The Impact of Mexico's Retraining Program on Employment and Wages

This article analyzes the impact and effectiveness of the Mexicanlabor retraining program for unemployed and displaced workers—Programade Becas de Capacitación para Trabajadores (PROBECAT).The strategy followed is to compare the post-training labormarket experiences of trainees with those of a comparison group—amatched sample of unemployed individuals who were eligible for,but did not participate in, PROBECAT. The results of this exercisesuggest that participation in PROBECAT reduced the mean durationof unemployment for both men and women trainees and increasedthe monthly earnings of men, but not of women. The results alsoindicate that the post-training earnings effect varied systematicallyby level of education attained, with the largest earnings increases(of about 28 to 37 percent) found for men with six to twelveyears of education.     

A monetary business cycle model with unemployment

To reproduce key features of the post-war U.S. data, most monetary business cycle models must assume there are high price markups and that agents have high labour supply elasticities despite the existence of contradictory microeconomic evidence. This paper eliminates the need for these assumptions by introducing imperfectly observed effort into a limited participation model. The estimated model is better able to capture the sluggish price response to a monetary policy shock than the standard model, and is consistent with evidence regarding the qualitative responses of the U.S. economy to technology shocks, fiscal policy shocks and monetary policy shocks.     

A multilevel, identity-based approach to leadership development

A frontier of leadership development is examined involving the respective roles of levels-of-analysis and identity in constructing an integrated development system. An approach is described in which individual and relational leadership identities are the focus of developmental efforts at lower organizational levels (e.g., individual contributor and first-level supervisor) but collective identities become the focus at higher levels (e.g., general manager and above). The separate areas of levels-of-analysis and leader identities are first discussed in terms of their respective relevance to leadership development. These are then discussed jointly in elaborating on a proposed development approach that integrates across organizational levels as well as levels of development (i.e., leader development and leadership development). In developing collective leadership identities, processes that involve participants in engaging across boundaries (functional, hierarchical, geographical) are recommended.     

Presentation Matters: Comparison of Cognitive Effects of DTC Prescription Drug Advergames,Websites, and Print Ads

Applying limited cognitive capacity theory, this study examined the cognitive effects of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advergames in comparison to those of print ads and websites. The results revealed consumers’ memories of the advertised drug brand and information about the drug and the disease it treats was the lowest in the advergame condition and highest in print. For the content elements that were centrally integrated into the advergame, however, consumer recall was the highest in the advergame condition. In addition, differential memory decay was found across media types. Memory decay was greater in the print ad condition than the other media conditions.     

Executive stock options and IPO underpricing

In about one-third of US IPOs between 1996 and 2000, executives received stock options with an exercise price equal to the IPO offer price rather than a market-determined price. Among firms with such “IPO options”, 58% of top executives realize a net benefit from underpricing: the gain from the options exceeds the loss from the dilution of their pre-IPO shareholdings. If executives can influence either the IPO offer price or the timing and terms of their stock option grants, there should be a positive relation between IPO option grants and underpricing. We find no evidence of such a relation. Our results contrast sharply with the emerging literature on managerial self-dealing at shareholder expense.     

The Value of Online Seller Reputation: Evidence from a Price Comparison Site

This paper examines the value of seller reputation for e‐retailers trading via a price comparison site (PCS). E‐markets are widely held to accommodate sellers of differing service quality, including some who behave opportunistically. The paper uses a sample of offers on up to 295 digital cameras traded on a leading PCS, over a 134‐day period to estimate reputation's price impact. User‐generated reputation measures have a significant impact in the expected direction. However, their magnitude is small compared with variables capturing economy‐wide reputation. The strength of the reputation signal increased non‐monotonically with the number of reviews on which it was based. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The destination image gap – visitors' and residents' perceptions of place: evidence from Waiheke Island,New Zealand

This paper reports results derived from a survey of 2229 residents of, and 2151 visitors to the island of Waiheke, New Zealand. The study finds there was a close similarity of place image held by both visitors and residents. The paper examines the proposal that where congruency exists between visitor and resident image of place, there may be less negative perceptions of visitor impact on the part of residents. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected and analysed, the former involving the use of CatPac?, a neural network program for analysing textual data. Little support was found for the contention that place images shared by residents and tourists would increase tolerance of tourists on the part of residents.     

The differential futures of ski tourism in Ontario (Canada) under climate change: the limits of snowmaking adaptation

The international ski tourism industry is highly vulnerable to inter-annual climate variability and climate change. Accordingly, there is a strong need to advance our understanding of climate risk for this multi-billion tourism market that is so important to mountain regions around the world. This study addressed major limitations in the ski tourism literature, while concurrently supporting priority information needs of ski tourism stakeholders. An improved version of SkiSim 2.0 is applied to all 34 alpine ski areas in southern Ontario (Canada) to examine potential changes in the capacity of this regional marketplace. Model improvements include differential snowmaking capacities of individual ski areas, updated snowmaking decision rules, as well as a new indicator, termed ‘terrain-days’, to estimate changes in system capacity. The results project two fundamentally different futures for this ski tourism marketplace under climate change. If the international community succeeds in achieving the?+?2°C Paris Agreement policy goal, then losses in system capacity can be limited to less than 10% in the mid- and late-century. In contrast, a high-end emission scenario (RCP 8.5) would severely disrupt this ski tourism market by mid-century, with system capacity losses between 28% and 73%.     

Postauditing capital assets and firm performance: An empirical investigation

The argument presented in this paper is that the adoption of sophisticated postaudit procedures should be associated with improved firm performance. Based on a matched-pair experimental design, utilizing the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks test and a newly developed statistic to test for a change point, empirical evidence is provided to support this argument.