Political selection and the relative age effect

In this paper we present substantial evidence for the existence of a bias in the distribution of births of leading US politicians in favor of those that have been the oldest in their cohort at school. This “relative age effect” has been proven to influence performance at school and in sports,but evidence on its impact on people’s vocational success has been rare. We find a marked break in the density of birthdate of politicians using a maximum likelihood test and McCrary’s (2008) nonparametric test. We conjecture that being relatively old in a peer group may create long term advantages which can create a significant role in the ability to succeed in a highly competitive environment like the race for top political offices in the USA. The magnitude of the effect we estimate is larger than what most other studies on the relative age effect for a broader (adult) population find, but is in general in line with studies that look at populations in high-competition environments.

Understanding process behaviours in a large insurance company in Australia : a case study

Having a reliable understanding about the behaviours, problems, and performance of existing processes is important in enabling a targeted process improvement initiative. Recently, there has been an increase in the application of innovative process mining techniques to facilitate evidence-based understanding about organizations' business processes. Nevertheless, the application of these techniques in the domain of finance in Australia is, at best, scarce. This paper details a 6-month case study on the application of process mining in one of the largest insurance companies in Australia. In particular, the challenges encountered, the lessons learned, and the results obtained from this case study are detailed. Through this case study, we not only validated existing `lessons learned' from other similar case studies, but also added new insights that can be beneficial to other practitioners in applying process mining in their respective fields.

A typology for business transformations (research in progress)

The term “business transformation” is a buzzword, often used to signify fundamental changes undergone by organisations. Despite numerous works in enterprise transformation, IT-enabled business transformation and organizational transformation, there appears to be a lack of consensus on what actually constitutes a business transformation as opposed to other types of redesign or organisational improvement projects. Consequently, knowledge about which elements of a business system that are impacted by such an endeavour is largely inconsistent, and partially conflicting. We present a business transformation typology that considers 18 attributes pertaining to the transforming organisation and the transformation initiative. To explore our typology, we analysed 10 published case studies and classified them along two dimensions – one ranging from marginal to fundamental changes, and another on internal and external visibility. Our literature review reveals how the terminology has been misused, and we provide some directions to provide more clarity around transformation phenomena in IS research.

Within-subject intra- and inter-method consistency of two experimental risk attitude elicitation methods

We compare the consistency of choices in two methods to used elicit risk preferences on an aggregate as well as on an individual level. We asked subjects to choose twice from a list of nine decision between two lotteries, as introduced by Holt and Laury (2002, 2005) alternating with nine decisions using the budget approach introduced by Andreoni and Harbaugh (2009). We find that while on an aggregate(subject pool) level the results are (roughly) consistent, on an individual(within-subject) level,behavior is far from consistent. Within each method as well as across methods we observe low correlations. This again questions the reliability of experimental risk elicitation measures and the ability to use results from such methods to control for the risk aversion of subjects when explaining e�ects in other experimental games.

Institutional and individual labor market discrimination based on hukou status : an artefactual field experiment

We study discrimination based on the hukou system that segregates citizens in groups of migrants and locals in urban China. We use an artefactual field experiment with a labor market framing. We recruit workers on their real labor market as experimental participants and investigate if official discrimination motivates individual discrimination based on hukou status. In our experimental results we observe discrimination based on the hukou characteristic: however, statistical discrimination does not seem to be the source of this, as status is exogeneous for our participants and migrants and locals behave similarly. Furthermore, discrimination increases between two experimental frameworks when motives for statistical discrimination are removed.

Impact fees and new housing cost: A comparative analysis of the empirical models

Developers and policy makers are consistently at odds over the debate as to whether impact fees increase house prices. This debate continues despite the extensive body of theoretical and empirical international literature that discusses the passing on to home buyers of impact fees, and the corresponding increase to housing prices. In attempting to quantify this impact, over a dozen empirical studies have been carried out in the US and Canada since the 1980’s. However the methodologies used vary greatly, as do the results. Despite similar infrastructure funding policies in numerous developed countries, no such empirical works exist outside of the US/Canada. The purpose of this research is to analyse the existing econometric models in order to identify, compare and contrast the theoretical bases, methodologies, key assumptions and findings of each. This research will assist in identifying if further model development is required and/or whether any of these models have external validity and are readily transferable outside of the US. The findings conclude that there is very little explicit rationale behind the various model selections and that significant model deficiencies appear still to exist.

Supporting risk-informed decisions during business process execution

This paper proposes a technique that supports process participants in making risk-informed decisions, with the aim to reduce the process risks. Risk reduction involves decreasing the likelihood and severity of a process fault from occurring. Given a process exposed to risks, e.g. a financial process exposed to a risk of reputation loss, we enact this process and whenever a process participant needs to provide input to the process, e.g. by selecting the next task to execute or by filling out a form, we prompt the participant with the expected risk that a given fault will occur given the particular input. These risks are predicted by traversing decision trees generated from the logs of past process executions and considering process data, involved resources, task durations and contextual information like task frequencies. The approach has been implemented in the YAWL system and its effectiveness evaluated. The results show that the process instances executed in the tests complete with substantially fewer faults and with lower fault severities, when taking into account the recommendations provided by our technique.

Shifting the Airline Business Model - Current Struggles of National Carriers to Become Profitable Passenger Experience Companies

National flag carriers are struggling for survival, not only due to classical reasons such as increase in fuel and tax or natural disasters, but largely due to the inability to quickly adapt to its competitive environment – the emergence of budget and Persian Gulf airlines. In this research, we investigate how airlines can transform their business models via technological and strategic capabilities to become profitable and sustainable passenger experience companies. To formulate recommendations, we analyze customer sentiments via social media to understand what people are saying about the airlines.

How fit is your organizational culture for business process management?

While business transformations often primarily focus on technological and methodological solutions, there is consensus that having the right organizational culture is critical for the successful change of business processes.

The relationship between entertainment producers and higher education providers

Cameron, Verhoeven and Court have noted that many screen producers do not see their tertiary education as being beneficial to their careers. We hypothesise that Universities have traditionally not trained students in producing skills because of the division of labour between Faculties of Art and Faculties of Business; and because their focus on art rather than entertainment has downplayed the importance of producing. This article presents a SOTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) whole-of-program evaluation of a new cross-Faculty Bachelor of Entertainment Industries at QUT, devoted to providing students with graduate attributes for producing including creative skills (understanding story, the aesthetics of entertainment, etc), business skills (business models, finance, marketing, etc) and legal skills (contracts, copyright, etc). Stakeholder evaluations suggest that entertainment producers are highly supportive of this new course.

Financialization, crisis and commodity correlation dynamics

Stronger investor interest in commodities may create closer integration with conventional asset markets. We estimate sudden and gradual changes in correlation between stocks, bonds and commodity futures returns driven by observable financial variables and time, using double smooth transition conditional correlation (DSTCC–GARCH) models. Most correlations begin the 1990s near zero but closer integration emerges around the early 2000s and reaches peaks during the recent crisis. Diversification benefits to investors across equity, bond and stock markets were significantly reduced. Increases in VIX and financial traders’ short open interest raise futures returns volatility for many commodities. Higher VIX also increases commodity returns correlation with equity returns for about half the pairs, indicating closer integration.

The determinants of hiring older workers in Britain revisited: an analysis using WERS 2004

This article reexamines the role of specific human capital and back loading of compensation as deterrents to hiring older workers. We utilize the framework initially suggested by Hutchens (1986) and more recently implemented by Daniel and Heywood (2007). This approach identifies the extent to which firms hire older workers at a rate less than full replacement would imply. Using the 2004 British Workplace Employment Relations Survey, we examine whether a more favourable climate including a much tighter UK labour market combined with the abandonment of defined benefit pension schemes has increased the tendency to hire older workers. We also examine the impact of private health insurance.

Input-orientated data envelopment analysis framework for measuring and decomposing economic, environmental and ecological efficiency : an application to OECD agriculture

This paper presents an input-orientated data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic, environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries. Economic, environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs, total amount of nutrients, and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively. The application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 OECD countries revealed that (i) there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systemsmore environmentally and ecologically sustainable; (ii) the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and, even more significantly, by changing the input combinations; (iii) the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across OECD countries within frontier-based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier-based measures and indicators.

Are academics messy? Testing the broken windows theory with a field experiment in the work environment

We test the broken windows theory using a field experiment in a shared area of an academic workplace(the department common room). More specifically, we explore academics’ and postgraduate students’ behavior under an order condition (a clean environment) and a disorder condition (a messy environment). We find strong evidence that signs of disorderly behavior trigger littering: In 59% of the cases, subjects litter in the disorder treatment as compared to 18% in the order condition. These results remain robust in a multivariate analysis even when controlling for a large set of factors not directly examined by previous studies. Overall, when academic staff and postgraduate students observe that others have violated the social norm of keeping the common room clean, all else being equal, the probability of littering increases by around 40%.

Econometric fellows and Nobel Laureates in economics

An academic award is method by which peers offer recognition of intellectual efforts. In this paper we take a purely descriptive look at the relationship between becoming a Fellow of the Econometric Society and receiving the Nobel Prize in economics. We discover some interesting aspects: of all 69 Nobel Prize Laureates between 1969 and 2011, only 9 of them were not also Fellows. Moreover, the proportion of future novel winners among the Fellows has been quite high throughout time and a large share of researchers who became Fellows between the 1930s and 1950s became Nobel Laureates at a later stage. On average, researchers became Fellows relatively early in their career (14.9 years after their PhD) and those who were subsequently made Nobel Laureates became Fellows earlier than other researchers. Interestingly, Harvard and MIT have been the dominant PhD granting institutions to generate Fellows and Nobel Laureates in the past.