1,721,041 research outputs found
Barriers to Investment by Russian Firms: Property Protection or Credit Constraints?
Get PDFA multitude of explanations for low investment by Russian firms have been offered: high inflation, high interest rates, falling production, falling GDP, an underdeveloped banking system, a confiscatory tax regime, calls for the re-nationalization of industry, excessive regulations, and an underdeveloped legal system, among others. This paper's basic premise is that investment in Russia will not occur if firms are unable to ensure the security of their property and property rights; that is, if the risk of destruction or expropriation is high. Nor will investment occur if access to investment funds is limited. Data collected from 264 Russian firms in the spring and fall 2001 are used to construct a security index and credit index in order to evaluate the relative importance of property protection and access to financing on the investment activities of manufacturing, retail, and other service sector firms in Moscow, Rostov, Taganrog, and Vladivostok. For the firms participating in this survey, the reported percentage of profit reinvested is significantly higher among firms which responded positively to questions about the effectiveness of police and courts in protecting their property and property rights, and significantly lower among firms which made above-average payments (official and unofficial) for property protection. Unofficial payments alone lower investment by 20%. Firms with access to credit reported reinvesting a significantly greater share of their profits. All other things equal, firms in Moscow, and firms in food processing and food distribution reinvested a significantly greater share of their profits. Manufacturing firms reported reinvesting a significantly smaller share of their profits in comparison to retail shops or other service sector companies. These results do not vary with the amount of collateral a firm has; that is, whether the firm owns or leases its premises.Russia, investment, property protection, credit, transition cost
Job Satisfaction Among Russian Workers
Get PDFWhy do Russians work without wages? This paper investigates the extent to which job satisfaction and attitude toward work in general may account for the observed behavior of Russian workers. To analyze the level and determinants of job satisfaction among Russian workers, this paper utilizes survey data collected from 1,200 workers and managers employed in seventy-six organizations in Moscow, Saratov and Taganrog The paper is divided into five parts. Part 1 presents the three measures of job satisfaction used in this analysis. Response patterns, analyzed by occupational status, gender, and generation, are discussed. Part 2 first explores gender and generational differences in attitudes toward work in general, and then examines the relationship between attitude toward work and job satisfaction. The results indicate that both gender and generation are significant in response patterns regarding attitudes toward work. Generational differences also are significant in response patterns relating the results of working hard to performance, productivity, and doing the job well. Regression analysis documents the positive relationship between attitude toward work and the level of job satisfaction. Part 3 focuses on the relationship between job satisfaction and performance. Three noteworthy results emerge. First, regardless of the specification or measure, there is a strong positive correlation between job satisfaction and performance. The relationship is not affected by gender, age, or educational attainment level of the respondents. Second, it is not possible using these data to establish causality between job satisfaction and performance. It appears, instead, that unspecified factors may be affecting the two conditions simultaneously. Finally, the results generated from these data are not significantly different from results based on previous surveys of U.S. workers, as well as a survey completed in 1996 of Russian and Polish workers. Part 4 analyzes the relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Among the workers participating in this survey there is, generally, only a moderate degree of organizational commitment. Commitment is highest among workers who feel they are making a contribution. The results document a positive relationship between job satisfaction and organizational commitment, although the causality is not well-defined. Concluding remarks are offered in Part 5.Russia, job satisfaction, performance, organizational commitment
Motivating Russian Workers: Analysis of Age and Gender Differences
Get PDFWhat motivates Russians to work? This paper utilizes survey data collected in May/June 2000 from 1200 employees in three regions of Russia to analyze the gender and generational differences in factors influencing motivation to work. Five main results emerge. First, Russians are not significantly different from their counterparts in the United States in terms of what is important to them at their place of work. Organizational commitment, however, emerges as only weakly positive among Russian workers; among managers the signal is much stronger. Second, there is little confusion on the part of managers regarding what is important to their workers. Managers' only mistake was to think workers valued their praise. Third, Russian workers have very low expectations of receiving any reward which they desire. This result, similar to results generated by American workers in the mid-1980s, is especially strong among the women and the older generation of workers participating in this survey. Fourth, gender differences involve the relative importance of particular motivators rather than differences in the ranking of motivators from most important to least important. That is, the Russian women participating in this project tended to express stronger feelings toward each of the motivators than the men, but the women did not rank order the motivators any differently than the men. Fifth, in many instances, generational differences disappeared when work experience was held constant. Age was only significant when expectation of receiving a particular reward was involved.Russia, motivation, gender, transition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
- …
