The Voluntary Redundancy Option: Carrot or Stick?

Voluntary redundancy is a relatively new form of retrenchment that has become a popular means of reducing workforce numbers in downsizing organizations. Voluntary redundancy involves the offer of a financial incentive to encourage employees to 'volunteer' for redundancy. Using the findings of a small study of individuals who had taken voluntary redundancy, this paper explores the voluntary nature of voluntary redundancy and suggests that both organizational change and the financial incentive are contributors to the redundancy decision. From an organizational perspective voluntary redundancy does appear to smooth the downsizing process but at the same time tends to mask underlying issues of morale and commitment.     

Alternative technologies and the rising cost of energy

There is no doubt that future fuel costs will be higher than at present in real terms. This is not just because oil and natural gas will command scarcity prices as supplies are restricted or depleted. It is also because substitutes for oil and gas such as SNG and electricity are more highly processed fuels and are therefore more expensive therm for therm. Some improvement of this situation will be achieved by spending more on systems for using these fuels more efficiently, and by insulation: but total annual costs will still be considerably greater than at present. This is also true for renewable technologies.     

The future for wool

Single dimensional projections are inadequate to determine what the future holds. A wide variety of economic, technological and social changes will influence the future environment for wool and other fibres. In these circumstances, and bearing in mind that, for planning purposes, strategic assumptions are often markedly superior to firm predictions, a set of alternative scenarios is a useful instrument. Consideration of some brief scenarios leads to the conclusion that wool's future depends, in no small measure, upon the actions of the wool-growing industry and governments of wool exporting countries.     

Median loss decision theory

In this paper, we argue that replacing the expectation of the loss in statistical decision theory with the median of the loss leads to a viable and useful alternative to conventional risk minimization particularly because it can be used with heavy tailed distributions. We investigate three possible definitions for such medloss estimators and derive examples of them in several standard settings. We argue that the medloss definition based on the posterior distribution is better than the other two definitions that do not permit optimization over large classes of estimators. We argue that median loss minimizing estimates often yield improved performance, have resistance to outliers as high as the usual robust estimates, and are resistant to the specific loss used to form them. In simulations with the posterior medloss formulation, we show how the estimates can be obtained numerically and that they can have better robustness properties than estimates derived from risk minimization.     

Investigation of the performance of trimmed estimators of life time distributions with censoring

For the lifetime (or negative) exponential distribution, the trimmed likelihood estimator has been shown to be explicit in the form of a β‐trimmed mean which is representable as an estimating functional that is both weakly continuous and Fréchet differentiable and hence qualitatively robust at the parametric model. It also has high efficiency at the model. The robustness is in contrast to the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) involving the usual mean which is not robust to contamination in the upper tail of the distribution. When there is known right censoring, it may be perceived that the MLE which is the most asymptotically efficient estimator may be protected from the effects of ‘outliers’ due to censoring. We demonstrate that this is not the case generally, and in fact, based on the functional form of the estimators, suggest a hybrid defined estimator that incorporates the best features of both the MLE and the β‐trimmed mean. Additionally, we study the pure trimmed likelihood estimator for censored data and show that it can be easily calculated and that the censored observations are not always trimmed. The different trimmed estimators are compared by a modest simulation study.     

Using multivariate time series methods to estimate location and climate change effects on temperature readings employed in electricity demand simulation

Long‐term historical daily temperatures are used in electricity forecasting to simulate the probability distribution of future demand but can be affected by changes in recording site and climate. This paper presents a method of adjusting for the effect of these changes on daily maximum and minimum temperatures. The adjustment technique accommodates the autocorrelated and bivariate nature of the temperature data which has not previously been taken into account. The data are from Perth, Western Australia, the main electricity demand centre for the South‐West of Western Australia. The statistical modelling involves a multivariate extension of the univariate time series ‘interleaving method’, which allows fully efficient simultaneous estimation of the parameters of replicated Vector Autoregressive Moving Average processes. Temperatures at the most recent weather recording location in Perth are shown to be significantly lower compared to previous sites. There is also evidence of long‐term heating due to climate change especially for minimum temperatures.     

Comparing community garden typologies of Baltimore,Chicago, and New York City (USA) to understand potential implications for socio-ecological services

Urban community gardens offer unique social and ecological benefits in cities. However, given the dynamic nature of cities and the profound effects of variable land uses on green space provisioning for people and wildlife, investigating community gardens from a landscape perspective offers valuable insight into the functions of these spaces in terms of ecosystem services and sustainable development. In this study, we use garden locations provided by stakeholder groups and fine-scale spatial data to compare community gardens across three cities: New York City, NY, Chicago, IL, and Baltimore, MD (USA). In each city, we assess the spatial distribution of gardens and compare the natural vegetation and impervious surface cover within these gardens to the surrounding neighborhood and landscape. We then compared these cities to clarify the role of community gardens in metropolitan development. Our findings demonstrate that gardens cluster in neighborhoods in New York City and Chicago, but they are more spatially distributed across the landscape in Baltimore. The distribution of Baltimore’s community gardens is more likely to be contributing to a greater network of ecosystem services across a broader urban landscape. Moreover, at the garden scale, gardens in NYC and Chicago have more canopy cover and built infrastructure than the more herbaceous gardens in Baltimore. This suggests that our case study cities exhibit different garden typologies, histories, and potential for ecosystem services. This work provides critical insight into the typology in and around community gardens in different cities, which is useful in understanding the potential ecosystem services and planning trajectories of these cities.

     

Employment Adjustment: an International Perspective

ABSTRACT: Structural change has been a necessary feature of the historical growth in real output and improved living standards and re-allocation of labour is essential if economic growth and new job creation are to result in a significant reduction in unemployment. Our societies have evolved to a point at which the State is expected to facilitate industrial activity and at which it is simply unacceptable that people should be left to struggle unaided against adversities resulting from the play of markets. Effective and equitable adjustment raises a whole range of issues for the employing enterprise, the State, and for trade unions. The policies and procedures followed are, and should be, complementary but the mix varies appreciably between countries. Here, the author deals first with what happens in the enterprise and then with the range of possible policies.