourism. Tourism infrastructure, income in country of origin and the island's level of development are confirmed to be key factors in the tourist selection decision. Finally, overall, short-run estimates confirm the above results.     

Some generalized distributions based on Stacy's generalized gamma distribution

Abstract

The generalized gamma distribution having the density function was introduced by Stacy (1962), who studied some of its properties. As observed by Stacy, many standard distributions are special cases of (1). For example d=p=1 gives the exponential, p=1 gives the gamma p=1 and d=n/2 (n is a positive integer) gives the chi-squared, and d=p gives the Weibull distribution. Furthermore, certain functions of a normal variable— viz., its positive even powers, its modulus, and all positive powers of its modulus, have Stacy's gamma form.