Work-family enrichment and well-being amongst working fathers

This study examined the relationship between work-family enrichment and well-being amongst working fathers in South Africa (N= 242). Convenience sampling was first employed as approval was granted from human resource managers and directors from several organisations in order to survey their employees. Due to a low response rate, snow-ball sampling was then also employed. Exploratory factor analysis revealed that the work-family enrichment scale is uni-directional as fathers did not distinguish between the two directions of enrichment. A three dimensional well-being scale measuring: social, emotional and psychological well-being was used to measure well-being of working fathers. Exploratory factor analysis however revealed that the well-being scale is bi-dimensional as fathers did not distinguish between the psychological and emotional well-being subscales. A composite variable called ‘psych-emotional well-being’ was therefore created. Correlation analyses revealed weak to strong correlations between work-family enrichment and both health and work-related well-being. Hierarchical multiple analyses showed that work-family enrichment predicted physical, psych-emotional and social well-being and work-engagement amongst working fathers. Management implications and recommendations for future research are discussed

On improving variational inference with low-variance multi-sample estimators

Les progrès de l’inférence variationnelle, tels que l’approche de variational autoencoder (VI) (Kingma and Welling (2013), Rezende et al. (2014)) et ses nombreuses modifications, se sont avérés très efficaces pour l’apprentissage des représentations latentes de données. Importance-weighted variational inference (IWVI) par Burda et al. (2015) améliore l’inférence variationnelle en utilisant plusieurs échantillons indépendants et répartis de manière identique pour obtenir des limites inférieures variationnelles plus strictes. Des articles récents tels que l’approche de hierarchical importance-weighted autoencoders (HIWVI) par Huang et al. (2019) et la modélisation de la distribution conjointe par Klys et al. (2018) démontrent l’idée de modéliser une distribution conjointe sur des échantillons pour améliorer encore l’IWVI en le rendant efficace pour l’échantillon. L’idée sous-jacente de ce mémoire est de relier les propriétés statistiques des estimateurs au resserrement des limites variationnelles. Pour ce faire, nous démontrons d’abord une borne supérieure sur l’écart variationnel en termes de variance des estimateurs sous certaines conditions. Nous prouvons que l’écart variationnel peut être fait disparaître au taux de O(1/n) pour une grande famille d’approches d’inférence variationelle. Sur la base de ces résultats, nous proposons l’approche de Conditional-IWVI (CIWVI), qui modélise explicitement l’échantillonnage séquentiel et conditionnel de variables latentes pour effectuer importance-weighted variational inference, et une approche connexe de Antithetic-IWVI (AIWVI) par Klys et al. (2018). Nos expériences sur les jeux de données d’analyse comparative, tels que MNIST (LeCun et al. (2010)) et OMNIGLOT (Lake et al. (2015)), démontrent que nos approches fonctionnent soit de manière compétitive, soit meilleures que les références IWVI et HIWVI en tant que le nombre d’échantillons augmente. De plus, nous démontrons que les résultats sont conformes aux propriétés théoriques que nous avons prouvées. En conclusion, nos travaux fournissent une perspective sur le taux d’amélioration de l’inference variationelle avec le nombre d’échantillons utilisés et l’utilité de modéliser la distribution conjointe sur des représentations latentes pour l’efficacité de l’échantillon.Advances in variational inference, such as variational autoencoders (VI) (Kingma and Welling (2013), Rezende et al. (2014)) along with its numerous modifications, have proven highly successful for learning latent representations of data. Importance-weighted variational inference (IWVI) by Burda et al. (2015) improves the variational inference by using multiple i.i.d. samples for obtaining tighter variational lower bounds. Recent works like hierarchical importance-weighted autoencoders (HIWVI) by Huang et al. (2019) and joint distribution modeling by Klys et al. (2018) demonstrate the idea of modeling a joint distribution over samples to further improve over IWVI by making it sample efficient. The underlying idea in this thesis is to connect the statistical properties of the estimators to the tightness of the variational bounds. Towards this, we first demonstrate an upper bound on the variational gap in terms of the variance of the estimators under certain conditions. We prove that the variational gap can be made to vanish at the rate of O(1/n) for a large family of VI approaches. Based on these results, we propose the approach of Conditional-IWVI (CIWVI), which explicitly models the sequential and conditional sampling of latent variables to perform importance-weighted variational inference, and a related approach of Antithetic-IWVI (AIWVI) by Klys et al. (2018). Our experiments on the benchmarking datasets MNIST (LeCun et al. (2010)) and OMNIGLOT (Lake et al. (2015)) demonstrate that our approaches perform either competitively or better than the baselines IWVI and HIWVI as the number of samples increases. Further, we also demonstrate that the results are in accordance with the theoretical properties we proved. In conclusion, our work provides a perspective on the rate of improvement in VI with the number of samples used and the utility of modeling the joint distribution over latent representations for sample efficiency in VI

Un portrait de l?investisseur individuel français

L'objet de cet article est de mettre en lumière à partir de données empiriques les caractéristiques de l'investisseur individuel français. Un échantillon de 92 603 porteurs de valeurs mobilières réalisant des opérations entre 1999 et 2006 est étudié. Des statistiques descriptives sur les variables démographiques, les comptes détenus, les transactions réalisées ainsi que les portefeuilles sont présentées. Nos principaux résultats peuvent être résumés ainsi : le porteur français est en moyenne un homme âgé de 42 ans et habite l'Ile de France. Lorsqu'il détient un compte PEA, il le clôture avant la date à laquelle l'avantage fiscal est activé (5 ans). De nombreux investisseurs réalisent moins de 6 opérations entre 1999 et 2006 et seulement 1,62% des porteurs font plus de 1000 opérations sur cette période. Même si plus de la moitié des investisseurs diversifient leurs portefeuilles à l'international, 90% des transactions portent sur des titres français. Le nombre d'actions ordinaires différentes détenues augmente de 2005 à 2006, suggérant que les investisseurs diversifient de plus en plus leurs portefeuilles. Enfin, plus de 30% des porteurs ont investi entre 1999 et 2006 moins de 10 000 euros sur leur portefeuille.Comportement d'investissement, investisseur individuel.

Trading activity and Overconfidence: First Evidence from a large European Database

We investigate the presence of overconfidence for 43 958 individual investors using a large brokerage account database between 1999 and 2006. We employ three methodologies to gauge overconfidence and our main results show that independently of the methodology considered, individual investors are subject to overconfidence and consequently trade too frequently. Securities investors are buying are systematically underperforming those they are selling on follow-up periods; investors are clearly not making profitable trades.

Logistics – A Pathway Towards ‘Sustainable’ Competitive Advantage for the Multinational Enterprise

The Internet is significantly changing the strategic behaviour of many businesses that operate in the global arena. Today, many multinational enterprises (MNEs) work closely with their logistics providers to enhance their competitive positions. They increasingly outsource their non-strategic business functions, with logistics providers picking up this new source of business. The MNE is moving more towards a ‘front-end’ or customer focused operation, with their key logistics providers aligning themselves as supply chain integrators. Logistics providers may be classified as 1st to 4th party logistics providers. A 4th party logistics provider provides complete supply side solutions for the MNE, plus a degree of demand side service. It becomes an integral part of the MNEs competitive solution set. This paper proposes that integrated, fully activated, demand-supply (FADS) chains provide a mechanism to move beyond 4th party logistics provider (4PLP) solutions. It elucidates the key clusters of skills levels that must be activated by the logistics provider to operate at the 5th party logistics provider (5PLP) FADS level of outsourcing and service. The 5PLP FADS logistics provider brings a vast array of ‘added-value skills’ to the MNE, and a key innovative, flexible and highly agile partnership results, whereby pathways towards ‘sustainable’ competitive advantage may be developed. The 5PLP FADS logistics model is the next step in the progression to total logistics integration

Are French Individual Investors reluctant to realize their losses?

We analyze the presence of the disposition effect for 90 244 French individual investors based on a large brokerage account database between 1999 and 2006. Main results show that a) French investors demonstrate a strong preference for realizing their winning stocks rather than their losing ones (disposition effect).b) the behavioral bias is not eliminated for sophisticated individual investors (higher trading activity or international diversification) c) more originally, based on French account specificities, we demonstrate that the change of “fiscal account type” does not imply a change in investors’ behavior (at an individual level of the disposition effect).

Role of organizational career websites for employer brand development

Purpose The paper aims to demonstrate the utilization of banks’ career website for publicizing the employer branding strategy to enable effective strategic talent relationship management through talent attraction, engagement and retention. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative approach using purposive sample comprising HR professionals involving HR directors, reward managers and talent relationship managers, participated in semi-structured interviews. Findings This paper provides empirical insights on the use of career websites to disseminate the employer brand. The findings reveal the presence of recruitment orientation career websites across the banking sector. It also conveys HR practitioners’ suggestions for revamping the banks’ career websites to a more screening orientation approach for greater interactivity by both the internal and external talent pools. Research limitations/implications The paper depicts the importance attributed around the utilization of career websites in promoting the employer brand by the HR community across the banking sector. It provides clear insights about the specific contents of career websites to enable sustainable talent attraction, engagement and retention. Originality/value This paper provides a qualitative insight to the study of employer branding and career websites. Whereas most previous research on career websites have been of a quantitative nature relying predominantly on fictitious websites, having mostly undergraduate students as research participants. This study contributes enormously to the existing literature and practice by unveiling the perceptions of HR professionals on the dissemination of the employer brand through the career website

Exploring HR practitioners’ perspective on employer branding and its role in organisational attractiveness and talent management

© 2017, © Emerald Publishing Limited. Purpose: The latest research in the field of employer branding highlights a mix of marketing principles and recruitment practices, based on the concept that, just as customers have perceptions of an organisation’s brand, then so do other stakeholders including employees. However, the emphasis has been on organisations, which predominantly operate in developed countries typically with Westernised-individualistic cultures. This paper aims to investigate employer branding for service organisations’ image and attraction as an employer in a non-Western culture. Design/methodology/approach: This study examines the perceptions of human resources’ professionals and practitioners on the role of employer branding in employer attractiveness and talent management, within Mauritian banking sector. The data collection for this qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews with senior managers from Mauritian banking organisations, including multinational enterprises, small business unit banks and Mauritian banks. Findings: Analysis of the findings showed that organisations, and banks in this case, are increasingly competing to attract highly skilled personnel in various professional areas; therefore, those organisations that attract the best talent will have a distinct edge in the marketplace. Furthermore, findings from the semi-structured interviews with senior managers suggest that employer branding remains at the embryonic stage within the Mauritian banking sector; therefore, a clear need exists for a more developed strategy. Research limitations/implications: The outcomes of this study call for re-engineering with regards to managerial collaboration in organisations for the successful design and implementation of the employer branding strategy. The empirical findings from the Mauritian banking sector show that the strategic position occupied by the human resource function is still at an embryonic stage as regards with the competitiveness of banks as service organisations. Practical implications: The study presents a need for the development and maintenance of long-term collaborative and trust-based relationships between the human resource and marketing functions. Originality/value: The insights provided through this study addresses the dearth of academic research on employer branding on the African continent while providing invaluable information from a human resource professional perspective