Small Firm Growth: Intentions, Implementation and Impediments

Recent evidence suggests that many small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK experience difficulty growing from the start-up phase into larger well established firms. This research uses survey data from UK instruments, printing and software SMEs to explore the attitudes of SME managers towards growth, to identify the strategies they pursue to achieve growth, and to establish the main factors they perceive to be limiting their growth. We find that although most managers profess to value growth and follow expansionary strategies, the main limits on the growth of SMEs are the intensity of competition stemming from the recession, and the inability or unwillingness of management to deal with the increased administrative burden arising from expansion.     

The effects of advertising and solicitation on audit fees

Leading academic and professional accountants have suggested that the crisis in auditing over the past few years may have had its origin in deregulation which allowed firms to advertise their services and solicit new clients, encouraging accounting firms to become more commercial. In this paper, we look at this issue in New Zealand which has the unique distinction of having separated two key forms of deregulation, namely advertising and solicitation, by 6 years. This allows us to separately examine the effect of each form of market competition on audit fees. We find that advertising is associated with increases in fees, not decreases, which suggests that quality-based advertising took place, and not price-based advertising. In contrast, solicitation corresponded with a general decrease in average fees for clients of the Big 8. We interpret this result as indicating an increase in competition among accounting firms. Our results suggest that there may be a much more complex relationship among market competition, advertising and solicitation, and fees than the arguments used to originally justify deregulation.     

What's on the Menu? Policies to Reduce Young People's Sugar Consumption

Young people in the UK consume far above the maximum recommended levels of added sugar. It is likely that neither they nor their parents fully take account of the future health, social and economic costs of this high sugar consumption. This provides a rationale for policy intervention. The majority of young people's added sugar consumption occurs in the home, where purchases are typically made by parents. This means that understanding the purchase decisions of adults is important for policy design, even if the policies aim to reduce the consumption of young people. We discuss the merits of popular policies, including taxes, advertising restrictions and restrictions on the availability of specific foods, and we identify promising avenues for future research.     

Shift work in nursing: is it really a risk factor for nurses' health and patients' safety?

There is evidence in the scientific literature of the adverse physiological and psychological effects of shift work, including disruption to biological rhythm, sleep disorders, health problems, diminished performance at work, job dissatisfaction, and social isolation. In this study, the results of health problems and sleep disorders between female and male nurses, between daytime and shift nurses, and between sleep-adjusted and non-sleep-adjusted shift nurses were compared. Also the relationship between adjustment to shift work and organizational outcomes (errors and incidents and absenteeism from work) was analyzed. Gender, age, and weight were more significant factors than shift work in determining the well-being of nurses. Shift work by itself was not found to be a risk factor for nurses' health and organizational outcomes in this study. Moreover, nurses who were identified as being "non-adaptive" to shift work were found to work as effectively and safely as their adaptive colleagues in terms of absenteeism from work and involvement in professional errors and accidents. This research adds two additional findings to the field of shift work studies. The first finding is that female shift workers complain significantly more about sleep disorders than male shift workers. Second, although high rates of nurses whose sleep was not adapted to shift work were found, this did not have a more adverse impact on their health, absenteeism rates, or performance (reported errors and incidents), compared to their "adaptive" and "daytime" colleagues.     

Transmission of information within transnational social networks: a field experiment

Several studies have shown a relationship between the stocks of migrants and country-level investment in the home country; however the mechanism through which this relationship operates is still unexplored. We use a field experiment in which participants who are recent immigrants send information about risky decisions to others in their social network in their home country. The results demonstrate how this information influences decisions in the home country. We find that the advice given by family members and decisions made by friends significantly affects an individual’s risky decision-making.     

A Field Experiment in Charitable Contribution: The Impact of Social Information on the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods

We study the effect of social information on the voluntary provision of public goods. Competing theories predict that others' contributions might be either substitutes or complements to one's own. We demonstrate a positive social information effect on individual contributions, supporting theories of complementarities. We find the most influential level of social information is drawn from the 90th to 95th percentile of previous contributions. We furthermore find the effect to be significant for new members but not for renewing members. In the most effective condition, social information increases contributions by 12% ($13). These increased contributions do not crowd out future contributions.     

Competition for goods in buyer-seller networks

Abstract. This paper studies competition in a network and how a network structure determines agents' individual payoffs. It constructs a general model of competition that can serve as a reduced form for specific models. The paper shows how agents' outside options, and hence their shares of surplus, derive from “opportunity paths” connecting them to direct and indirect alternative exchanges. Analyzing these paths, results show how third parties' links affect different agents' bargaining power. Even distant links may have large effects on agents' earnings. These payoff results, and the identification of the paths themselves, should prove useful to further analysis of network structure.     

Environmental Change, Leadership Succession and Incrementalism in Local Government

A theoretical model of strategic budgetary choices in local government is developed and tested. The model assumes that expenditure decisions are a function of changes in environmental circumstances and the characteristics of local leaders. Environmental change is operationalized through measures of workload, munificence and regulatory controls. Leadership succession is defined as the turnover in managerial and political élites. These environmental and leadership variables are included in a multivariate statistical model of budgetary incrementalism. The model is tested on the spending decisions of 402 English local authorities from 1981 to 1996. The empirical results suggest that the extent of budgetary change is influenced strongly by environmental change but weakly by leadership succession. Furthermore, environmental constraints became tighter during the study period. The characteristics of public sector organizations that impose limits on the strategic choices of new leaders are identified.     

Evaluating FOMC forecasts

Monetary policy outcomes have improved since the early 1980s. One factor contributing to the improvement is that Federal Reserve policymakers began reporting economic forecasts to Congress in 1979. These forecasts indicate what the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) members think will be the likely consequence of their policies. We evaluate the accuracy of the FOMC forecasts relative to private sector forecasts, the forecasts of the Research Staff at the Board of Governors, and a naïve alternative. We find that the FOMC output forecasts were better than the naïve model and at least as good as those of the private sector and the Fed staff. The FOMC inflation forecasts were more accurate than the private sector forecasts and the naïve model; for the period ending in 1996, however, they were not as accurate as Fed staff inflation forecasts.