Money and the Open Economy Business Cycle: A Flexible Price Model

This paper develops an open-economy model of the business cycle. The nominal prices in the model are flexible and monetary nonneutrality is developed using information confusion about the sources of disturbances to demand coupled with differential persistence of demand shocks. Firms use inventories to smooth their production, and consumers follow a stochastic permanent income expenditure function. The major implication of the model is that unperceived monetary disturbances improve the terms of trade and increase real output in contrast to sticky price models in which the terms of trade deteriorates. This implication of the model is examined empirically.

Asset Price Volatility, Bubbles, and Process Switching

Evidence of excess volatilities of asset prices compared with those of market fundamentals is often attributed to speculative bubbles. This study examines the sense in which speculative bubbles could in theory lead to excess volatility, hut it demonstrates that some of the variance hounds evidence reported to date precludes bubbles as a reason why asset prices might violate such hounds. The findings must represent some other model misspecffication or market inefficiency. One important misspecification occurs when there searcher incorrectly specifies the time series properties of market fundamentals. A bubble-free example economy characterized by a potential switch in government policies produces paths of asset prices that would appear, to an unwary researcher, to contain bubbles.

An Empirical Exploration of Exchange Rate Target-Zones

In the context of a flexible-price monetary exchange rate model and the assumption of uncovered interest parity, we obtain a measure of the fundamental determinant of exchange rates. Daily data for the European Monetary System are used to explore the importance of non-linearities in the relationship between the exchange rates and fundamentals. Many implications of existing "target-zone" exchange rate models are tested; little support is found for existing non-linear models of limited exchange rate flexibility.

Employee Involvement Climate and Climate Strength: A study of employee attitudes and organizational effectiveness in UK hospitals

Purpose – Addressing the continuing productivity challenge the purpose of this paper is to analyze data from the National Health Service (NHS) on employee involvement (EI) in order to gain critical insights into how employees’ shared perception of employee involvement in organizational decision-making (labelled EI climate) might address two persistent issues: how to enhance positive staff attitudes and improve organizational performance. In doing so we respond to recent calls for more multilevel research and extend previous research on EI climate by attending to both EI climate level and EI climate strength. Design/methodology/approach – Data from 4702 employees nested in 33 UK hospitals was used to test the moderating role of EI climate strength in the (a) crosslevel EI climate level-employee attitudes relationship and in the (b) organizationallevel EI climate-organizational effectiveness relationship. Findings – The results of the multilevel analyses showed that EI climate level was positively associated with individual-level employee attitudes (i.e. job satisfaction, affective commitment). Further the results of the hierarchical regression analysis and the ordinal logistic regression analysis showed that EI climate level was also related to organizational effectiveness (i.e. lower outpatient waiting times; higher performance quality). In addition, both analyses demonstrated the moderating role of EI climate strength, in that the positive impact of EI climate level on employee attitudes and organizational effectiveness was more marked in the presence of a strong compared to a weak EI climate. Practical implications – By creating and maintaining a positive and strong climate for involvement hospital managers can tackle the productivity challenge that UK hospitals and health care institutions more generally are currently facing while improving the attitudes of their employees who are critical in the transformative process and ultimately underpin organizational success. Originality/value – This is the first study which provides evidence that favorable and consistent collective recognition of EI opportunities by staff contributes to enhance both employee attitudes and hospital performance. Results highlight the role of EI climate strength and underscore its importance in future research and practice

Measurement of the semileptonic branching fraction of the B_s meson

We report a measurement of the inclusive semileptonic branching fraction of the B_s meson using data collected with the BABAR detector in the center-of-mass energy region above the Υ(4S) resonance. We use the inclusive yield of ϕ mesons and the ϕ yield in association with a high-momentum lepton to perform a simultaneous measurement of the semileptonic branching fraction and the production rate of B_s mesons relative to all B mesons as a function of center-of-mass energy. The inclusive semileptonic branching fraction of the B_s meson is determined to be B(B_s→ℓνX)=9.5_(-2.0)^(+2.5)(stat)_(-1.9)^(+1.1)(syst)%, where ℓ indicates the average of e and μ