Is There a Correlation for Companies With a Strong Employment Brand Between Employee Engagement Levels and Bottom Line Results?

The concept of employer brand was first introduced in 1996, where the authors defined “employer brand” as “the package of functional, economic and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the employing company” (Amber & Barrow, 1996). Initial application of employer brand in human resource management focused heavily on attracting and recruiting talents; However, a recent survey by People in Business Co. found that 42% of the 104 survey participants (organizations that are currently developing employer brands) focus as much internal as external (People in Business, 2010). Employer brand is recognized as a powerful tool to help employees to internalize corporate values (The Conference Board, 2001), to shape corporate culture (Backhaus & Tikoo, 2004), to engage employees, and to align talent management with business strategies (Kunerth & Mosley, 2011). SHRM’s survey in 2008 found that 61% of surveyed companies have had an employer brand, and that 25% were either developing or planning to do so within the next 12 months (SHRM, 2008)

Which Organizations are Best in Class in Managing Diversity and Inclusion, and What Does their Path of Success Look Like?

Question: Which organizations are best in class in managing diversity and inclusion, and what does their path of success look like? What are the criteria to measure ‘best in class’

Managing Learning and Turnover in Employee Staffing

We study the employee staffing problem in a service organization that uses employee service capacities to meet random, non-stationary service requirements. The employees experience learning and turnover on the job, and we develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) model that explicitly represents the stochastic nature of these effects. Theoretical results are developed that show the optimal hiring policy is of a state-dependent "hire-up-to" type, similar to the inventory "order-up-to" policy. This holds for discounted-costs MDP's under both finite and infinite planning horizons. We also develop structural properties of the optimal policy to facilitate computation of the optimal hiring numbers. For two important special cases of the general model, we prove the optimality of a myopic policy under both stationary and stochastically increasing service requirements. Moreover, we show that in these two cases, when service requirements are k-periodic, it is sufficient to solve a k-period MDP problem with appropriate end-of-horizon cost function. When general, non-stationary service requirements are present, we prove the existence of a one-sided "smoothing effect" of the optimal hire-up-to-levels. Numerical results show that the use of state-dependent hire-up-to policies may offer significant cost savings over simpler hiring policies. In particular, our results show that when employee capacity increase due to learning is substantial and flexible incremental capacity (overtime) is tight, a fully state-dependent policy out-performs a policy that hires only on the basis of the total number of employees in the system. Our problem formulation and results suggest natural connections to the classic results in inventory literature. We also discuss many of the connections and distinctions in the paper.

A Single-Server Queue with Markov Modulated Service Times

We study an M/MMPP/1 queuing system, where the arrival process is Poisson and service requirements are Markov modulated. When the Markov Chain modulating service times has two states, we show that the distribution of the number-in-system is a superposition of two matrix-geometric series and provide a simple algorithm for computing the rate and coefficient matrices. These results hold for both finite and infinite waiting space systems and extend results obtained in Neuts [5] and Naoumov [4]. Numerical comparisons between the performance of the M/MMPP/1 system and its M/G/1 analogue lead us to make the conjecture that the M/MMPP/1 system performs better if and only if the total switching probabilities between the two states satisfy a simple condition. We give an intuitive argument to support this conjecture.

Mechanism of formation of half-doped stripes in underdoped cuprates

Using a variational Monte-Carlo approach with a recently proposed stripe wave function, we showed that the strong correlation included in a t-J-type model has essentially all the necessary ingredients to form these stripes with modulations of charge density, spin magnetization, and pair field. If a perturbative effect of electron-phonon coupling to renormalize the effective mass or the hopping rate of holes is considered with the model, we find the half-doped stripes, which has on the average one half of a hole in one period of charge modulation, to be most stable, energetic wise in the underdoped region, $1/12\leq\delta\leq1/8$. This is in good agreement with the observation in the neutron scattering experiments. We also find long range Coulomb interaction to be less effective in the formation of half-doped stripes.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Holographic Metal-Insulator Transition in Higher Derivative Gravity

We introduce a Weyl term into the Einstein-Maxwell-Axion theory in four dimensional spacetime. Up to the first order of the Weyl coupling parameter $\gamma$, we construct charged black brane solutions without translational invariance in a perturbative manner. Among all the holographic frameworks involving higher derivative gravity, we are the first to obtain metal-insulator transitions (MIT) when varying the system parameters at zero temperature. Furthermore, we study the holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) of strip geometry in this model and find that the second order derivative of HEE with respect to the axion parameter exhibits maximization behavior near quantum critical points (QCPs) of MIT. It testifies the conjecture in 1502.03661 and 1604.04857 that HEE itself or its derivatives can be used to diagnose quantum phase transition (QPT).Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures; typo corrected, added 3 references; minor revisio

Investment Horizon and the Cross Section of Expected Returns: Evidence from the Tokyo Stock Exchange

Using data from the Tokyo Stock Exchange, we study how beta, size, and ratio of book to market equity (BE/ME) account for the cross-section of expected stock returns over different lengths of investment horizons. We find that $\beta$, adjusted for infrequent trading or not, fails to explain the cross-section of monthly expected returns, but does a much better job for horizons over half- and one-year. However, either the size or the BE/ME alone is still a significant factor in explaining the cross-section expected returns, but the size significance diminishes for longer horizons when $\beta$ is included as an additional independent variable.Investment horizon, Beta, Size, Book-to-market equity, CAPM