Quality costing: a management review

This paper relates a review of the English language literature on quality costing and traces its historical development; it provides authoritative reading on the subject. The review also has a focus on collection and use of quality-costing methods, quantitative cost data and the role and views of accountants in the task of quality-cost collection and reporting. Amongst the main findings is the preoccupation with the prevention – appraisal – failure categorization of quality costs and lack of guidance on definitions. The considerable impact of the American quality profession on the development of quality costing is pointed out along with the increasingly positive stance of accountants.     

Exercising Property Rights to Pollute: Do Cancer Risks and Politics Affect Plant Emission Reductions?

This paper examines whether firms' decisions about reductions in toxic emissions depend on the magnitude of dangers arising from their pollution and on who bears pollutant risks. Controlling for the quantity of air toxics released in 1988, this article finds that plants whose emissions generated higher numbers of expected cancer cases did reduce their emissions more between 1988 and 1991. The nature of the community bearing the pollution risk also affected firm decisions. The higher the voter turnout in the area, a proxy for residents' likelihood of collective action, the greater the reductions in a plant's release of air carcinogens.     

Modelling Variability in the Branching Structure of Strawberry Inflorescences

The branching structure of inflorescences of the cultivated strawberry ( Fragaria × ananassa Duch.) is very variable. This paper demonstrates that some aspects of this variability are well described by a simple stochastic model of branching that has two adjustable parameters. The model is shown to provide a good fit to data from a set of almost 700 inflorescences of the cultivar Elsanta, collected over two successive years. For one parameter the maximum likelihood estimator is a moment estimator which is fully efficient even if the detailed branching structure of the inflorescences is not recorded. This parameter provides a convenient summary of branching vigour. The maximum likelihood estimator of the second parameter must be determined iteratively and can be quite inefficient unless the full branching structure is recorded. The model demonstrates that branching structure is affected by the order in which inflorescences emerge on the plant.     

Segregation and Mortality: The Deadly Effects of Racism?

Elevated rates of mortality for African Americans compared to whites, coupled with the persistence of high levels of racial residential segregation, have directed attention to the structural manifestations of racism as potentially important pathogens for health. Using national mortality and census data for 1990 and a measure of black social isolation from whites, we examine the association between residential segregation and mortality in 107 major U.S. cities. Our analyses revealed that black social isolation tended to predict higher rates of mortality for African American males and females, although the strength of the association varied by cause of death. Socioeconomic deprivation explained a modest part of this association for black males but not for black females. Our analyses also found that a positive association between social isolation and mortality was more pronounced, for both blacks and whites, in cities that were also high on the index of dissimilarity. These findings highlight the need for research to identify the specific mechanisms and processes that link residential environments to adverse changes in health status.     

e‐Integration in the Supply Chain: Barriers and Performance*

Current opinion holds that Internet‐based supply chain integration with upstream suppliers and downstream customers (called “e‐integration” in this paper) is superior to traditional ways of doing business. This proposition remains untested, however, and similarly we know little about what are the upstream, internal, and downstream barriers to implementing e‐integration. This paper empirically addressed these questions using data from a large single nation study, and found (1) a positive link between e‐integration and performance, and (2) that internal barriers impeded e‐integration more than either upstream supplier barriers or downstream customer barriers. Findings from this study contribute to our theoretical understanding of implementing change in contemporary supply chains, and have important implications for manufacturers interested in improving their supply chain's performance using the Internet.     

MODELING MODEL UNCERTAINTY

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in studying monetary policy under model uncertainty. We point out that different assumptions about the uncertainty may result in drastically different “robust” policy recommendations. Therefore, we develop new methods to analyze uncertainty about the parameters of a model, the lag specification, the serial correlation of shocks, and the effects of real‐time data in one coherent structure. We consider both parametric and nonparametric specifications of this structure and use them to estimate the uncertainty in a small model of the U.S. economy. We then use our estimates to compute robust Bayesian and minimax monetary policy rules, which are designed to perform well in the face of uncertainty. Our results suggest that the aggressiveness recently found in robust policy rules is likely to be caused by overemphasizing uncertainty about economic dynamics at low frequencies. (JEL: E52, C32, D81)     

Francine Blau receives IZA Prize in Labor Economics

News

Francine Blau receives IZA Prize in Labor Economics     

The Role of Organizational and Information Technology Antecedents in Reengineering Initiation Behavior*

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been a major catalyst of the pervasive organizational change we have witnessed over the past decade. Although one can speculate on the reasons for the popularity of this phenomenon, it is important that we carefully examine its underlying antecedents for initiation, implementation, and ultimately success, if we are to add value to practitioners of this concept. This study empirically examines the importance of facets of the organizational structure, IT knowledge resources and infrastructure, and the IS function in the initiation of BPR. Data from 313 corporations were gathered using a carefully validated survey, and initiators were compared with noninitiators. The results strongly suggest that client-server architectures, the strategic integration of IS, and cross departmental interaction are among the more important factors facilitating initiation and can be important inputs in a BPR decision-making process. The study attempts to build a contingent theory for BPR, and the more sustainable notion of fundamental process change.