production costs scope economies and multi client outsourcing under quantity competition abstract two game models are developed based on production costs and scope economies to investigate the widely observed multi client outsourcing mco phenomenon analytical results demonstrate that outsourcers high in house production costs and the advantage of scope economies motivate firms to outsource collectively to an independent vendor under certain conditions if both firms make their outsourcing decisions simultaneously collective outsourcing is one of the two equilibria if both firms make decisions sequentially collective outsourcing becomes the unique equilibrium furthermore the comparative statics of the critical degree of scope economies are examined for the occurrence of mco with regard to diverse market parameters finally it is proved that market prices decrease as the degree of scope economies increases when mco occurs this research helps explain some widely observed phenomena such as malls supply chain cities and the china price

multi product newsboy problem with limited capacity and outsourcing this paper considers a multi product newsboy system that produces multiple products for fulfilling independently uncertain demands which share the same production capacity to deal with possible shortage of limited capacity productions can be outsourced we consider two outsourcing strategies zero lead time outsourcing and nonzero lead time outsourcing the structural properties and solution procedures for the profit maximization models are developed numerical results are provided for obtaining some managerial insights

do relative income and income inequality affect consumptionq evidence from the villages of rural china abstract this article examines how a household s consumption rate is affected by its relative income and income inequality within a community based on the theory of social status seeking in consumption we test hypotheses related to these factors using a unique panel data set of rural households in china observed within a few hundred villages between 2003 and 2006 we find that the household s consumption rate is negatively related to the relative income position after controlling for the absolute income and positively related to the income inequality of the village we confirm these with different measurements of relative position

time varying parameters in the almost ideal demand system and the rotterdam model will the best specification please stand up this article assesses the ability of the rotterdam model rm and of three versions of the almost ideal demand system aids to recover the time varying elasticities of a true demand system and to satisfy theoretical regularity using monte carlo simulations we find that the rm performs better than the linear approximate aids at recovering the signs of all the time varying elasticities more importantly the rm has the ability to track the paths of time varying income elasticities even when the true values are very high the linear approximate aids not only performs poorly at recovering the time varying elasticities but also badly approximates the nonlinear aids

maturity structure of public debt and expected bond returns abstract the relevancy of changes in maturity structure is tested using a disaggregated measure of the maturity composition of government debt tests based on predictions from the market efficiency and rational expectations theories find evidence that maturity composition occasionally helps to predict future excess returns the maturity composition is also found to be correlated with the term premium and future changes in the short rate the evidence supports the claim that bonds with all the same characteristics except maturity are not perfect substitutes

a model of educational investment social concerns and inequality we consider a model in which educational investments entail productivity gains signaling power and social status the latter depends on the agent s relative achievement in one of three dimensions innate skills level of schooling and income we study the three scenarios separately and characterize the conditions under which social concerns increase or decrease educational and income inequality inequality increases decreases if education lowers the stigma suffered by low skilled workers less more than it boosts the prestige enjoyed by high skilled workers we discuss the expected results of some policies in light of these findings

social behaviour as a basis for modelling the urban housing market a review this paper considers how empirical models of urban housing markets might be constructed as a basis for policy analysis it is suggested that this is fundamentally more difficult than national or re

the constant preferences assumption as a specification error in demand analysis abstract complete demand systems often are estimated under the assumption that preferences are constant if preferences do change in reality this leads to a specification error this note explores some of the implications of such a specification error

a mixed integer model of bidding strategies for outsourcing an emerging phenomenon in the management of information systems is outsourcing outsourcing is the contracting of various system management functions by user firms to vendors this paper focuses on the outsourcing bidding process pertinent to the selection of one contractor by a user firm the paper explores bidding situations where the vendors have different levels of expertise and cost structures truth revealing mechanisms that induce the vendors to bid competitively in line with their costs are utilized and a mixed integer programming model is presented the model allows the user firm to obtain the optimal expected contract cost some interesting conclusions emerge from the analysis of representative examples used in the paper first the results clearly show that truth revealing strategies always result in lower contract costs for the user firm than if the user firm were to follow the straightforward strategy of always choosing the lowest bid second the user firm can reduce contract costs by deploying a discriminatory selection policy vis a vis the different vendors third subsidies need to be given in order to ensure truth revealing behavior of the vendors thus the qualitative interpretations of the model parallel bidding behavior practices observed in the real world

locally interdependent preferences in a general equilibrium environment abstract this paper explores the consequences of interdependent preferences for consumer goods that is preferences that evolve in response to the consumption decisions of neighboring agents the key feature is that the interdependence of preferences coexists and interacts with the price mechanism in a general equilibrium environment the interaction between the negative feedback operating through the price system and the positive feedback expressed in the bandwagon effect creates distinct geographic patterns of consumption on the micro level and a characteristic evolution of average preferences and production on the macro level in equilibrium agents preferences and consumption are completely polarized into stable regions in which every agent consumes the same good exclusively

social comparisons and contributions to online communities a field experiment on movielens we design a field experiment to explore the use of social comparison to increase contributions to an online community we find that after receiving behavioral information about the median user s total number of movie ratings users below the median demonstrate a 530 percent increase in the number of monthly movie ratings while those above the median decrease their ratings by 62 percent when given outcome information about the average user s net benefit score above average users mainly engage in activities that help others our findings suggest that effective personalized social information can increase the level of public goods provision

the effect of federal debt management policy on corporate bond and equity yields in theory federal debt management policy potentially plays an important role in determining treasury and private security yields however empirical studies have been unable to detect any significant effects from federal debt management in large part the insignificance of relative asset supply effects associated with federal debt management policy may result from the use of unrestricted reduced form models of interest rate determination using a disaggregated structural model of the markets for corporate bonds equities and four distinct maturity classes of treasury securities federal debt management policy is found to affect treasury and private security yields significantly furthermore the yields on corporate bonds and equities are influenced disproportionately

modeling interdependent consumer preferences abstract a consumer s preference for an offering can be influenced by the preferences of others in many ways ranging from social identification and inclusion to the benefits of network externalities in this article the authors introduce a bayesian spatial autoregressive discrete choice model to study the preference interdependence among individual consumers the autoregressive specification can reflect patterns of heterogeneity in which influence propagates within and across networks these patterns cannot be modeled with standard random effect specifications and can be difficult to capture with covariates in a linear model the authors illustrate their model of interdependent preferences with data on automobile purchases and show that preferences for japanese made cars are related to geographically and demographically defined networks

analysing the risk premium in the italian stock market arch m models versus non parametric models this paper investigates the variability of the risk premium in the italian stock market over the period 1978 89 we have modelled voatility using two different approaches arch m models and non parametric models the estimate of the arch m models confirm the existence of both an arch process in the variance and a time varying risk premium also the non parametric specification confirms the existence of a time varying risk premium moreover in both models the acceleration in the inflation rate has a negative effect on stock prices

outsourcing and capacity planning in an uncertain global environment firms employing offshore outsourcing strategies may face both exchange rate and demand uncertainties in this paper we show that the firms may benefit from operational option to switch production by keeping capacities with both domestic and foreign suppliers the value of the operational option increases as the exchange rate uncertainty or demand uncertainty increases in addition when the firms become risk averse they may use domestic capacity to hedge against offshore capacity as a result the firms may choose to hold local capacity even if it exhibits negative marginal contribution to the profit furthermore risk averse firms may keep more total capacity than risk neutral firms

starting even job mobility and the wage gap between young single males and females standard econometric analysis of male female earnings differentials ignores job mobility despite its vital role in theories of discrimination and its demonstrated importance in explaining the earnings of young men this paper develops a model of male and female earnings and job mobility and estimates it for young single men and women in canada using the 1981 survey of work history the results corrected for sample selection bias arising from job mobility suggest that male and female earnings determination differs considerably by job mobility status returns to mobility are much greater for males than for females the results also show significantly different mobility behaviour for men and women but if anything females are more mobile than males faced with the same earnings opportunities thus differential job mobility behaviour does not appear to account for any portion of the male female earnings gap

educational screening by certificates an empirical test this paper argues that the relevant test of wage screening effects should be based on educational certificates rather than years of schooling this is because information conveyed to firms about individual productivity through years of schooling is not sufficiently refined for making individual wage offer decisions although it may be useful for making hiring decisions

life cycle consumption under social interactions abstract in this paper we examine how social interactions affect consumption decisions at various levels of aggregation in a life cycle economy made up of peer groups for this purpose we consider two analytically solvable life cycle models one under certainty equivalent behavior and one under prudence and explicitly allow for three different forms of social interactions in peer groups namely conformism altruism and jealousy we show that whether social interactions have any effects on individuals optimal consumption decisions critically depends on intertemporal rather than static considerations this is true regardless of whether individuals preferences are time separable or exhibit habit formation and whether information within peer groups is homogeneous or disparate it implies that analyzing the effects of social interactions in static rather than intertemporal settings is likely to be misleading we also show that social interactions when coupled with either habit formation or prudence can significantly strengthen the effects of habit formation or prudence in the direction of resolving two well known puzzles in the literature on the permanent income hypothesis namely excess smoothness and excess sensitivity

status concern and the exploitation of common pool renewable resources we examine the impact of social status concern in a common pool renewable resource oligopoly a small number of players share access to a common pool resource and sell their production in a common market where they are oligopolists we depart from the mainstream literature on common pool resource oligopolies by considering that each player cares about her social status we allow for two channels to impact a player s welfare harvest and profits under the first channel a player has a bump in her utility when her harvest is larger than the average harvest of the rest of the players in this case we show that the presence of this channel exacerbates the tragedy of the commons under the second channel a player enjoys a bump in her utility if she manages to earn more profits than the average profits of the other players in this case we show that social status concern may temporarily alleviate the tragedy of the commons it results in a decrease of extraction over an interval of stock sizes

trust institutions and the generally speaking question a reply to uslaner in his critical reply on my article uslaner points to several issues amongst others the lack of observations in the principal components analysis and the fundamental relationship between micro and macro trust on the one hand and institutions on the other hand of these two i hold the second one to be most important and i will therefore focus on this issue i will also use this opportunity to position our trust discussion in the broader context of contemporary economic research on culture copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

strategic outsourcing revisited this paper analyzes a sequential game where firms decide about outsourcing the production of a non specific input good to an imperfectly competitive input market we apply the taxonomy of business strategies introduced by fudenberg and tirole 1984 to characterize the different equilibria and find that outsourcing generally softens competition in the final product market if firms anticipate the impact of their outsourcing decisions on input prices there may be equilibria where firms outsource so as to collude or to raise rivals costs we illustrate our analysis using a linear cournot model

adolescent weight gain and social networks is there a contagion effect previous studies on the spread of obesity in social networks have focused on the contemporaneous effect of peer weight outcomes on individuals this article is the first to investigate the longer term effects within adolescence and from adolescence into early adulthood of peers on individual weight outcomes using data from the first three waves of the national longitudinal study of adolescent health add health and accounting for correlated effects using a number of empirical strategies including school level fixed effects and accounting for neighbourhood preferences we show that body mass index bmi and overweight status in a person s friendship network influence their bmi and likelihood of being overweight the evidence suggests that there is some persistence of the effects of past peer weight experiences on individual weight outcomes during adolescence and into early adulthood the findings are consistent with adolescence being an important formative period of individuals preference for ideal p

outsourcing vertical integration and price vs quantity competition abstract we show that standard conclusions about duopoly competition can be reversed when the production of key inputs is outsourced to a vertically integrated retail competitor with upstream market power under such outsourcing bertrand competition can produce higher prices higher industry profit lower consumer surplus and lower total surplus than cournot competition in addition to limiting the intensity of retail competition bertrand competition can limit the extent of wholesale competition by reducing the incentive of retail providers to produce key inputs themselves

portfolio crowding out empirically estimated this paper tests hypotheses regarding the parameters in investors asset demand functions the hypothesis that federal bonds are closer substitutes for equity than for money implies portfolio crowding out by federal borrowing regression studies of asset demand functions have needed to impose prior beliefs to obtain precise and plausible estimates for the parameters this paper uses a mle technique that dominates regression in that it makes full use of the constraint that the parameters are not determined arbitrarily but rather are determined by mean variance optimization on the part of the investor the striking conclusion is that portfolio effects are close to zero

do positional concerns destroy social capital evidence from 26 countries research on the effects of positional concerns on individuals attitudes and behavior is sorely lacking to address this deficiency we use the international social survey programme 1998 data on 25 000 individuals from 26 countries to investigate the impact of relative income position on three facets of social capital horizontal and vertical trust as well as norm compliance testing relative deprivation theory we identify a deleterious positional income effect for persons below the reference income particularly for their social trust and confidence in secular institutions also often a social capital lowering effect of relative income advantage occurs while a rise in absolute income almost always contributes positively these results indicate that a rise in income inequality in a society too large is rather detrimental to the formation of social capital jel z130 i300 d310

occupational mobility and the distribution of occupational success among young men interpretation of the distribution of occupational success depends crucially on an understanding of the process of mobility if the holders of low paying jobs this year are just as likely as anyone else to hold good jobs next year then the lower tail of the earnings distribution is not a matter of great social concern further if the distribution of success is primarily determined by a random process the prospects for a significant reduction in the inequality of earnings are unfavorable on the other hand high mobility in the short run may conceal systematic stratification of the labor force it may be that the same individuals spend most of their time in the worst jobs if so luck and random events may play a small role in the distribution of well being inequality may be a major issue and the elimination of stratification may hold out the promise of an important reduction in inequality simple tabulation of distributions of success and of mobility among categories of success cannot answer the basic question of the role of stratification in this paper we develop a model and statistical method for studying mobility and relating it to characteristics upon which stratification may be based our study rests on annual interviews conducted from 1966 through 1969 with about 3 000 white males born between 1942 and 1952 1 we find that mobility is closely related to personal characteristics especially intelligence and education men with high iqs and extensive education are more likely to move to high paying jobs and are more likely to remain in them nevertheless random events dominate the distribution of occupational success in the short run our results strongly support the finding of christopher jencks and his collaborators that redistribution of the determinants of earnings would do almost nothing to reduce the observed inequality of annual earnings

non marketable assets and households portfolio choices a case study of italy abstract this paper analyzes the determinants of aggregate households portfolio choices conditional on those components of wealth which can be regarded as highly or totally illiquid because of the existence of substantial transaction costs and or institutional constraints on agents behaviour the empirical analysis broadly confirms the importance of the above mentioned institutional aspects in the allocation of financial wealth and provides the means for addressing some interesting questions regarding the behavior of portfolio holders in financial markets in particular it is shown that the presence of non tradable assets changes the risk premia on marketable assets hence in cases such as the italian one where the state is both the issuer of government securities and the collector of social security funds the positive correlation due to a common default risk between returns on government securities and on non marketable assets could lead to a higher cost of public debt financing

do asset demand functions optimize over the mean and variance of real returns a six currency test abstract international asset demands are functions of expected returns optimal portfolio theory tells us that the coefficients in this relationship depend on the variance covariance matrix of real returns but previous estimates of the optimal portfolio 1 assume expected returns constant and 2 are not set up to test the hypothesis of mean variance optimization we use maximum likelihood estimation to impose a constraint between the coefficients and the error variance covariance matrix for a portfolio of six currencies we are able statistically to reject the constraint evidently investors are either not sophisticated enough to maximize a function of the mean and variance of end of period wealth or else are too sophisticated to do so

selection of contract suppliers under price and demand uncertainty in a dynamic market in this paper we consider a supply contracting problem in which the buyer firm faces non stationary stochastic price and demand first we derive analytical results to compare two pure strategies i periodically purchasing from the spot market and ii signing a long term contract with a single supplier the results from the pure strategies show that the selection of suppliers can be complicated by many parameters and is particularly affected by price uncertainty we then develop a stochastic dynamic programming model to incorporate mixed strategies purchasing commitments and contract cancellations computational results show that increases in price demand uncertainty favor long term short term suppliers by examining the two way interactions of contract factors price demand purchasing bounds learning and technology effect salvage values and contract cancellation both intuitive and non intuitive managerial insights in outsourcing strategies are derived

dynamic portfolio adjustment and capital controls a euler equation approach we present a multiasset dynamic portfolio balance model that is based on the maximization of an intertemporal utility function in consumption when investors operate under uncertainty quadratic adjustment costs and capital market regulations we estimate the model s structural parameters on quarterly portfolio data of the german private sector asset demand is insensitive to return changes although the coefficients are significant adjustment costs are low but highly significant giving rise to moderate lags of adjustment still existing capital controls and adjustment costs cannot explain the currently observed home bias in the portfolio overall our results imply a strong rejection of the portfolio model

running to keep in the same place consumer choice as a game of status if individuals care about their status defined as their rank in the distribution of consumption of one positional good then the consumer s problem is strategic as her utility depends on the consumption choices of others in the symmetric nash equilibrium each individual spends an inefficiently high amount on the status good using techniques from auction theory we analyze the effects of exogenous changes in the distribution of income in a richer society almost all individuals spend more on conspicuous consumption and individual utility is lower at each income level in a more equal society the poor are worse off

human capital job matching and earnings growth between jobs an empirical analysis the process of job matching is complementary to human capital investment in determining earnings growth over the individual job history change in earnings associated with moving between jobs is portrayed as a result of matching in this paper the idea of job matching is refined to distinguish between job matching within firms and job matching across firms the derived hypotheses are supported by empirical results of a causal model which controls for human capital and personal endowment variables

the u shapes of occupational mobility using administrative panel data on the entire danish population we document a new set of facts characterizing occupational mobility for most occupations mobility is u shaped and directional not only low but also high wage earners within an occupation have a particularly large probability of leaving their occupation and the low high earners tend to switch to new occupations with lower higher average wages exceptions to this pattern of two sided selection are occupations with steeply rising declining productivity where mainly the lower higher paid workers within this occupation tend to leave the facts conflict with several existing theories that are used to account for endogeneity in occupational choice but it is shown analytically that the patterns are explained consistently within a theory of vertical sorting under absolute advantage that includes learning about workers abilities

supplier initiated outsourcing a methodology to exploit synergy in transportation over the last decades transportation has been evolving from a necessary though low priority function to an important part of business that can enable companies to attain a competitive edge over their competitors to cut down transportation costs shippers often outsource their transportation activities to a logistics service provider of their choice this paper proposes a new procedure that puts the initiative with the service provider instead supplier initiated outsourcing this procedure is based on both operations research and game theoretical insights to stress the contrast between the traditional push approach of outsourcing and the here proposed pull approach where the service provider is the initiator of the shift of logistics activities from the shipper to the logistics service provider we will refer to this phenomenon as insinking insinking has the advantage that the logistics service provider can proactively select a group of shippers with a strong synergy potential moreover these synergies can be allocated to the participating shippers in a fair and sustainable way by means of a so called shapley monotonic path of customized tariffs insinking is illustrated by means of a practical example based on data from the dutch grocery transportation sector

the econometric analysis of models with risk terms summary in this paper we have attempted to provide an integrated approach to the estimation of models with risk terms it was argued that there exist orthogonality conditions between variables in the information set and higher order moments of the unanticipated variable density these could be exploited to provide consistent estimators of the parameters associated with the risk term specifically it was recommended that an iv estimator should be applied with instruments constructed from the information set four existing methods commonly used to estimate models with risk terms are examined and applications of the techniques are made to the estimation of the risk term in the us c exchange market and the effects of price uncertainty upon production

do excess holding period returns depend on the composition of outstanding federal debt the relationship between the composition of outstanding federal debt and the term structure of interest rates has been a much studied and debated subject this note examines the relationship between the excess holding period returns and the composition of debt over the post accord period the evidence fails to support a link between debt composition and excess holding period returns copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

contests for ranks experimental evidence we use experiments to analyze multiple dimensions of the relationship between rank incentives and individual performance in our experiment i rank is defined as subjects relative position in their group based on their performance in a real effort task and ii subjects earnings are independent of their performance we find that any rank incentive improves mean performance than no rank incentive and this result is independent of the group size in the large group the mean performance increases strictly in all except at the highest rank incentive but in the small group the mean performance increases weakly in rank incentives finally the mean performance is significantly higher in the large than in the small group because of a higher prestige effect in additional treatments in which we do not reveal the identity of the statusprize winners we find that average performance is identical to that in the baseline treatment without any status prizes the last result signifies the important role that public revelation plays to enhance the strength of status the results are important for managerial practices

the relative income hypothesis abstract despite its theoretical dominance the empirical case in favor of the permanent income hypothesis is weak contrary to one of its basic implications a growing body of evidence suggests that rich households save a higher proportion of their permanent income than poor households we propose an overlapping generations economy where households care about relative consumption as a result an individual s consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his reference group a permanent income version of duesenberry s 1949 relative income hypothesis across households the savings rate increases with income while aggregate savings are independent of the income distribution

offshore outsourcing decision making a policy maker s perspective this research aims at finding the best governing policy for offshore outsourcing of business activities we use analytical network process a multicriteria decision making methodology to create the evaluation framework from the perspective of decision makers stakeholders and influence groups four policy options are evaluated with respect to approximately 50 economic political technological and other factors the model provides both long term and short term views of the outsourcing issue concerned to all parties the all inclusive approach helps policy makers to decide on the best policy and has the potential to ease tension between proponents and opponents of offshore outsourcing

risk versus return in the substitutability of debt and equity securities abstract this paper addresses the empirical issue of whether financial assets held by the u s household sector especially debt and equity are substitutes or complements and what if any are the magnitudes of the relationships using a flexible functional form portfolio optimization framework together with asset holdings and returns data and a rolling sample var expectation model we estimate asset demand elasticities with respect to expected returns variance and covariance of returns in general we find the elasticities to be significantly different from zero the results also indicate that debt and equity are substitutes public policy implications are drawn from the results

neighbourhood effects and housing demand in this paper we estimate a model of housing demand with neighborhood eects we exploit special features of the national sample of the american housing survey and properties of housing markets that allow us to create natural instruments and therefore identify the impact of social interactions we find evidence of both endogenous and contextual neighborhood eects we report two alternative sets of estimates for neighborhood eects that dier in terms of the instruments we use for estimating the model when the endogenous neighborhood eect is large the respective contextual eects are weak and vice versa the elasticity of housing demand with respect to the mean of the neighbors housing demands the endogenous eect ranges from 0 19 to 0 66 and is generally very significant the contextual eects are also very significant a key such eect the elasticity with respect to the mean of neighbors permanent incomes ranges from 0 17 to 0 54

a discrete choice model with social interactions with an application to high school teen behavior we develop an empirical discrete choice interaction model with a finite number of agents we characterize its equilibrium properties in particular the correspondence between interaction strength number of agents and the set of equilibria and propose to estimate the model by means of simulation methods in an empirical application we analyze the individual behavior of high school teenagers in almost 500 school classes from 70 schools in our baseline model endogenous social interaction effects are strong for behavior closely related to school truancy somewhat weaker for behavior partly related to school smoking cell phone ownership and moped ownership and absent for behavior far away from school asking parents permission for purchases intra gender interactions are generally much stronger than cross gender interactions in a model with school specific fixed effects social interaction effects are insignificant with the exception of intra gender interactions for truancy copyright c 2007 john wiley sons ltd

a simulation study of it outsourcing in the credit card business the use of monte carlo simulation for evaluation of financial risk of an information technology project selection decision is described a major thai bank considered the opportunity to expand credit card operations through information technology it alternatives considered were in house development and outsourcing there were many strategic reasons for the initiative however there were also many risks associated with the proposal a monte carlo simulation spreadsheet model was used to model risk parameters and to analyze key performance variables of financial performance key output variables were the number of cardholders expected project net present value net profit and expected return on investment the spreadsheet model made entry of model elements transparent and monte carlo simulation provided clear visual display of the financial output variables the bank used this information in its decision to outsource its credit card operations

social interactions and habit formation in a model of female labour supply this paper investigates the influence of habit formation and preference interdependence on labour supply behaviour of married females a novelty of the paper is that we incorporate direct survey information on reference groups of individuals in a neoclassical labour supply model for that purpose we first estimate a latent variables model relating the direct information to the true but unobserved reference groups one of the most interesting features of the model is that the presence of young children becomes an insignificant factor in the hours equation while it remains a significant factor in the participation decision in addition the labour supply curve is much flatter in a model with habit formation and preference interdependence than in a model without it both habit formation and preference interdependence contribute significantly to the explanation of female labour supply 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

the simple analytics of contraceptive social marketing abstract contraceptive social marketing csm programs have been advocated for the dissemination of contraceptives in developing countries this paper considers csm programs from a simple economic perspective it begins with a review of the major economic models of private fertility determinants and the associated private demand for contraceptives and then adds private contraceptive supply to obtain market equilibrium next inefficiencies due to negative externalities of added children and due to imperfect information and distributional concerns are considered finally this framework is utilized to point to lacunae in our knowledge of csm programs and their impact and to suggest some promising areas for research

you paid for the skills now keep them tuition reimbursement and voluntary turnover does investing in employees marketable skills reduce turnover this study uses insights from human capital theory to explain how general skill development and promotion relate to voluntary turnover data from 9 439 salaried employees of a large manufacturer show that participation in tuition reimbursement reduces turnover while employees are in school voluntary turnover increases when individuals earn graduate degrees but is significantly reduced if they are subsequently promoted

recent estimates of time variation in the conditional variance and in the exchange risk premium abstract the optimal diversification model of investors portfolio behavior can give a linear relationship between the exchange risk premium and the conditional exchange rate variance this note surveys recent empirical work that allows the conditional variance itself and therefore the risk premium to vary over time in particular it examines the implications of recent empirical estimates for earlier arguments based on the assumption that the conditional variance was constant over time that the exchange risk premium had to be small in magnitude and variability

growth outside the stable path lessons from the european reconstruction abstract this paper exploits a natural experiment the large destruction of capital in continental europe during world war ii to characterize the transitional dynamics of an economy that begins with a capital stock below its steady state level we use these regularities as a benchmark to discriminate among competing growth specifications a model that combines non separabilities in preferences with a technology that restricts the degree of substitutability between inputs outperforms the widely used ak and cobb douglas specifications with time separable preferences our results suggest that policy evaluations based in growth models that overlook non separabilities in preferences or impose strong restrictions on the technological structure might be grossly misleading

performance measures and metrics in outsourcing decisions a review for research and applications outsourcing an operations strategy that influences the performance of a supply chain has become an important component of global operations management an effective global sourcing strategy helps companies to manage the flow of parts and finished products in meeting the needs of overseas and domestic markets outsourcing reduces the cost of assets facilitates core competencies to reduce production costs leads to strategic flexibility and reduces administrative and overhead costs some of the reasons why companies are against outsourcing include integration challenges sacrificing their competitive base opportunistic behaviour rising transaction and coordination costs limited innovation and higher procurement costs despite these shortcomings outsourcing will continue to play an important role in enhancing organizational competitiveness therefore an attempt has been made to review the literature on outsourcing with particular reference to performance measures and metrics pmms used in arriving at outsourcing decisions the main objective of this paper is to present a taxonomy classification of pmms in outsourcing decisions at the pre outsourcing during outsourcing and post outsourcing stages also based on the literature review and analysis an attempt is made to determine a list of specific tools and techniques for pmms in outsourcing finally the limitations of the paper and future research directions are presented

outsourcing suppliers as downstream competitors biting the hand that feeds abstract in this paper we highlight an aspect of supplier opportunism in the outsourcing paradox that has largely been ignored by extant research the supplier as a direct competitor of the buyer firm in light of this paradox we offer a game theoretic framework in which we identify conditions under which firms could alleviate or mitigate this outsourcing problem our results show that apart from transaction costs firm level capabilities both ordinary and dynamic play important roles in determining the make only buy only or make and buy options a firm could exercise in countering the threat of the supplier as a potential competitor in the downstream marketplace

why do we reject the mean variance model a two stage test procedure for the static mean variance portfolio model is presented which focuses on increasingly restrictive versions of the general model it also delivers clues to the probable cause of rejection the procedure is applied to quarterly data for german private net wealth the mean variance restrictions are strongly rejected because the data reject any positive semi definite link between returns and asset holdings this suggests that the failure of the model is not primarily caused by neglect of the time variation of conditional covanances

estimation of relative risk aversion across time abstractthis article examines relative risk aversion in the framework of a three moment asset pricing model that accounts for skewness accounting for skewness in calculating risk aversion gives a more accurate series of estimates of risk aversion and helps to reconcile the wide disparity in risk coefficients found in past literature risk aversion coefficients are calculated from 1926 to 2014 using stock market returns this procedure results in a time series of data that can be related to other variables such as real interest rates and changes in demand for various asset classes

the effectiveness of alternative monetary policy tools in a zero lower bound environment this paper reviews alternative options for monetary policy when the shortterm interest rate is at the zero lower bound and develops new empirical estimates of the effects of the maturity structure of publicly held debt on the term structure of interest rates we use a model of risk averse arbitrageurs to develop measures of how the maturity structure of debt held by the public might affect the pricing of level slope and curvature term structure risk we find that these treasury factors historically were quite helpful for predicting both yields and excess returns over 1990 2007 the historical correlations are consistent with the claim that if in december 2006 the fed were to have sold off all its treasury holdings of less than 1 year maturity about 400 billion and use the proceeds to retire treasury debt from the long end this might have resulted in a 14 basis point drop in the 10 year rate and an 11 basis point increase in the 6 month rate we also develop a description of how the dynamic behavior of the term structure of interest rates changed after hitting the zero lower bound in 2009 our estimates imply that at the zero lower bound such a maturity swap would have the same effects as buying 400 billion in long term maturities outright with newly created reserves and could reduce the 10 year rate by 13 basis points without raising short term yields

positional spending and status seeking in rural china focusing on a remote area in rural china we use a panel census of households in 26 villages to show that socially observable spending has risen sharply in recent years we demonstrate that such spending by households is highly sensitive to social spending by other villagers this suggests that social spending is either positional in nature i e motivated by status concerns or subject to herding behavior we also document systematic relations between social spending and changes in higher order terms of the income distribution we find that the implications of status seeking for spending are not unidimensional they vary across income groups and expenditure categories in particular and consistent with theories of rank based status seeking we find that the poor increase spending on funerals and gifts as competition for status intensifies in addition poor families of grooms expend more for wedding ceremonies as local income competition increases while the families of brides do not the welfare implications of spending in order to keep up with the joneses are potentially large particularly for poor households

resource grabbing by status conscious agents abstract we introduce a dynamic model of resource grabbing by status conscious agents i e agents value not only their absolute consumption levels but also the relative status within their reference group we explore the effect of the concern for relative consumption on the growth rate and the welfare of an economy where agents appropriate from a common property resource our model shows that the greater is agents concern about their relative status the more aggressively they tend to behave consequently social welfare is lower because the growth rate of the public asset is reduced due to higher extraction rate we also consider the effect of increased heterogeneity and show that social welfare decreases as the distribution of status consciousness among agents widens

a testable model of consumption with externalities abstract this paper presents a nonparametric model of interdependent preferences where an individual s consumption may act as an externality on the preferences of other consumers we assume that individual price consumption data is observed for all consumers it is known that the general consumption model with externalities imposes few restrictions on the observed data where the consistency requirement is nash rationalizability we motivate potential games as an important sub class of games where the family of concave potential games is refutable and imposes stronger restrictions on observed data we use this framework to extend the analysis of brown and matzkin d brown r matzkin testable restrictions on the equilibrium manifold econometrica 64 1996 1249 1262 on refutable pure exchange economies to pure exchange economies with externalities finally we discuss an application of this model to inter household consumption data

social comparisons status and driving behavior abstract the establishment of desirable social norms is an integral part of a well functioning civil society while recent evidence has demonstrated that social comparison can affect behavior in a variety of contexts it is not clear what type of comparative social information is most effective using a large scale field experiment to study driving practices we sent text messages containing different types of social information to drivers in tsingtao china we find two types of social information to be particularly effective in reducing traffic violations the driving behavior of those similar to oneself and the driving behavior of those with high status cars our results indicate that the combination of descriptive norms with social status is a cost effective yet powerful intervention for establishing better driving behavior in emerging markets

estimation of asset demands by heterogeneous agents we develop optimization models to analyze the demand for financial assets by heterogeneous agents the models extend frankel s j portfolio manage 11 4 1985 18 earlier approach and relax the assumption of normality of asset returns instead we assume that investors maximize an expected utility of terminal wealth based on heterogeneous attitudes toward risk solving a bi level optimization program we endogenously estimate the risk aversion parameters and derive the optimal asset holdings for each agent the models are tested on united states market data explaining the market structure better than previously postulated models

do changes in debt maturity composition affect the term structure some canadian evidence this paper examines the time series behaviour of the term structure of interest rates in the government of canada bond market to determine whether changes in the maturity composition of canada debt have had a significant effect on bond yields methodologically a reduced form model is estimated which incorporates exogenous information about both the level of domestic interest rates and the shape of the us term structure the empirical results indicate that the null hypothesis of no debt management effects in the government of canada bond market is rejected for monthly data

optimal funding rules abstract the operation of automatic fiscal stabilisers may prevent interest rates from falling during times of recession while they may lower interest rates during recovery thereby exacerbating the private sector business cycle we demonstrate that the government funding authority may devise rules for debt issuance which minimise the variance of the government s overall funding requirement this is done by switching issuance between different debt instruments in such a way that interest and redemption payments counteract the cycle in the underlying funding requirement thereby removing any autocorrelation in the net funding requirement we illustrate the application of such a funding rule to the borrowing requirement of the united kingdom government this has the effect of smoothing out the borrowing requirement over the business cycle