Small and Medium sized Enterprises’ Collaborative Buyer-Supplier Relationships: Boundary Spanning Individual Perspectives

Boundary-spanning individuals (BSIs) play a critical role in supply chain management, especially in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) where interactions with buyers and suppliers can depend heavily on just a few individuals. This study, utilizing data from Korean manufacturing-sector SMEs, explores whether cooperative social value orientations of SMEs’ BSIs influence the effects of collaborative buyer-supplier initiatives. The results suggested that the performance implication of decision-sharing initiative increases when BSIs have a high level of cooperative social value orientation. However, it also negatively moderates the relationship between risk/benefit sharing (involving financial losses or gains) and performance suggesting possible negative side-effects. However, we found that such orientation also negatively moderates the relationship between risk/benefit sharing (involving direct financial losses or gains) and relationship performance suggesting possible negative side-effects

Does maternity leave affect child health? Evidence from parental leave in Australia survey

One of the arguments that is advanced in support of paid maternity leave (PML) policies is that the mother’s time away from work, around childbirth, is expected to improve maternal health and child health and development. However evidence on these links is scarce and, until recently, little was known about the link, if any, between child health and maternity leave. Moreover, the limited literature that does exist tends to use aggregate data (i.e., an “ecological design”) to test the hypotheses that maternity leave affects maternal and child health. Evidence from micro-level data is rare because of the unavailability of such data on household level. We employ such data from the Parental Leave in Australia Survey (PLAS), which is a nested survey of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), to examine the impacts of maternity leave on child health. Using the PLAS and the first two waves of the LSAC we find that maternity leave, as measured by the duration of paid maternity leave (PML) and other forms of leave around childbirth, have strong and statistically significant effects on: child health, the decision to breastfeed, the duration of breastfeeding, and the probability that child immunisations are up-to-date. Our results show that mothers who take maternity leave are more likely to breastfeed their children and also that longer-term maternity leave is associated with an increase in the duration of breastfeeding. Our results also confirm that both mothers’ PML and fathers’ paid paternity leave (PPL) have statistically significant and positive effects on general health status of children. We also find that, in most specifications, the effects of PML are significant if the duration of leave is at least 6 weeks. PML is also significantly associated with a lower probability of some childhood chronic conditions such as asthma and bronchiolitis, but the effects of PPL on these conditions is ambiguous

Spin force and intrinsic spin Hall effect in spintronics systems

We investigate the spin Hall effect (SHE) in a wide class of spin-orbit coupling systems by using spin force picture. We derive the general relation equation between spin force and spin current and show that the longitudinal force component can induce a spin Hall current, from which we reproduce the spin Hall conductivity obtained previously using Kubo's formula. This simple spin force picture gives a clear and intuitive explanation for SHE

Child Health and the Income Gradient: Evidence from Australia

The positive relationship between household income and child health is well documented in the child health literature but the precise mechanisms via which income generates better health and whether the income gradient is increasing in child age are not well understood. This paper presents new Australian evidence on the child health-income gradient. We use data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian (LSAC), which involved two waves of data collection for children born between March 2003 and February 2004 (B-Cohort), and between March 1999 and February 2000 (K-Cohort). This data set allows us to test the robustness of some of the findings of the influential studies of Case et al. (2002) and J.Currie and Stabile (2003), and a recent study by A.Currie et al. (2007) , using a sample of Australian children. The richness of the LSAC data set also allows us to conduct further exploration of the determinants of child health. Our results reveal an increasing income gradient by child age using similar covariates to Case et al. (2002). However, the income gradient disappears if we include a rich set of controls. Our results indicate that parental health and, in particular, the mother's health plays a significant role, reducing the income coefficient to zero. Thus, our results for Australian children are similar to those produced by Propper et al. (2007) on their British child cohort. We also find some evidence that higher incomes have a protective effect when health shocks do arise: for several chronic conditions, children from higher-income households are less likely to be reported as being in poor health than children from lower-income households who have the same chronic conditions. The latter result is similar to some recent findings by Condliffe and Link (2008) on a sample of US children.Child health, Income gradient, Parental health, Nutrition, Panel data, Australia

Chiral Anomaly and Classical Negative Magnetoresistance of Weyl Metals

We consider the classical magnetoresistance of a Weyl metal in which the electron Fermi surface possess nonzero fluxes of the Berry curvature. Such a system may exhibit large negative magnetoresistance with unusual anisotropy as a function of the angle between the electric and magnetic fields. In this case the system can support a new type of plasma waves. These phenomena are consequences of chiral anomaly in electron transport theory.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Charged and superconducting vortices in dense quark matter

Quark matter at astrophysical densities may contain stable vortices due to the spontaneous breaking of hypercharge symmetry by kaon condensation. We argue that these vortices could be both charged and electrically superconducting. Current carrying loops (vortons) could be long lived and play a role in the magnetic and transport properties of this matter. We provide a scenario for vorton formation in protoneutron stars.Comment: Replaced with the published version. A typographical error in Eq. 2 is correcte