Educating business schools about safety & health is no accident

This paper summarizes the consequences of safety and health inattentiveness, and reviews four primary dangers in the workplace. In addition, perspectives of employee health and safety are presented from industry and academia which provide the basis for a strong recommendation to include safety and health issues in business school curricula. Wayne H. Stewart's areas of research and teaching interest include Social Responsibility in Management, Entrepreneurship, and International Business. Wayne is currently on the editorial board of the International Journal of Case Studies, and has published in the Journal of Management Learning, as well as participating in several academic conferences. Donna E. Ledgerwood is currently the Secretary for the Southern Management Association. Donna was President of the Southwest Academy of Management in 1993 and served as the Academy of Management's Director of Exhibits/Publisher Relations and Director of Advertising from 1983–1991. Having written one of the first articles on sexual harassment in 1980, Donna serves on the Editorial Review Board for the Journal of Business Strategies and has published in the Labor Law Journal, the Monthly Labor Review, and the Personnel Administrator. Ruth C. May's areas of expertise are International Business, Business Policy and Strategy and International Human Resource Management. Specializing in the transfer of Western management practices to the former Soviet Union, Ruth is currently involved in the development of training programs and privatization processes in central Russia. She has published in the Academy of Management Executive, Multinational Business Review, and Socialist Labor (Russia).     

Bank Equity Investments: Reducing Agency Costs or Buying Undervalued Firms? The Information Effects

Abstract:   This paper analyses the relevance of two different reasons for banks to acquire firms' stock: the increase of agency costs in the lending relationship (the agency costs hypothesis), and participation in the expected profits of undervalued firms (the information asymmetry hypothesis). Results indicate not only that banks make equity investments for both reasons but also that the market exploits their lending decisions to learn which of the two motivations was in play. Bank equity investments concurrent with reductions in bank debt are consistent with the agency costs hypothesis, whereas bank equity investments concurrent with increases in bank debt are consistent with the information asymmetry hypothesis.     

On the Role of Weight Restrictions in Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper examines the role that weight restrictions play in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). It is argued that the decision to include a factor (input or output) in a DEA model represents an implicit judgement that the factor has a non-trivial weight. It therefore seems perverse to allow DEA to assign a trivial weight to that factor in assessing the efficiency of a unit. There is therefore a strong case for imposing restrictions on factor weights. However, many existing methods of weight restriction are in practice unwieldy. This paper proposes an alternative approach we term contingent weight restriction which is both practical and intellectually consistent with the DEA philosophy. The paper explores the implications of alternative methods of weight restriction using simulated data from a well known production process.     

Assessment of Interjudge Reliability in the Open-Ended Questions Coding Process

In the process of coding open-ended questions, the evaluation of interjudge reliability is a critical issue. In this paper, using real data, the behavior of three coefficients of reliability among coders, Cohen’s K, Krippendorff’s α and Perreault and Leigh’s I _r are patterned, in terms of the number of judges involved and the categories of answer defined. The outcome underlines the importance of both variables in the valuations of interjudge reliability, as well as the higher adequacy of Perreault and Leigh’s I _r and Krippendorff’s α for marketing and opinion research.     

Linking thoughts to feelings: Investigating cognitive appraisals and consumption emotions in a mixed-emotions context

While emotions have been shown to have significant influence on various consumer behaviors, the cognitive appraisals linked to consumption emotions have not been fully explored. This research investigates how individuals' cognitive interpretations of situations correspond to the emotions they experience in these contexts. Using analysis of variance and multiple discriminant analysis, our results show a systematic relationship between cognitive appraisals and 10 consumption emotions. The author's findings offer theoretical insights into these consumption emotions, the appraisal/consumption emotion correspondence, basisversus subordinate-level category differences in emotions, and mixed consumption emotions. The findings provide a practical framework for academics and practitioners interested in better understanding and managing consumption emotions. Julie A. Ruth (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business—Camden at Rutgers University. Her research interests include affect and emotions, consumer relationships, and consumer response to brand strategies such as brand alliances and sponsorships. Frédéric F. Brunel (Ph.D., University of Washington) is an assistant professor of marketing in the School of Management at Boston University. His research interests include consumer perceptions of product design and aesthetics, consumer attitude and affect, and gender and sociocultural issues in consumption. Cele C. Otnes (Ph.D., University of Tennessee) is an associate professor of business administration in the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Her research interests include consumer rituals, affect and consumer ambivalence, and gift exchange.     

Reinforcing the Link Between Contributions and Pensions: The Effect of the Population Aging

In this paper, we analyze a majority voting process on the earnings-related part of pension benefits in a Social Security system with flexible retirement. We show that the aging of the population may make it easier to implement one of the proposed reforms to achieve a delay in the average retirement age of workers, to reinforce the link between contributions and pensions.     

The Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism Needs Better Categories: Clearing up the Confusions that Result from Blurring Analytic and Lay Concepts

Synopsis It has been difficult to make progress in the study of ethnicity and nationalism because of the multiple confusions of analytic and lay terms, and the sheer lack of terminological standardization (often even within the same article). This makes a conceptual cleaning-up unavoidable, and it is especially salutary to attempt it now that more economists are becoming interested in the effects of identity on behavior, so that they may begin with the best conceptual tools possible. My approach to these questions has been informed by anthropological and evolutionary-psychological questions. I will focus primarily on the terms ‘ethnic group’, ‘nation’, and ‘nationalism’, and I will make the following points: (1) so-called ‘ethnic groups’ are collections of people with a common cultural identity, plus an ideology of membership by descent and normative endogamy; (2) the ‘group’ in ‘ethnic group’ is a misleading misnomer—these are not ‘groups’ but categories, so I propose to call them ‘ethnies’; (3) ‘nationalism’ mostly refers to the recent ideology that ethnies—cultural communities with a self-conscious ideology of self-sufficient reproduction—be made politically sovereign; (4) it is very confusing to use ‘nationalism’ also to stand for ‘loyalty to a multi-ethnic state’ because this is the exact opposite; (5) a ‘nation’ truly exists only in a politician’s imagination, so analysts should not pretend that establishing whether something ‘really’ is or is not ‘a nation’ matters; (6) a big analytic cost is paid every time an ‘ethnie’ is called a ‘nation’ because this mobilizes the intuition that nationalism is indispensable to ethnic organization (not true), which thereby confuses the very historical process—namely, the recent historical emergence of nationalism—that must be explained; (7) another analytical cost is paid when scholars pretend that ethnicity is a form of kinship—it is not.     

An equilibrium analysis of information aggregation and fluctuations in markets with discrete decisions

This paper shows how the interaction between decentralized information gathering and discreteness of investment decisions at the individual level can generate random fluctuations in aggregate investment that involve occasionally large allocation errors. This interaction is illustrated in a model in which private information is costly to acquire and prices reveal information. The unique rational expectations equilibrium outcome of the model is shown to always be noisy and characterized by investment levels which may be high simply because uninformed investors are buying under the impression that the high price is a signal of good investment opportunities.