Bonuses and Employment in Japan

Japan has a relatively unique system of labor compensation. Most Japanese workers are paid large bonuses twice a year. This paper examines the cyclical movement of bonuses compared with wages and the relation of bonuses to employment in the context of the Weitzman "share economy." The paper makes three basic points:(1) The Japanese bonus is much more pro-cyclical than Japanese base wages,but not as cyclically variable as profits. Bonuses can be interpreted as containing a quantitatively significant revenue or profit-sharing component.(2) Bonuses have quite different employment consequences than do base wages. Even after controlling for other economic factors, bonuses are positively related to employment, whereas base wages are negatively related to employment.(3) The bonus system of paying workers, while far from explaining the whole macroeconomic story in Japan, seems to play a role in helping to stabilize Japanese unemployment at comparatively low levels.

Employee Stock Ownership and Financial Performance in European Countries: The Moderating Effects of Uncertainty Avoidance and Social Trust

This study investigates how the effect of employee stock ownership on financial performance may hinge on the diverse cultural and societal contexts of European countries. Based on agency and national culture theories, we hypothesize that the positive relationship between employee stock ownership and return on assets (ROA) is stronger in those nations with lower uncertainty avoidance and higher social trust. Using a multisource, time‐lagged, large‐scale dataset of 1,741 firms from 21 countries in Europe, our multilevel, random coefficient modeling analysis found evidence for these hypotheses, suggesting that uncertainty avoidance and social trust serve as important contextual cues in predicting the linkage between employee stock ownership and financial performance. Our supplemental analysis with distinction between the managerial and nonmanagerial employee stock ownership further indicates managerial employee stock ownership has a direct positive effect on ROA. Although nonmanagerial employee stock ownership had a nonsignificant association with ROA, the relationship was positive and significant when uncertainty avoidance was low and social trust was high. This research contributes to the existing literature by illuminating some of the contextual influences altering the effectiveness of employee stock ownership. Our findings also offer practical suggestions for effectively using employee stock ownership

Peer-group and price influence students drinking along with planned behaviour

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ 2008 The Authors.Aims: To examine the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), as a framework for explaining binge drinking among young adults. Methods: One hundred and seventy-eight students in a cross-sectional design study completed self-report questionnaires examining attitudes to drinking, intention to drink and drinking behaviour in university. Binge drinking was defined for females (and males) as consuming ‘four (males—five) or more pints of beer/glasses of wine/measures of spirits’ in a single session. Results: Drinking alcohol was common; 39.6% of males and 35.9% of females reported binge drinking. The TPB explained 7% of the variance in intention to drink. Overall, 43% of the variance in intention, 83% of the variance in total weekly consumption and 44% of the variance in binge drinking was explained. The frequency of drinking and the drinking behaviour of friends significantly predicted intention to drink and binge drinking, respectively. Binge drinkers were influenced by peers and social-situational factors. Pressure to drink was greater for males; undergraduates were influenced by the size of the drinking group, ‘special offer’ prices, and the availability of alcohol. Conclusions: The TPB appeared to be a weak predictor of student drinking but this may be a result of how constructs were measured. With friends’ drinking behaviour emerging as a significant predictor of alcohol consumption, interventions seeking to reduce excessive drinking should target the role of peers and the university environment in which drinking occurs

Is diversity good?

Prominent ethical and policy issues such as affirmative action and female enrollment in science and engineering revolve around the idea that diversity is good. However, even though diversity is an ambiguous concept, a precise definition is seldom provided. We show that diversity may be construed as a factual description, a craving for symmetry, an intrinsic good, an instrumental good, a symptom, or a side effect. These acceptions differ vastly in their nature and properties. The first one cannot lead to any action and the second one is mistaken. Diversity as intrinsic good is a mere opinion, which cannot be concretely applied; moreover, the most commonly invoked forms of diversity (sexual and racial) are not intrinsically good. On the other hand, diversity as instrumental good can be evaluated empirically and can give rise to policies, but these may be very weak. Finally, symptoms and side effects are not actually about diversity. We consider the example of female enrollment in science and engineering, interpreting the various arguments found in the literature in light of this polysemy. Keywords: ethics, policy, higher education, female students, minority students, affirmative actionComment: 7 page

Transcriptional territories in the genome

An analysis of numerous Drosophila microarray experiments reveals that the genome has many large groups of adjacent genes that are expressed similarly but are not functionally related

A marriage of techniques

Technical wizardry has made possible the combination of two powerful methodologies, optical trapping and single-molecule fluorescence, to measure precisely the force required to unzip DNA

Dishevelled nuclear shuttling

Structure-function analysis of the Dishevelled (Dsh) protein in frog embryos has defined sequences that regulate Dsh nuclear localization, which proves critical for Wnt signaling

Growing without a size checkpoint

Mammalian cells, unlike yeast, seem to maintain a constant distribution of cell sizes without a cell-size checkpoint

Getting the right dose of sex (chromosomes)

Gene-expression analysis provides evidence for dosage compensation of the X chromosome in flies, mice and worms

Imaging with isotopes: high resolution and quantitation

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