Shaping the future of retail banking

The first half of this article considers recent developments in the retail banking market and, with the aid of tables, describes the present state of the market. Emphasis is placed on the increased competitiveness of the market with more institutions involved in providing more products than ever before, and with more attention being focused on the unbanked sector of the population. The second half of the article considers the factors which are most likely to influence the ruture development of the market—both external influences such as the political, economic and regulatory environment and factors which lie more directly under the control of the banks themselves, such as the introduction of new services and branching policy. The article ends by stressing the scope for individual banks to pursue distinctive policies in this market in future.     

Product-limit Estimators and Cox Regression with Missing Censoring Information

The Kaplan–Meier estimator of a survival function requires that the censoring indicator is always observed. A method of survival function estimation is developed when the censoring indicators are missing completely at random (MCAR). The resulting estimator is a smooth functional of the Nelson–Aalen estimators of certain cumulative transition intensities. The asymptotic properties of this estimator are derived. A simulation study shows that the proposed estimator has greater efficiency than competing MCAR-based estimators. The approach is extended to the Cox model setting for the estimation of a conditional survival function given a covariate.     

Complaining Our Way to Quality: Complaints, Contracts and the Voluntary Sector

The research on which this paper is based is part of a wider study of quality assurance and the voluntary sector. The focus of this paper is on complaints procedures, as part of quality assurance mechanisms, where voluntary agencies are the contracted service providers. The authors argue that, with the introduction of contracting and particularly with its further development, the way in which complaints mechanisms currently operate will need to be revised if they are to be an effective part of the quality assurance process.     

Effects of neuroticism,extraversion, circadian type and age on reported driver stress

Studies have examined effects of various personality variables, including extraversion and neuroticism, as well as age, on driver stress. However, the effect of the morningness-eveningness dimension (circadian type) on reported driver stress among commuters has not been investigated. This study aimed to assess the influence of circadian type as well as extraversion, neuroticism and age on driver stress. Participants were 101 Australian university administrative staff who completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised, the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, and also morning and evening driving diaries as a state measure of driver stress each weekday for one week. Two standard multiple regressions assessed whether neuroticism, extraversion, circadian type and age predicted reported driver stress for morning and evening drives. Neuroticism, circadian type, and age predicted reported driver stress in the mornings but age mainly predicted driver stress in the evenings. A repeated measures ANOVA isolated differences between circadian types for weekday mornings and evenings. Reported driver stress differed for day of week and time of day according to circadian type. The three-way interaction suggested that driver stress is influenced by circadian type and that factors influence driver stress differentially between mornings and evenings. Circadian type appears to influence when driver stress affects individuals.     

Modeling Endogenous Mobility in Earnings Determination

ABSTRACT

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer–employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to unmodeled determinants of earnings. Both tests reject exogenous mobility. We relax exogenous mobility by modeling the matched data as an evolving bipartite graph using a Bayesian latent-type framework. Our results suggest that allowing endogenous mobility increases the variation in earnings explained by individual heterogeneity and reduces the proportion due to employer and match effects. To assess external validity, we match our estimates of the wage components to out-of-sample estimates of revenue per worker. The mobility-bias-corrected estimates attribute much more of the variation in revenue per worker to variation in match quality and worker quality than the uncorrected estimates. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Corporate planning and control systems in Williams & Glyn's Bank

The paper describes the planning procedures presently existing in Williams & Glyn's Bank. Emphasis is placed on the link between the Corporate Plan and the shorter-term budgets; the Corporate Plan provides the framework within which the budget is compiled and the budget is then used as a means of implementing the plan and monitoring progress. Emphasis is also given to the dissemination of the Corporate Plan both to all staff at Branch Manager, or equivalent level, and above and to members of the National Union of Bank Employees Joint Consultative Committee.Lectures based on this paper have been given to the Organization and Use of the Corporate Planning Process Study Group and to the Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Group; both Groups belong to the Society for Long Range Planning.     

Accountability and the Camera Perspective Bias in Videotaped Confessions

Prior research indicates that altering the perspective from which a videotaped confession is recorded influences assessments of the confession's voluntariness. The present study examined whether increasing decision makers' sense of accountability attenuates this biasing effect of camera perspective. Participants in a high-accountability (but not a low-accountability) condition were told that they would have to justify their judgments concerning the voluntary status of a video-taped confession to a trial judge. Although supplementary measures indicated that high-accountability participants processed information contained in the video-taped confession more carefully and thoroughly, the camera perspective bias persisted. This result adds to a growing body of work indicating that the criminal justice system needs to be seriously concerned with how it acquires and utilizes videotaped confession evidence.     

Reviews

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Colin Platt, The English Medieval Town (1976), 219 (Seeker and Warburg, £6.00).

James Axtell, The School Upon A Hill. Education and Society In Colonial New England (1974), xxi+298 (Yale University Press, New Haven, £7.50).

Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England. An Enquiry Into The Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (1974), 164 (W. W. Norton and Co., New‐York, $6.95).

Jean‐Claude Perrot, Genèse d'une ville moderns. Caen au XVIII'siècle (1975), 2 vols, 1157 (Mouton: Paris, the Hague, 250 fr.).

Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E. P. Thompson (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree (1975), 344+15 illustrations (Allen Lane, £7.50).

E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (1975), 300+17 illustrations (Allen Lane, £6.50).

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Alan Forrest, Society and Politics in Revolutionary Bordeaux (1975), xi+300 (Oxford University Press, £8.00).

Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor (1974), 264 (Dawsons of Pall Mall, £4.50, paperback £1.50).

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Thomas S. Szasz, The Age of Madness, The History of Involuntary Mental Hospitalization Presented in Selected Texts (1973), xxi+372 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, £5.95).

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Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labour Force. Upper Silesia, 1865–1914 (1975), xvi+213 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £7.80).

Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti‐Semitism. Volume III. From Voltaire to Wagner (1975), x+582 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, no price given).

Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus. Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (1975), 208 (Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, Göttingen, paperback DM 28).

Uriel Tal, Christians and Jews in Germany. Religion, Politics and Ideology in the Second Reich, 1870–1914 (1975), 359 (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, £10.70).

Richard S. Levy, The Downfall of the Anti‐Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany (1975), 335 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, no price given).

Andrew G. Whiteside, The Socialism of Fools. Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan‐Germanism (1975), x+404 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £15.75).

Paul Thompson, The Edwardians: the remaking of British society (1975), xi+382 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £10.00).

Marc Fried, The World of the Urban Working Class (1975), x+410 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, £6.50).

Philip Gabriel Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907 (1974), xii+260 (E. J. Brill, Leiden, 64 guilders).

Peter H. Mcrkl, Political Violence under the Swastika: 581 Early Nazis (1975), xiv+735 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, $17.50, paper $6.30).