- Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research - Research Publications
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ItemOptimal employee turnover rate: theory and evidenceHARRIS, MARK ; Tang, Kam-Ki ; TSENG, YI-PING ( 2002-10)This paper investigates the quantitative effects of employee turnover on firms' productivity.The Australian Business Longitudinal Survey 1995-98, a unique survey providing firm level data on both production and employee turnover, is used as the data source. Theoretical studies have advocated that firm specific human capital and job matching to be the two major, but competing, mechanisms through which turnover affects productivity. Our results indicate that the effect of job matching dominates when turnover is"low," while the effect of firm specific human capital dominates when turnover is"high." We identify that the optimal turnover rate - the rate that maximises productivity, controlling for other factors - is about 0.3, well in excess of the sample mean. The finding suggests that further increasing the flexibility of employment arrangement for small and medium Australian enterprises could yield substantial productivity gains.
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ItemOptimal employee turnover rate: theory and evidenceHARRIS, MARK ; Tang, Kam-Ki ; TSENG, YI-PING ( 2002-10)This paper investigates the quantitative effects of employee turnover on firms' productivity. The Australian Business Longitudinal Survey 1995-98, a unique survey providing firm level data on both production and employee turnover, is used as the data source. Theoretical studies have advocated that firm specific human capital and job matching to be the two major, but competing, mechanisms through which turnover affects productivity. Our results indicate that the effect of job matching dominates when turnover is"low," while the effect of firm specific human capital dominates when turnover is"high." We identify that the optimal turnover rate - the rate that maximises productivity, controlling for other factors - is about 0.3, well in excess of the sample mean. The finding suggests that further increasing the flexibility of employment arrangement for small and medium Australian enterprises could yield substantial productivity gains
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ItemModelling Export Activity of Eleven APEC CountriesMatyas, Laszlo ; Konya, Laszlo ; Harris, Mark N. ( 2000-03)The gravity model has long been used for modelling and predicting trade flows. This paper generalises the gravity model allowing for proper representation of local and target country effects and also the business cycle. The new approach is based on a panel data framework (instead of a simple cross sectional or time series approach) where the additional information available from using both types of data (ie. cross sectional and time series) is utilised to properly model all the specific effects. The model is applied to a panel of APEC countries.
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ItemModelling the Impact of Environmental Regulations on Bilateral Trade Flows: OECD, 1990-96Harris, Mark N. ; Konya, Laszlo ; Matyas, Laszlo ( 2000-07)Since the early seventies an increasing attention has been paid to the impact environmental policy has on foreign trade. One of the most important issues is whether countries with relatively strict environmental regulations tend to experience a deterioration of international competitiveness and thus a fall in the exports, and a rise in the imports, of the pollution-intensive commodities or, on the other hand, benefit from the improvement in environmental quality and are likely to develop new comparative advantages in the environmentally more sensitive industries. So far, most empirical studies have concluded that the proportion of environmental costs to the total production costs is still so marginal that environmental policies have hardly any effect on comparative advantage patterns and thus on foreign trade. One of the few exceptions is Van Beers and Van den Bergh (1997), who found that stricter regulations have some negative impact on bilateral trade flows between OECD countries. The aim of this paper is to show that this outcome is partly due to model mis-specification. The analysis is based on a triple indexed fixed-effects model and on its variant's. It is found that, as so on as both the importing and exporting country specific effects are taken into consideration, the relationship between stricter regulations and foreign trade becomes statistically insignificant. This suggests that environmental costs do not have a real impact, neither negative nor positive, on foreign trade.