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.

Exploring the characteristics of the market-driven firms and antecedents to sustained competitive advantage

During the last few decades, identifying and examining the characteristics of market-driven firms have been a dominant theme in strategic marketing research. It has been argued that market-driven firms are superior in their market sensing and customer linking capabilities, enabling market-driven firms to outperform their competitors. This paper reports the findings of a study that examines the role market-focused learning capability and marketing capability in innovation-based competitive strategy on sustainable competitive advantage. The findings indicate that entrepreneurship is an important factor in sustained competitive advantage (SCA) and while market-focused learning capability leads to higher degrees of innovation, marketing capability enables SCA. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Correlations, integration and Hansen-Jagannathan Bounds

Recent studies have documented the growing economic and financial integration between countries. Among other things, this has led to the argument that greater integration results in higher bilateral correlations between returns on national stock markets. This study endeavours to link the two issues by utilizing the assumption that if countries are integrated, they would have to display a minimum level of correlation. This is achieved by constructing a bound on the level of the bilateral correlation, as originally developed by Kasa (1995). In contrast to Kasa, the present studies demonstrate that the correlation bound may not be downward sloping in all cases and careful interpretation of the results is required.

Technological and financial approaches to risk management in agriculture: an integrated approach

In the present paper, risk-management problems where farmers manage risk both through production decisions and through the use of market-based and informal risk-management mechanisms are considered. It is shown that many of these problems share a common structure, and that a unified and informative treatment of a broad spectrum of risk-management tools is possible within a cost-minimisation framework, under minimal conditions on their objective functions. Fundamental results are derived that apply regardless of the producer's preference towards risks, using only the no-arbitrage condition that agricultural producers never forego any opportunity to lower costs without lowering returns.

Equity market linkage and multinational trade accords: The case of NAFTA

This paper examines the impact of multinational trade accords on the degree of stock market linkage using NAFTA as a case study. Besides liberalizing trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, NAFTA has also sought to strengthen linkage among stock markets of these countries. If successful, this could lessen the appeal of asset diversification across the North American region and promote a higher degree of market efficiency. We assess the possible impact of NAFTA on market linkage using cross-correlations, multivariate price cointegrating systems, speed of convergence, and generalized variance decompositions of unexpected stock returns. The evidence proves robust and consistently indicates intensified equity market linkage since the NAFTA accord. The results also suggest that interdependent goods markets in the region are a primary reason behind the stronger equity market linkage observed in the post-NAFTA period. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.