SelectedWorks @ Melbourne Business School (The University of Melbourne)
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713 research outputs found
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An elasticity analysis of fertility rates in Australia
No full textIn the recent decade, Australia’s fertility rebounded. Meanwhile, many pronatalist policies are implemented. We are interested in the effectiveness of these policies. To this end, we obtained data to estimate the age and parity specific fertility rates for married and unmarried mothers as well as age-specific marriage and divorce rates. Based on these rates, we then construct a stochastic model for total fertility rate (TFR). Our aim is to identify the group(s) which may have the largest impact on the TFR. We first estimate the elasticity of TFR, which measures the percentage change of TFR given 1% in these group-specific fertility rates. We further elaborate the elasticity by taking into account the propensity to change of group-specific fertility rates and estimate the likely impact on TFR that each group would contribute. Our results suggest that the largest impact will be from married mothers in the 35-39 age group with 1 or 2 children and unmarried women with no children in the 15-30 age-group. It is unlikely that the youngest segment of the latter group would be a target of policy. Finally, we conduct a rough estimation of benefit-cost ratios under an untargeted policy, to investigate intervention on which group is more cost-effective. Our results suggest that, after taking account of costs, the most effective group to target would be mothers with two children (who may have a third). Most of the likely impact would be from the 30-39 age-group
Possibilities, Purpose, Pitfalls: Insights from introducing mindfulness to
No full textWhile mindfulness has been part of Buddhism and other religious and philosophical traditions for millennia, the last decades have seen adoption of mindfulness in clinical settings and more recently, in organisations and leadership. This article reports experiences introducing practices and concepts of mindfulness to managers and leaders across a wide range of sectors and organisational settings over the last ten years. I identify six particular insights that have emerged as important over that time: from how to define and explain mindfulness to leaders, through to ethical issues of the purposes to which mindfulness is put. Through discussion of these insights, I argue that mindful leadership is not a template and its introduction in organisations is not just about reducing stress and helping employees put their shoulder to the wheel of greater productivity. Rather, being mindful in leadership can be understood as a potentially radical, even subversive, act. It offers enlivening and humanising prospects for leaders and leadership, with its encouragement to see reality and challenge orthodoxies, to put a primary value on the well-being of others and how we live and lead now
Business to Business Buying: Challenges and Opportunities
No full textIn this article, we lay out the challenges and research opportunities associated with business-to-business (B2B) buying. These challenges and opportunities reflect four aspects of B2B buying that the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM: www.isbm.org) has identified through a Delphi-like process: (1) the changing landscape of B2B buying, (2) the increasing sophistication of sellers, (3) the impact of technological changes, and (4) the increasing importance and growth of emerging markets. For each of these four areas, we identify the relevant background, key issues, and pertinent research agendas
Human Branding in Political Marketing: Applying Contemporary Branding Thought to Political Parties and their Leaders
No full textConfirmation Bias in Individual-Level Perceptions of Distance: An Experimental Investigation
No full textIn this article we draw from social cognition theory to explore the influence of confirmation bias on perceptions of psychic distance. Despite the prominence of psychic distance, and other forms of distance, as potential predictor variables in international business research, very little work has been done exploring the factors and processes that shape a decision maker\u27s perceptions of distance. We argue in this paper that social cognition theory can help fill that void. Specifically, we hypothesize that confirmation bias may influence managers’ processing of information concerning differences between cultures. Such a bias may cause managers to attend more to information that confirms pre-existing beliefs, and discount information that contradicts pre-existing beliefs, thus biasing their perceptions of psychic distance. Using an experimental approach, the impact of confirmation bias on perceptions of psychic distance is confirmed in a sample of 200 Australian managers. The observed changes in perceptions are also associated with changes in perceptions of risk and preferences for entry modes in a hypothetical business scenario. As a result this paper demonstrates how the application of social psychology theories and methods can provide new theoretical perspectives to explain when, how, and why individual-level perceptions of psychic distance might diverge from national-level averages
Organizational Responses to Public and Private Politics: An Analysis of Climate Change Activists and U.S. Oil and Gas Firms
No full textWe explore how activists’ public and private politics elicit different organizational responses. Using data on U.S. petroleum companies from 1982 to 2010, we investigate how climate change activists serving as witnesses at congressional hearings and engaging in firm protests influenced firms’ internal and external responses. We find that public politics induced internally focused practice adoption, whereas private politics induced externally focused framing activities. We also find that private and public politics had an interaction effect: as firms faced more private political pressure, they were less likely to respond to public political pressures; similarly, as firms faced greater public political pressure, they were less likely to respond to private political pressures. The results suggest that activists can have a significant impact on firm behavior depending on the mix of private and public political tactics they engage in. We discuss the implications of our study for social movement research, organization theory, and nonmarket strategy
Some Matlab Routines to Compute CRPS and Quantile Weighted PS
No full textThree routines to compute the CRPS of Gneiting and Raftery (JASA 2007) and the quantile weighted probability score (QWPS) extension in Gneiting and Ranjan (JBES, 2011). They are based on numerical integration as discussed in the Appendix of Smith and Vahey (2015), and I have found them to be much more accurate than using Monte Carlo approximation to the difference of two expectations, as advocated in Panagiotelis and Smith (IJF, 2008)
Navigating the territories of indigenous leadership: Exploring the experiences and practices of Australian Indigenous arts leaders
No full textThis article explores the leadership of Australian Indigenous artists and arts leaders. We advance the idea of ‘territories’ to convey the overlapping contexts in which Indigenous artistic leaders work, and through this framework seek to highlight the embodied ways individuals enact leadership across country and community. Thematic, narrative and discursive analysis of 29 in-depth interviews with diverse Indigenous artists identify four territories and multiple practices of leadership in which our participants engage. The four territories are: authorisation in a bi-cultural world (cultural authorisation and self-authorising); identity and belonging (both fearless and connected); artistic practice (innovative and custodian of cultural values); and history, colonisation and trauma (expressing and containing trauma, empowering and generating hope). The article builds on emerging research on Indigenous leadership to argue that the experiences of Indigenous artists and a framework designed to reflect their embodied and spatially anchored practices, has broader applicability – revealing new insights about leadership
Approximate Bayesian Computation in State Space Models
No full textA new approach to inference in state space models is proposed, based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC avoids evaluation of the likelihood function by matching observed summary statistics with statistics computed from data simulated from the true process; exact inference being feasible only if the statistics are sufficient. With finite sample sufficiency unattainable in the state space setting, we seek asymptotic sufficiency via the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the parameters of an auxiliary model. We prove that this auxiliary model-based approach achieves Bayesian consistency, and that - in a precise limiting sense - the proximity to (asymptotic) sufficiency yielded by the MLE is replicated by the score. In multiple parameter settings a separate treatment of scalar parameters, based on integrated likelihood techniques, is advocated as a way of avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Some attention is given to a structure in which the state variable is driven by a continuous time process, with exact inference typically infeasible in this case as a result of intractable transitions. The ABC method is demonstrated using the unscented Kalman filter as a fast and simple way of producing an approximation in this setting, with a stochastic volatility model for financial returns used for illustration