Minimum and preferred entry qualifications and training provision for North Australian workers

This paper reports on the outcomes of a replication study of a survey of British employers that requested information on the qualifications sought when recruiting employees and on subsequent training and development. While the British survey was interested in the uptake and use of the British National Vocational Qualifications, the study reported in this article is primarily focused on the uptake and use of the Australian Qualifications Framework qualifications by North Australian employers. This study was prompted by the skills shortages and recruitment difficulties being experienced by organizations throughout rural and regional Australia. Previous studies have found that vocational qualifications were not valued by UK employers and few employers were encouraging employees to undertake vocational awards. If this is also the case in Australia, it may in part explain problems in recruiting skilled workers. This research clearly demonstrates that employees in regional and rural Australia are seeking to improve their knowledge and skills through vocational training and higher education qualifications. Also, employers are providing access to training and are supporting managerial and professional employees to gain higher educational qualifications. When recruiting all types of worker other than unskilled labourers, the majority of organizations prefer to recruit workers with qualifications. In rural and regional centres, however, a more pragmatic stance of recruiting unqualified employees in some areas is observed. Clearly, employers will attempt to minimize training costs by recruiting skilled employees, but in the end they will have to provide access to training and education to ensure that they have a skilled workforce that can deliver essential services and products.     

Introducing Time‐to‐Educate in a Job‐Search Model

Transition patterns from school to work differ considerably across OECD countries. Some countries exhibit high youth unemployment rates, which can be considered an indicator of the difficulty facing young people trying to integrate into the labour market. At the same time, education is a time‐consuming process, and enrolment and dropout decisions depend on expected duration of studies as well as on job prospects with and without completed degrees. One way to model entry into the labour market is by means of job‐search models, where the job arrival hazard is a key parameter in capturing the ease or difficulty in finding a job. Standard models of job search and education assume that skills can be upgraded instantaneously (and mostly in the form of on‐the‐job training) at a fixed cost. This paper models education as a time‐consuming process, a concept which we call time‐to‐educate, during which an individual faces the trade‐off between continuing education and taking up a job.     

MOTIVATING RECYCLING: A MARGINAL COST ANALYSIS

Areas considering alternative house-to-house recycling programs as a means of diverting material from landfills can determine the most efficient choice by comparing programs' marginal costs with diversion's marginal benefits. This paper describes a controlled field experiment that observed individual household recycling habits over a six-month period. The experiment monitored the quantity of material that households recycled under increasingly more convenient (and increasingly more costly) programs. The analysis here uses a Tobit model to determine how the quantity of material diverted varies as a function of convenience factors and demographic characteristics. The analysis compares the value of the expected marginal increase in diversion to the marginal cost of increasing recycling convenience to determine the efficient level of convenience for an area's recycling program.     

The Research Field “Modeling Business Information Systems”

The research field “Modeling business information systems” has a long tradition in the scientific discipline of Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE). The present paper highlights research shaping the research field, discusses challenges impairing the development of the research field in the coming years, and outlines elements of a future research agenda.     

Market-Oriented Management: A Systems-Based Perspective

Market orientation has received substantial academic and practitioner interest over the last decade. However, previous research has not addressed the issue how a company's management systems can be designed in a market-oriented way. Starting from a systems-based perspective of management, the authors develop and validate a scale measuring the extent of market orientation of a business organization's management systems including the organization system, the information system, the planning system, the controlling system, and the human resource management system. Empirical results reveal a substantial positive impact of market-oriented management on market performance which in turn leads to financial performance.     

Fiscal equalisation schemes under competition

This paper considers optimal fiscal equalisation in a federation that competes with other federations for business tax base. It formalises the argument that, under certain circumstances, federations have an incentive to foster tax competition among their subunits in order to attract tax base from other federations. We show that optimal fiscal equalisation serves the purpose of redistributing income from rich to poor subunits and of choosing an optimal level of tax competition. The latter is chosen as a trade-off between three goals. First, decentralised tax rate setting has positive fiscal externalities within the federation and, thus, tax rates are inefficiently low. Second, in the presence of hold-up problems in investment, tax rates may be inefficiently high. Then, tax competition serves as a commitment device for low future tax rates and is, thus, welfare enhancing. Third, generous fiscal equalisation within the federation is a commitment to not aggressively compete with subunits outside the federation for tax base; as a consequence, with optimal equalisation, equilibrium tax rates are higher within and outside the federation—and even higher than in the case of centralised (i.e. federal level) tax rate setting.     

The Effects of Executive,Firm, and Board Characteristics on Executive Exit

We estimate a hazard model of the probability of top corporate executives exiting their firms over the period 1996–2010. Our main findings are that: (1) female executives have greater likelihoods of exit than males, (2) the likelihood of exit increases with the independence of the board and decreases with the fraction of the board that is female and the average age of board members, and (3) a higher percentage of independent directors on the board lowers the probability of exit more for females than for males. Further, controlling for exit risk reduces the well‐documented compensation differential between men and women.