When age does not harm innovative behavior and perceptions of competence: Testing interdepartmental collaboration as a social buffer

Can older managers overcome stereotypes relating age to low competence? We integrate the literature on age and cognitive ability with research on innovation to explore whether—and if so, when—employees' age harms performance and promotability appraisals made by their supervisors. Multisource, time‐lag data from 305 project managers indicate that the negative stereotypes can be explained through decreased innovative behavior. However, older employees are not always seen as poorer performers with less potential to be promoted due to their reduced innovative behavior. Rather, interdepartmental collaboration moderates these effects. Specifically, older employees with low interdepartmental collaboration are less innovative and receive worse performance and promotability appraisals than younger employees, but the “age handicap” vanishes when older employees collaborate with members of other departments. Organizations should foster formal or informal collaboration among units to prevent negative consequences of an aging workforce.     

Asymmetric information consolidation and price discovery: Inferring bad news from insider sales

Due to the paucity of sources of negative firm‐specific information, US capital markets have more difficulty identifying and incorporating bad news into stock prices than they do good news. Even though insider selling is a potentially important proxy for undisclosed bad news, researchers have difficulty ex ante identifying information‐based sales due to an inability to separate liquidity‐motivated from information‐based insider trades. We hypothesize that when insiders in multiple firms sell shares of one firm in which they are insiders and at the same time buy shares of other insider portfolio firms, the sale is more likely to be information‐based, since the proceeds are reinvested. Conversely, when an insider sells one firm without purchasing others or sells multiple insider firms the sale is likely liquidity‐motivated. We find that insider sales identified as information‐based using this algorithm are followed by significant negative abnormal returns. Information‐based sales are also more likely to be associated with delistings, earnings declines and earnings restatements. Analysts are also more likely to revise their earnings forecasts downwards for these firms. It is thus possible to ex ante identify insider sales with information content. Our results will be of interest to investors and also to regulators designing insider trading rules.     

Exploring job crafting: Diagnosing and responding to the ways employees adjust their jobs

Recent research has developed an in-depth understanding of how workers change their jobs on their own to improve their performance and well-being, a process called job crafting. This research suggests that managers, coworkers, and organizations need a better understanding of how to manage job crafting to capitalize on its benefits and reduce costs. This article will help organizations diagnose the occurrence of job crafting, recognize the differences between goal-oriented approaches to job crafting as opposed to withdrawal-oriented avoidance job crafting, and identify the seven specific types of job crafting: work role expansion, social expansion, work role reduction, work organization, adoption, metacognition, and withdrawal. We conclude with recommendations for managers, coworkers, and organizations on how to diagnose and manage job crafting.     

Twenty-Five Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: An Empirical Revisit of West German Consumers' Attitudes Toward Products and Brands from Former East Germany

More than 25 years after the German reunification, data show that products/brands from the eastern regions of Germany (“Neue Länder”) still do not have significant shares in the country's western part (“Alte Länder”). To analyze potential reasons for this phenomenon, our current study replicates a previous study that investigated selected attitudes of Alte Länder consumers toward products/brands from the Neue Länder. It is shown that factors such as consumer ethnocentrism, product judgment, willingness to buy, and economic animosity continue to influence consumer behavior and as such our study offers potential explanation for the failure of Neue Länder products/brands in the western regions of Germany.     

Determinants of students’ entrepreneurial intention to compete in a fast-pitch competition

Despite the heightened popularity of entrepreneurship education, there remain open questions regarding best practices in co-curricular programs. Using the theory of planned behavior, the authors examine how students’ intention is shaped to increase the likelihood of participation in entrepreneurship co-curricular programs. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the relation between entrepreneurial identity and entrepreneurial intention theory. They find the popular personality trait, openness, is related to ambition, which reveals the interaction between personal elements (personality/identity) and contextual elements (aspirations to success/intention), a novel finding in the literature. This further illustrates the interconnectedness between the theory of planned behavior and the entrepreneurial event model     

Uncertainty Associated with Future Environmental Costs and the Market's Differential Response to Earnings Information

This study examines whether the uncertainty arising from a firm's exposure to future environmental costs (environmental uncertainty) affects the market's price sensitivity to reported earnings. Specifically, when environmental uncertainty is significantly high, are investors more responsive to reported earnings released by 'high-polluting' firms than reported earnings announced by 'low-polluting' firms within the same industry? The initial impact of Title IV (the acid rain provisions) of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (1990 CAAA) on the US electric utility industry provides the research setting required to isolate the effects of environmental uncertainty while addressing this question. Consistent with theoretical predictions, we find that the earnings response coefficients (ERCs) of high-polluting electric utilities are significantly greater than those of their low-polluting counterparts during a predicted period of elevated environmental uncertainty. In adjoining sample years associated with lower environmental uncertainty, we observe no statistical difference in the magnitude of the ERCs between these two groups. In addition, the study's findings suggest that the magnitude of the ERC is increasing in the firm's exposure to future environmental costs, after controlling for other factors that potentially affect ERCs.     

一项关于农村五保供养制度的实证研究——以闽北地区为例

农村五保供养制度是一项具有中国特色保障鳏寡孤独残疾人基本生活权益的制度,也是我国农村社会保障体系的重要组成部分。在实地调查的基础上,分析了闽北地区农村五保供养的现实状况,提出了未来建设农村五保供养制度的若干思路。     

Effet des Evolutions Techniques et des Changements de la Spécialisation Internationale sur les Marchés du Travail et les Systèmes Productifs: Comment les Statisticiens Pourraient-ils Relever les Défis?

Thinking about future needs and about what can reasonably be expected as feasible in the next century, how should producers of statistics direct their activity? Increasing complexity and diversity of needs leads us to recognize that, between producers and users of statistics, a mediating role is more and more often played by analysts and research workers who are requesting above all good data bases. Concerning infrastructures for statistics on productive systems, coordination between accountants and statisticians will be crucial, as well as adaptation of the constraints which, because of excessive worry about confidentiality, could prevent establishment or use of data bases. In an increasingly competitive world, where private firms will sell analyses and informations, particularly on very large enterprises, the public statistical service will remain essential in all respects. Intangible investments, innovations and many aspects of the internal organization of firms will create formidable challenges. Information on employment and labour markets has been much developed during the past decades; but on a few specific and difficult issues progress is still needed: lifecyles in the working-age population, acquisition of knowledge and skills in formal education and on the job, matching labour supplies and demands, and so on. Particular attention will have to be given to the lower levels of cultural and professional skills.     

Are Fundamentals Priced in the Bond Market?*

To date, the discussion of the Lev and Thiagarajan 1993 fundamentals in the prior literature has been exclusively in the context of the stock market. Our study is the first to examine the value‐relevance of these fundamentals for default risk. By focusing on the market for new bond issues, we examine the value‐relevance of the fundamental score using expected rather than realized returns. Also, by focusing on the bond market we provide a different perspective than that brought by prior studies relying solely on stock prices. We find the fundamentals to be priced in the market for new bond issues as indicators of expected future earnings and to be value‐relevant in enabling the market to discern differences in bond credit quality over and above the published bond ratings.     

Duration and the price behavior of fixed-rate level payment mortgages: An analytical investigation

In this research we use a continuous payment formula for duration to examine the price behavior of a fixed-rate level payment mortgage. In the case where the mortgage is held to maturity, duration increases monotonically as term-to-maturity increases, regardless of changes in the market rate of interest. In the case where the mortgage is prepaid prior to maturity, there exists a unique market interest rate below which duration is a monotonically increasing function of time of prepayment, but above which duration has a global maximum at some time of prepayment prior to the term-to-maturity.