The uneasy alliance of organisational culture and equal opportunities for ethnic minority groups: A British example

Recent statistics suggest that there is a continuing disparity in labour market outcomes between ethnic minority (EM) groups and their White counterparts. However, although there is now an abundance of statistical and anecdotal evidence that speaks to the disadvantage of EM groups, there is less understanding of the intraorganisational dynamics that give rise to the outcomes that are reported. Drawing on postcolonial, cultural capital, and social capital theories, this article argues that the dominant approach through which organisational culture is conceptualised and the ways in which it is commonly managed may encourage labour market inequality and disadvantage for EM groups (defined as access to employment and having opportunities for promotion while in employment). The article explores three intraorganisational interventions that are common in culture management initiatives (leadership, selective recruitment, and internal promotion) to illustrate the arguments. The article concludes by discussing a series of implications and highlighting the pivotal role of the HR academy and practitioners in generating deeper insights and attention into the potential sources of EM disadvantage that are linked to culture and culture management.     

Maximum efforts in contests with asymmetric valuations

Efforts may be reduced when players with different valuations participate in a contest. This paper considers the problem of designing a contest to elicit maximum aggregate effort from players with asymmetric valuations. Optimal designs for different classes of contest technologies are computed and characterized. A value weighted contest is optimal in the concave case. In the unconstrained case, the optimal contest is equivalent to a first price all-pay auction with a reserve price. The optimal design discounts the effort of the high valuation player in order to induce him to compete vigorously.     

The False Promise of Organizational Culture Change: A Case Study of Middle Managers in Grocery Retailing*

ABSTRACT The strategic importance of managing organizational culture has been a central theme in organizational literature over the past two decades. But relatively little attention has been given to the impact of culture change initiatives on managers. This paper reports on the impact of a programme of culture change on managers at one of Britain's leading grocery retail chains. Based on a series of detailed interviews with managers together with examination of company documents and an understanding of trends in grocery retailing, we explain the purpose and content of change, and document and analyse the reactions of those managers who are expected to change their own cultural orientations as well as persuade their subordinates to change. We conclude that in this case at least changes in managerial behaviour, as with previously documented changes in the behaviour of shopfloor workers, are related more to surveillance, direct control and the threat of sanction than any transformation of managerial values. Indeed, the situation and experiences of managers – one of reduced autonomy, close monitoring and control, and perceived career insecurity – are explained less in relation to ‘organizational culture’, more in relation to organizational (re‐)structuring intended to create a more centralized form of organizational control.     

Income distribution and inequality measurement: The problem of extreme values

We examine the statistical performance of inequality indices in the presence of extreme values in the data and show that these indices are very sensitive to the properties of the income distribution. Estimation and inference can be dramatically affected, especially when the tail of the income distribution is heavy, even when standard bootstrap methods are employed. However, use of appropriate semiparametric methods for modelling the upper tail can greatly improve the performance of even those inequality indices that are normally considered particularly sensitive to extreme values.     

Finding Closest Targets in Non-Oriented DEA Models: The Case of Convex and Non-Convex Technologies

This paper draws attention for the fact that traditional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models do not provide the closest possible targets (or peers) to inefficient units, and presents a procedure to obtain such targets.It focuses on non-oriented efficiency measures (which assume that production units are able to control, and thus change, inputs and outputs simultaneously) both measured in relation to a Free Disposal Hull (FDH) technology and in relation to a convex technology. The approaches developed for finding close targets are applied to a sample of Portuguese bank branches.     

The optimal treatment of tax expenditures

This paper analyzes the optimal treatment of tax expenditures. It develops an optimal tax model where individuals derive utility from spending on a “contribution” good such as charitable giving. The contribution good has also a public good effect on all individuals in the economy. The government imposes linear taxes on earnings and on the contribution good so as to maximize welfare. The government may also finance directly the contribution good out of tax revenue. Optimal tax and subsidy rates on earnings and the contribution good are expressed in terms of empirically estimable parameters and the redistributive tastes of the government. The optimal subsidy on the contribution good is increasing in the size of the price elasticity of contributions, the size of the crowding out effect of public contributions on private contributions, and the size of the public good effect of the contribution good. Numerical simulations show that the optimal subsidy on contributions is fairly sensitive to the size of these parameters but that, in most cases, it should be lower than the earnings tax rate.     

Dynamic volatility and external security related shocks: The case of the Athens Stock Exchange

This paper analyses the impact of exogenous national security related shocks on the time-varying volatility structure of the Greek stock market. Alternative autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic models are estimated, in order to identify the best fit that adequately describes return volatility behavior, testing symmetric as well as asymmetric innovation responses. An external national security related shock factor is included as well as a military crisis dummy, in order to depict possible implications for the conditional variance. The empirical findings appear to support a statistically significant impact of both national security related factors on the Athens stock market returns.     

Behavioral portfolio selection and optimization: an application to international stocks

The behavioral approach of decision making has emerged as a diversified solution in the presence of risk and uncertainty. Using the popular cumulative prospect theory as an objective function for portfolio selection, this study implements the classical mean–variance model to compare the portfolio performance of high behavioral stocks with that of stocks with lower behavioral values. Based on a sample of 37 international stocks over the period from October 1998 to November 2017, empirical results from D-vine pair copula GARCH-GEV indicate that the portfolio of high behavioral prospect stocks outperforms the portfolio of stocks with low behavioral scores. This finding may suggest that portfolios with high behavioral values coincide with rational efficiency sets.