The influence of financial participation and participation in decision-making on employee job attitudes

This study investigates the direct and indirect effects of financial participation (FP) and participation in decision-making (PDM) on employee job attitudes. The central premise is that both financial participation and participation in decision-making have effects on job attitudes, such as integration, involvement and commitment, perceived pay equity, performance-reward contingencies, satisfaction and motivation. After reviewing the theoretical and empirical literature and testing two theoretical frameworks, developed by Long (1978a) and Florkowski ( 1989), a new model was constructed to consider a combined effects of both FP and PDM, herein referred to as employee participation (EP). The underpinning of the model is based on the assumption that both ( a) the combination of financial participation and participation in decision-making ('employee participation'), and (b) participation in decision-making produce favourable effects on employee job attitudes. The test of the new model showed that employee participation does not produce more favourable effects on employee job attitudes, than does participation in decision-making on its own. The data were gathered from a questionnaire study administered in a large British retail organization that operates two types of ownership schemes - profit-sharing and SAYE schemes.

A note on execution costs for stock index futures: Information versus liquidity effects

This paper examines execution costs and the impact of trade size for stock index futures using price-volume transaction data from the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange. Consistent with Subrahmanyam [Rev. Financ. Stud. 4 (1991) 11] we find that effective half spreads in the stock index futures market are small compared to stock markets, and that trades in stock index futures have only a small permanent price impact. This result is important as it helps to better understand the success of equity index products such as index futures and Exchange Traded Funds. We also find that there is no asymmetry in the post-trade price reaction between purchases and sales for stock index futures across various trade sizes. This result is consistent with the conjecture in Chan and Lakonishok [J. Financ. Econ. 33 (1993) 173] that the asymmetry surrounding block trades in stock markets is due to the high cost of short selling and the general reluctance of traders to short sell on stock markets. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.