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In the past decade, corporate firms have globally increasingly adopted corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices; however, so far less is known about how productivity change in the presence of socially responsible and undesirable output can be evaluated. This paper develops a framework that integrates CSR in a dynamic by-production technology which captures the transformation of multiple inputs into marketed outputs, socially responsible and undesirable outputs, while accounting for adjustment costs in quasi-fixed inputs. The paper illustrates the method using a sample of European food and beverage manufacturing firms. The results of the empirical application show that there is a decline in dynamic Luenberger productivity indicators mainly due to technical inefficiency change. Hence, firms should devise strategies to enhance utilization of resources and reduce technical inefficiency. The regression of productivity change indicators on firm-specific factors showed that more indebted firms experienced a lower growth of the productivity of undesirable output, whereas more profitable firms have a lower productivity growth of variable inputs and a higher growth of the productivity of investments. [EconLit Citations: C02, C14, C6, D24]

We investigate various performance indicators of ten leading journals in the field of Agricultural Economics and Policy over the period from 2000 to 2020. More specifically, we combine various data sources to derive a coherent record of indicators including acceptance rates, times between submission and first response and impact factors. We show that, for the discipline at large, the turn-around times have decreased, and impact factors have increased substantially over time. However, this has been accompanied by a sharp decrease in the proportion of accepted articles. Our analysis also reveals large differences across journals in all dimensions. Results show there is no free lunch, that is, authors face trade-offs. For example, submitting to a higher impact factor journal means on average longer turn-around time and lower acceptance rates. The dataset compiled and presented here gives the first coherent overview of relevant information to guide authors' submission decisions, and inform our fellow professionals., Journal of Agricultural Economics, 73 (2), ISSN:0021-857X, ISSN:1477-9552

We review the empirical literature on the causal effects of welfare-to-work policies on the employment of low-income parents and the intergenerational impacts on their children. We focus on welfare policies that change benefit levels, activity requirements, time limits, and in-work benefits. These policies may affect children through several mechanisms, including changes in family income, time spent with parents, and attitudes towards work or welfare. To unpack these mechanisms and understand the net effects of these policies, we assess how the impact on children varies across outcomes, home environments and institutional settings. Overall, the literature shows that income tax credits are an attractive policy, simultaneously increasing employment and improving child development outcomes. In contrast, other policies that boost employment either have no or negative impacts on child development.

The HILDA Survey has provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the determinants and consequences of family formation and dissolution in Australia. This review gives an overview of this research, focusing on (i) relationship formation, (ii) fertility, children and parenting and (iii) relationship dissolution.

We explore implications of asbestos for the measurement and reporting of liabilities, assets and expenses by diverse entities. We argue that entities in both public and private sectors are failing to recognise or appropriately measure liabilities related to asbestos and that the implications of asbestos for assets and expenses in financial statements are rarely reported. While we focus on recognition and measurement implications for Australian entities, we also examine relevant requirements in other jurisdictions and for sustainability reporting.

Research Summary: Strategy research advises firms to capture generative value by continually introducing generational improvements on their existing products. This article considers a potential dark side of such strategy. We argue that generational innovation can elicit a negative near-term response from customers, as it distorts their ingrained behavioral patterns and imposes learning costs. Further, we propose that this negative effect of generational innovation will diminish when the product has a leading market position; and it will be more severe as the product's technological legacy lengthens. Using a difference-in-differences research design based on mobile game apps that multihome on two platforms, we find supportive evidence for our hypotheses and discuss the corresponding implications for strategy and technology innovation literature. MAnagerial Summary: Firms are advised to capture the value in future innovations that are spawned from their existing innovation, and they can do so by releasing improved generations of current products. This article examines a potential dark side of such strategy—that generational innovation could alienate existing customers by unsettling their ingrained behavioral patterns. Utilizing a unique dataset of mobile game apps, we find evidence of this negative effect, which tends to be weaker for market leaders but more damaging for those having already experienced numerous generational changes.

This article provides a brief and selective review of research studies examining job characteristics and the changing nature of work that have used data from the HILDA Survey. It focuses on research into job satisfaction (and job quality more broadly), working time and forms of employment.

This article studies the pricing problem of a seller given an initial inventory of products with heterogeneous quality, facing uncertain customer arrivals over a finite selling season. We consider various regimes depending on whether the seller inspects the inventory to assess the quality levels of the products, and whether customers examine the inventory themselves and pick their specific item of choice among the available products. We formulate the problem under each regime as a stochastic optimization model which maximizes the seller's expected profits, capturing the salient problem features such as stochastic customer arrivals, customers' choice behavior, and uncertain product qualities. As obtaining closed-form solutions or structural properties for the optimal prices is quite difficult, we explore the full information solution to the problem as an upper bound, as well as solution approaches that approximate some key problem characteristics. Finally, we substantiate our results through an extensive numerical study, focusing on the performance of the proposed pricing policies and approximations.

The objective of this paper is to propose a novel deep learning methodology to gain pragmatic insights into the behavior of an insured person using unsupervised variable importance. It lays the groundwork for understanding how insights can be gained into the fraudulent behavior of an insured person with minimum effort. Starting with a preliminary investigation of the limitations of the existing fraud detection models, we propose a new variable importance methodology incorporated with two prominent unsupervised deep learning models, namely, the autoencoder and the variational autoencoder. Each model's dynamics is discussed to inform the reader on how models can be adapted for fraud detection and how results can be perceived appropriately. Both qualitative and quantitative performance evaluations are conducted, although a greater emphasis is placed on qualitative evaluation. To broaden the scope of reference of fraud detection setting, various metrics are used in the qualitative evaluation.

This study finds that institutional investors in Australia recall loaned shares prior to shareholder meetings to exercise their voting rights as part of their effort to improve corporate governance. Recalls are increasingly common in larger firms, firms with more independent directors, and stocks with higher past returns in recent years. Recalls are associated with less support for resolutions at meetings, especially those related to the remuneration package in firms within the ASX100 and those with existing shareholder dissent. We deduce the value of votes (around 351 bps per annum) from the incremental cost of borrowing shares with voting rights around shareholder meetings.

This article points to gaps between academic research and the needs of accounting standard-setters. In part it attributes those gaps to the academic literature seeming to be inaccessible and oriented to ideas apparently unrelated to the policy-making issues facing standard-setters. As a means of partially reducing that perceived inaccessibility, the paper provides a way for standard-setters to identify and classify the various forms of academic accounting research so that they can evaluate their usefulness. Two prominent strands of research (agency theory/costly contracting and value relevance) are, as illustrations, analysed so that standard-setters can see how they might approach those strands. The paper suggests a users’ needs/demand driven approach to improving understanding, rather than a supply (by academics) driven approach. Finally, the paper explains how the performance metrics faced by academics can be inconsistent with the readiness expressed by standard-setters to have academics assist them. The paper provides a suggestion as to how there could be some alignment of academic performance metrics and standard-setters’ needs.

Following Kahneman and Tversky, studies such as those by Haigh and List, Ert and Erev and Mukherjee et al. find that loss aversion increases as stake increases. This study extends the 2011 work of Berger and Pope by analysing over 68,000 US professional basketball games played from the initial National Basketball Association (NBA) season in 1946/1947 to the 2018/2019 season, and over 69,000 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) games played from the 2007/2008 season to the 2018/2019 season. We posit that, a priori, stakes, and therefore loss aversion, will be greater for NBA teams than for NCAA teams, and higher for home teams than for away teams. Further, loss aversion is expected to be greater for favourites, that is, teams that are expected to win. We model outcomes using a digital call option. This model allows for necessary non-linearity in the relation between halftime score and winning percentage. It also provides an analysis for which the result for home (favourite) teams is not simply the converse of that for away (underdog) teams. We find evidence of better-than-expected performance for NBA home teams that are behind by up to four points, and for favourites that are behind by between two and seven points. We find no evidence of this effect with respect to NBA away teams, NBA underdogs, nor for NCAA teams – whether home or away. Our results suggest that loss aversion is apparent when stakes are high.

We examine how rapid growth in imports of manufactured goods from China affected employment in Australia from 1991 to 2006. Alternative sources of variation in Chinese import exposure (at industry level and between local labour markets) are used to identify the effect on employment. Growth in imports from China is estimated to have reduced manufacturing employment by around 53,200 to 78,900 workers, representing 5.3 to 7.5 per cent of that workforce in 1991. Largest impacts are found for manufacturing industries most exposed to import competition from China; and from 2001 to 2006 when import growth was strongest.

We consider the effects of terrorism in a home nation and in its neighbors on the home nation's imports. We find that a 10% increase in terrorist attacks in a neighboring nation reduces a country's imports from the rest of the world by approximately $320 million USD, on average. Mediation analysis shows that trading delays is a potential channel of transmission of trade costs of terrorism to a neighbor. We also present a monopolistically competitive theoretical model to throw light on our empirical results.

We show that for the United States and Australia consumers expect significantly lower inflation when the political party they support holds executive office. This finding cannot be explained by previously documented sources of heterogeneity in consumer inflation expectations. It is consistent with stereotypical thinking (Bordalo et al. 2016), pointing to the use of heuristics in the formation of macro-economic beliefs. Our findings have implications for consumers' understanding of central bank independence and its connection with inflation stabilization.

Over the years, Operations and Supply Chain Management (OSCM) researchers have continued to examine foundational topics, while also expanding and adding new ones. Given that the field has changed a great deal, it seems valuable to examine the evolution of OSCM's intellectual structure over its 70 years of academic communications. Using bibliometrics methods, we analyze 96,125 articles containing 1,047,468 references from 31 representative OSCM journals. Our study defines primary topic areas represented in the most co-cited documents, while tracing past and current research trends. We include analyses of recent bursts in research attention and comparisons of trends in academic and practitioner literatures. The results from an inclusive analysis suggest that OSCM researchers have been responsive to methodological advances and to some of the dynamics in the operating environments of businesses. However, a product/manufacturing focus seems to persist, and inconsistencies between researchers’ and practitioners’ interests suggest that relevance of OSCM could be further improved. Current hot topics are quite different from those of the past. Trend data suggest that studies of supply chain management and data analytics issues will continue to figure largely in shaping the future research agenda. Our analysis quantifies trends and identifies subtopics that are growing in prominence. In addition, the findings provide a benchmark for evaluating the progress of the OSCM field, while highlighting opportunities for shaping its development and directions.

Retirement village contracts are complex, blending together financial options on real estate, life annuities and life insurance. We analyse the structure of the cash flows involved in a retirement village contract and distil the cost components into an equivalent monthly comparison rent. In general, we observe lower monthly rents when the maintenance fees and deferred management fees are lower, when higher rates of capital gain are evident, and, importantly, when retirees reside in the retirement village for a longer period. Our analysis provides a framework to meaningfully compare the relative merits of the finances incorporated into retirement village contracts.

We study how trade liberalisation affects the extent of corporate decentralisation using the World Bank enterprise survey in China. In particular, we examine the autonomy of production, investment and employment decision and the incentive compensation of CEOs of subsidiary firms after China's entry in the World Trade Organization (WTO). We show that subsidiary firm CEOs receive more decision autonomy and higher powered incentives when facing increased foreign competition in output market. In contrast, subsidiary CEOs receive less decision autonomy and flat incentive compensation when foreign competition in subsidiaries’ input market intensifies. When examining subsidiary CEOs’ autonomy in different decisions, we find that CEOs’ investment autonomy is more responsive to foreign competition than employment and production autonomy. We explain this difference through the agency cost angle by showing that firms whose CEOs with greater investment autonomy tend to spend more on managerial perks. Taken together, this paper sheds new light on how trade liberalisation reshapes firms’ decentralisation decisions in a multi‐tasking principal‐agent setting.

Organizational research underpinned by self‐determination theory (SDT) has grown substantially over the past decade. However, the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote support for basic psychological needs in organizations remains ill documented. We thus report the results of a qualitative systematic review and synthesis of SDT‐informed studies of interventions to cultivate autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs, and in turn, autonomous motivation in organizational contexts. Studies were included in the review if they evaluated the effect of interventions to develop autonomy‐, competence‐, or relatedness‐supportive work climates or leader behaviours. A systematic search yielded ten eligible field studies for inclusion: three randomized‐controlled trials and seven non‐randomized intervention studies (combined N = 2,337). Seven studies yielded mostly favourable effects, two yielded mixed effects, and one study showed no evidence of change post‐intervention. Substantial heterogeneity in intervention format and delivery existed across studies. Studies pointed towards possible moderators of effectiveness. Interventions were more effective at spawning change at the proximal (leader) level than at the distal (subordinate) level, though few studies tracked employees over time to comprehensively evaluate long‐term transfer. Bias assessments showed that risk of bias was moderate or high across studies. We discuss overall implications of the review and suggest several recommendations for future intervention research and practice.

Performance measures are often outlined in the section of the service-level agreement (SLA) of the contract between a supplier and a retailer. They are monitored periodically, and penalty and/or bonus payments are imposed in each performance review period, according to the SLA clauses. Previous studies have mostly considered a static inventory policy in analyzing SLAs. However, in practice, the supplier may have an opportunity to adjust the stock level in each inventory review period, according to the observed performance. This study analyzes the dynamic stocking decision for a supplier facing an SLA where the supplier sells a single product to the retailer. The ready rate is used to measure the performance in an SLA. To this end, models for both lump-sum and linear penalty/bonus structures are developed, and the optimal stocking decisions for a strategic supplier are calculated using the stochastic dynamic programming approach. The results are then compared with the optimal static inventory policy, and new insights are derived to efficiently design an inventory system for the suppliers that are subject to service-level incentives. In addition, we investigate the impact of SLA parameters—such as the length of the performance review period and incentive structures—on a supplier's performance, with the probability of meeting or exceeding the target service levels and the supplier's cost. We also consider the impact of demand distribution and inventory holding costs. Results show that under lump-sum incentives, a longer performance review period benefits both the supplier and the buyer, given that the average ready rate increases with less variability as the length of the performance review period increases, leading to decrements in the supplier's total costs. In this scenario, there is a higher chance of gaining bonuses/avoiding penalties for a strategic supplier who adopts a dynamic inventory policy. On the other hand, under linear incentives, the impact of the performance review period on the supplier's cost and the performance measure (i.e., ready rate) is complicated and depends on the magnitude of the holding cost and the bonus and/or penalty structure of the contract. Under this scheme, the performance of a static inventory policy is highly dependent on the holding cost because a high holding cost may lead to failure to meet the contract requirements in terms of the service level.

This study enables practitioners and researchers to make an informed choice for a financial statement fraud detection model, rather than defaulting to popular, yet dated, models. Using a specifically devised performance criterion, our newly configured ensemble outperforms 31 others in the most comprehensive comparison to date spanning parametric, non‐parametric, big data and ensemble techniques. We use a large set of input variables and holdout data relative to prior studies. We find empirical support for financial and non‐financial variables covering the three Fraud Triangle factors. New findings include fraud risk being reduced with more debt, likely from increased monitoring by creditors.

Strategy research views firms’ diverse experience base as critical to new product success. It also champions strategy-by-doing in entrepreneurial settings. This study juxtaposes and bridges these two perspectives to better understand product development. We propose that while a firm’s product portfolio diversity contributes to new product success only to a certain degree, design iteration—a post-launch strategy-by-doing approach—is positively associated with new product performance. Our core contribution points to a complementary relationship: strategy-by-doing helps mitigate the capacity constraints problem that prevents firms from successfully adapting product development capabilities to a dynamic market. Our analysis of a sample of 2,182 nascent mobile apps from 564 top producers in the US market supports our hypotheses. We discuss implications for product development, strategy-by-doing, and technology innovation literature.

We examine the association between a country's electoral system and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity of firms and explore whether this association is influenced by corporate political donation. The study draws on the neo‐pluralist theory of power in society to examine how possible corporate influence in the electoral systems relates to corporate environmental performance. Using a cross‐country panel dataset, we find that companies operating in countries using majoritarian electoral systems (MAJ), where corporations have a relatively low influence on election outcomes, are associated with lower GHG emission intensity than those in proportional electoral systems, after controlling for macro‐economic factors and variations in firm characteristics. Further, our findings show that corporate political donation positively moderates the association between MAJ and GHG emission intensity. Our results suggest that corporations are likely to utilise political donations as a component of business strategy to ease the regulatory actions of the state on companies. The results are robust to alternative variable measurements and tests of sensitivity.

This paper investigates how wage growth varies among Australian employees with different individual characteristics and job characteristics, and how the role of these characteristics has changed over the 2001-2018 period. The results show that after increasing between 2002 and 2007, wage growth had significantly slowed down post 2008, and particularly from 2013 onwards, returning to the levels of the early 2000s. Employees’ age, education, employment contract, occupation and industry explain a large share of differences in wage growth between individuals, and these characteristics are more important than aggregate business cycle effects. Conversely, the employee’s gender seems less important. Interestingly, the employee’s occupation is more important post-2008 than pre-2008, with managers and professionals experiencing substantially higher wage growth than others since 2014, whereas education was more important pre-2008. Finally, we find that casual employees receive a wage growth premium during the economic upturn and a penalty during the economic downturn.

A larger and more productive economy would facilitate the reduction of COVID‐19 government deficits and their future repayment. Reform of state taxes is among the low‐hanging fruit to include in a broad supply‐side agenda to increase national productivity. Approximate aggregate revenue neutral reform packages to reduce tax distortions and improve productivity are discussed for state taxes on property, payroll and motor vehicles.

Over the last few months, COVID-19 has entered our own consciousness as a moment of profound disruption, leading in too many cases to misery and death, but also, forcing us more mundanely to reorganize our lives, work and social relations This unexpected dis-organization of life has revealed our mutual dependency to exist, as one people, literally: pan-demic

Designing effective settings for performance measures (e.g., fill rate) of a service-level agreement (SLA) is challenging. This challenge is intensified when a firm adopts the pooling inventory model to allocate inventory/capacity to multiple buyers. Each buyer has its own service-level contract outlining the required service level, the penalty structures, and the performance review period (PRP) length, which might not be the same as other buyers. This means the supplier requires an effective resource allocation policy whereby the different requirements of multiple buyers are integrated into a pooling model and capacities/inventories are allocated in the most effective way. Given a base-stock replenishment policy and finite time horizon PRP, in this study we propose two new (anticipative) allocation policies—foresight linear programming (FLP) and two-stage stochastic (TS)—and compare them with existing allocation policies. These allocation policies are developed for different penalty structures of linear, lump-sum, hybrid, and no-penalty settings. Results show that suppliers benefit from longer PRPs if linear or hybrid penalty structures are employed. We also find that when the length of PRP of buyers is not identical, TS is the recommending policy. Further, results provide a guideline for selecting the best resource allocation policy under various SLA terms, in particular, where buyers' PRP lengths are not identical.

Women who graduate from university are less likely than men to specialize in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM). We use detailed administrative data for a recent cohort of high school students in Ontario, Canada, combined with data from the province's university admission system to analyze the dynamic process leading to this gap. We show that entry to STEM programs is mediated through an index of STEM readiness based on end-ofhigh-school courses in math and science. Most of the gender gap in STEM entry can be traced to differences in the rate of STEM readiness; less than a fifth is due to differences in the choice of major conditional on readiness. We then use high school course data to decompose the gap in STEM readiness among university entrants into two channels: one reflecting the gender gap in the fraction of high school students with the necessary prerequisites to enter STEM, and a second arising from differences in the fractions of females and males who enter university. The gender gap in the fraction of students with STEM prerequisites is small. The main factor is the lower university entry rate by men -- a difference that is due to the lower fraction of non-science oriented males who complete enough advanced level courses to qualify for university entry. We conclude that differences in course-taking patterns and preferences for STEM conditional on readiness contribute to male-female differences in the rate of entering STEM, but that the main source of the gap is the lower overall rate of university attendance by men.

This paper reviews the history of human economic activity from the time Homo sapiens appeared to the present. The first aim is to provide a coherent narrative of the economic history of this period. The second aim is to quantify economic activities where time series data is available and to use economic theory to explain the trends and turning points. It examines the history of three central time series – the aggregate human population, output per capita and human-induced species extinctions. It concludes with some brief observations on the contribution of Big Economic History to Big Human History.

Traditional benchmarking implicitly assumes that decision making units operate in isolation from their peers. For arable production systems in particular, this assumption is unlikely to hold in reality. This paper quantifies spatial spillovers on input‐specific inefficiency using data envelopment analysis and a second‐stage bootstrap truncated regression model. The bootstrap algorithm is extended to allow for the estimation of the parameter of the spatial weight matrix, which captures the proximity between producers. The empirical application concerns Dutch arable farms for which latitudes and longitudes are available. The average inefficiency across years was 3.87% for productive inputs and 2.98% for damage abatement inputs under variable returns to scale. For productive inputs technical inefficiency, statistically significant spillover effects from neighbours’ age and their degree of specialisation depended on the type of the spatial weight matrix used (inverse distance or k‐nearest neighbours). Statistically significant spillover effects of subsidy payments were adverse while statistically significant spillover effects from insurance payments were beneficial. For damage abatement inputs technical inefficiency, statistically significant adverse effects were found for neighbours’ age and subsidy payments and beneficial effects from neighbours’ insurance payments and their degree of specialisation.

The Australian Taxation Office release of annual longitudinally linked individual tax and superannuation records, known as the ATO Longitudinal Information Files (ALife), opens up opportunities for new research. In this study, we provide an overview of ALife, focusing on its use for retirement income research. To this end, we provide the first longitudinal estimates of superannuation outcomes for 1-year birth cohorts. Results show marked increase in disparity of super balances in the lead-up to retirement as those in the top quartile ramp-up their contributions, possibly to take advantage of the favourable tax treatment of superannuation income in retirement years.

From March to June 2020 was the most dramatic four months in the history of the Australian labour market. Never before has such a substantial decrease in labour demand (and partial reversal) occurred so quickly. In this article, we present an overview of the early impact of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19: the main drivers it brought into play and the consequent labour market developments. Aggregate effects and how impacts differed by type of job and worker are described. We conclude with a brief review of the main government response to COVID-19, the JobKeeper program.

While voluntary disclosure theory posits that profit‐oriented companies voluntarily disclose information to increase their market value, this does not explain why a charity would report in accordance with a more comprehensive financial reporting framework than required. Using a unique financial reporting framework choice available in Australia, our study examines factors associated with large charities' choice of a General Purpose Financial Statements (GPFS) reporting framework, which encompasses expansive financial reporting requirements, versus a Special Purpose Financial Statements (SPFS) reporting framework, where management, within limits, effectively chooses that subset of accounting standards applicable to that charity. For those preparing GPFS, we then examine the factors that determine those charities that report in accordance with the complete set of Australian Accounting Standards (Tier 1) versus Reduced Disclosure Requirements (Tier 2). Using manually collected data from 11,471 large‐registered charities for 2014–2016, we find that the economic importance of the charity, its funding sources, and level of indebtedness are significant in explaining charities choosing a more comprehensive financial reporting framework. Further, we find a substantial increase in the proportion of large charities electing to disclose GPFS‐Tier 2 over this three‐year window. The choice of a large audit firm (Big 4 and mid‐tier audit firms) is significantly associated with charities both lodging more comprehensive GPFS, and also reporting GPFS in accordance with the less onerous GPFS‐Tier 2 framework. Our results provide insights into voluntary reporting choices made by charities and inform charities, accounting firms, and regulators of factors influencing charities' choice of financial reporting frameworks.