Distributive Justice Evaluations in Two Cultural Contexts: A Comparison of U.S. and South Korean Teachers

The justice literature suggests, but has nottested, a positive relationship between met expectationsabout multiple workplace rewards and distributivejustice evaluations (the individual's assessment of whether s/he has been treated fairly). Datafrom samples of teachers in South Korea (N = 649) andthe U.S. (N = 810) are used to examine thisrelationship. In addition, U.S.-South Korea culturalvalue differences in individualism, seniority, and hierarchicalauthority are the basis for hypothesizing that certainreward-specific met expectations will be linkeddifferently to justice evaluations across the twosocieties. As hypothesized for both societies, the moreone's expectations about job-related rewards are met,the greater the perception of just treatment. Also ashypothesized, several societal differences based on cultural differences are found. Metexpectations about autonomy are more important inexplaining justice evaluations in the U.S., whereas metexpectations about advancement opportunities are moreimportant in South Korea.     

Education and religion: Individual, congregational, and cross-level interaction effects on biblical literalism

Using ideas from cultural and organizational theory, I examine the interplay of individual and congregation-level educational attainment on biblical literalism. Data on 387 congregations and 100,009 worshippers (US Congregational Life Survey, 2001) are used to test hypotheses. Results indicate that the effects of congregational education and individual educational attainment are among the largest effects in models. This study is the first to show that regardless of an individual’s own education, affirmations of biblical literalism are less likely when persons with higher education dominate a congregation. This finding brings into relief the important role of social context in persons’ belief in biblical literalism. Additionally, congregational education amplifies the influence of individual education on biblical literalism such that the gap in belief between college/non-college education individuals widens in high education congregations. This finding suggests that high education persons more deeply absorb the influence of a more educated congregational context.     

Technology,Geography, and Trade

We develop a Ricardian trade model that incorporates realistic geographic features into general equilibrium. It delivers simple structural equations for bilateral trade with parameters relating to absolute advantage, to comparative advantage (promoting trade), and to geographic barriers (resisting it). We estimate the parameters with data on bilateral trade in manufactures, prices, and geography from 19 OECD countries in 1990. We use the model to explore various issues such as the gains from trade, the role of trade in spreading the benefits of new technology, and the effects of tariff reduction.     

Getting your supervisors and managers on the right team

They do a great job. So we promote them. Now they supervise people who don't do the job as well as they did. We give them a big raise. But because they're exempt they make less than their leads. They have the toughest job in the company—managing people. So we grant them an entire day of training to prepare. We ask them to mentor, coach, and have close relationships with their direct reports—all 132 of them. Then when the stock dips, we blame “middle management” and lay a bunch of them off.     

Stakeholder Green Pressure and New Product Performance in Emerging Countries: A Cross-country Study

Despite the burgeoning literature on stakeholder green pressure, research is scarce on how it influences eco-product innovation and new product performance. This article examines stakeholder green pressures as antecedents of eco-product innovation and new product performance in firms operating in resource-constrained countries. Using data gathered from surveys in Vietnam (N = 183) and Ghana (N = 217), we find that the positive effects of stakeholder green pressures on new product performance are serially mediated by environmental sustainability orientation and eco-product innovation. Our findings contribute to ongoing efforts to clarify the mechanisms channelling stakeholder pressures into new product performance in resource-constrained environments.     

Perceived effectiveness and implementation of public relations measurement and evaluation tools among European providers and consumers of PR services

While the need for and lack of implementation of more sophisticated methods for measuring the impact of public relations efforts has been well documented in the U.S. and some other world regions, relatively little information exist about this practice in the European Union. Results from a survey of both consumers and providers of public relations in the EU shows that perceptions of effectiveness and actual use are not related for most advanced techniques of measurement and evaluation. These results demonstrate some potentially important differences between the perceptions of providers and consumers that may support practitioner observations regarding a lack of interest among clients in more accurate assessment of results from public relations activities.     

On Variational Bayes Estimation and Variational Information Criteria for Linear Regression Models

Variational Bayes (VB) estimation is a fast alternative to Markov Chain Monte Carlo for performing approximate Baesian inference. This procedure can be an efficient and effective means of analyzing large datasets. However, VB estimation is often criticised, typically on empirical grounds, for being unable to produce valid statistical inferences. In this article we refute this criticism for one of the simplest models where Bayesian inference is not analytically tractable, that is, the Bayesian linear model (for a particular choice of priors). We prove that under mild regularity conditions, VB based estimators enjoy some desirable frequentist properties such as consistency and can be used to obtain asymptotically valid standard errors. In addition to these results we introduce two VB information criteria: the variational Akaike information criterion and the variational Bayesian information criterion. We show that variational Akaike information criterion is asymptotically equivalent to the frequentist Akaike information criterion and that the variational Bayesian information criterion is first order equivalent to the Bayesian information criterion in linear regression. These results motivate the potential use of the variational information criteria for more complex models. We support our theoretical results with numerical examples.     

A Nonstationary Cylinder–Based Model Describing Group Dispersal in a Fragmented Habitat

□ A doubly nonstationary cylinder-based model is built to describe the dispersal of a population from a point source. In this model, each cylinder represents a fraction of the population, i.e., a group. Two contexts are considered: The dispersal can occur in a uniform habitat or in a fragmented habitat described by a conditional Boolean model. After the construction of the models, we investigate their properties: the first and second order moments, the probability that the population vanishes, and the distribution of the spatial extent of the population.     

Sources of Population Aging in More and Less Developed Countries

We provide the first global assessment of the sources of population aging by tracing its origins to the demographic histories of more and less developed countries. In more developed countries, improvements in survival among successive cohorts have accounted for the large majority of the recent increase in the population's mean age. Improved survivorship and declines in the growth rate of births have made roughly equal contributions to the aging that is occurring in less developed countries. Aging is more rapid in less developed countries because the number of births has declined faster, with China and India making large contributions. Use of the proportion of the population above age 65, 70, or 75 as measures of aging produces results similar to those using the mean age. Mortality decline becomes an even larger contributor to aging using all these measures, and its contribution grows as age advances.     

Caste,Class, and Urbanization: The Shaping of Religious Community in Contemporary India

Building on the implications of qualitative work from India and urbanism theories, I aim to understand whether religious bonding social capital in contemporary India increases with greater urbanization and whether such increases are moderated by caste or social class position. Results from multinomial logistic regression on 1,417 Hindu respondents in a nationally representative sample of India (World Values Survey-India 2001) indicate that religious bonding is fostered by urbanism and that this association is stronger for upper castes. But there is little evidence that social class similarly moderates the association between urbanism and religious bonding. In light of these findings, religious bonding might be better understood as rooted in the interaction of caste dynamics and changes in the urban environment, rather than as a result of greater affluence. The data are also consistent with work underscoring the importance of disentangling social class and caste among Hindus in contemporary India.