The IT performance evaluation in the construction industry

To date there has been limited published work in the construction management and engineering literature that has provided empirical evidence to demonstrate that IT can improve organizational performance. Without an explicit understanding about how IT can be effectively used to improve organizational performance, its justification will remain to be weak for managers. To ensure the continuous increase in IT based applications in the construction industry, sufficient evidence has to be provided for management in various professions of the construction industry to evaluate, allocate and utilize appropriate IT systems. In an attempt to explore the relationship between IT and productivity, an empirical investigation of 60 Professional Consulting Firms (PCF) from the Hong Kong construction industry was undertaken. A model for determining the organizational productivity of IT is proposed, and the methodology used to test the model is described. The findings are analyzed and a cross-profession comparison of the results indicated the differences in the use of IT. The research findings are discussed with similarities being drawn. The limitations of the research are then presented and discussed. The implications of the findings and conclusions then fully presented

Gauging internal fermionic symmetries and spin 3/2 fields

Field theoretic models possessing a global internal fermionic shift symmetry are considered. When such a symmetry is realized locally, spin 3/2 fields appear naturally as gauge fields. Implementation of the gauging procedure requires not only the usual replacement of ordinary derivatives by covariant derivatives containing the spin 3/2 fields, but also the inclusion of additional monomials. The Higgs mechanism and the high energy Nambu-Goldstone fermion equivalence theorem are explicitly demonstrated.Comment: 9 page

The Real Exchange Rate and Employment in U.S. Manufacturing: State and Regional Results

In a series of earlier papers we have examined the impact of exchange rate movements on employment and output in the manufacturing sector, disaggregated by industry sector and by production and non-production workers. In this paper we examine the impact of exchange rate movements on manufacturing employment, disaggregated geographically, using census divisions, regions, states and SMSA's as the unit of analysis. Empirical estimates of employment changes are first presented for the four census regions, the nine census divisions, and the fifty states plus the District of Columbia. For the country as a whole, we estimate that movements in the real exchange rate led to the loss of about 1 million manufacturing jobs over this period. We go on to examine in greater detail manufacturing employment in New York State, and report that exchange rate movements had a much larger impact in the areas outside of New York City than in the metropolitan area. This result is consistent with earlier work that found that employment in management or research is not as sensitive to exchange rate movements as employment in production processes. The New York results are followed by an examination of manufacturing employment in five southern states with large rural populations. Some policy makers have expressed a concern that manufacturing employment in rural areas suffered more than in urban areas during the period of the dollar appreciation. We find that within these five states, the impact of the exchange rate on manufacturing employment in the non-SMSA areas was the same or less than was the case for employment within SMSA areas. Finally, we use a multivariate model to explore why manufacturing employment is more sensitive to exchange rate movements in some states than in others. Factors which are associated with greater sensitivity of manufacturing employment to exchange rate movements are: the percent of the population living outside of SMSA areas, the level of production worker wages, and crude oil production. Factors that are associated with less sensitivity of manufacturing employment to exchange rate movements include the percent of the population with 4 years or more of college or per-capita expenditures on public secondary schools.

The Real Exchange Rate, Employment, and Output in Manufacturing in the U.S. and Japan

In the spring of 1981 the U.S. dollar began a four-year period of real appreciation that took it to a peak of more than 50 percent by first quarter 1985. Since then, the dollar has depreciated substantially, but remains above its 1980 level. During the same period, the Japanese yen first depreciated by 12 percent in real terms from 1981 to 1982, and then appreciated by some 30 percent to 1986. These swings in real exchange rates effects on the relative competitiveness of U.S. and Japanese industry, and have effects on employment and output in sectors producing tradeable goods. This paper presents estimates of these effects. Using time series data for the period 1970 to 1986, we use a simple model of supply and demand to estimate the impact of swings in the effective real exchange rate of the dollar and the yen on manufacturing employment and output in the U.S. and Japan, disaggregated by industry sectors, and by production and non-production workers in the case of the U.S. employment. These results are part of a larger research project to estimate the effects of the movements in the real exchange rate on world manufacturing industries. We find significant and substantial effects of the dollar appreciation on employment and output in U.S. manufacturing. In particular, we find that exchange rate movements have had important effects on the durable goods sectors, including primary metals, fabricated metal products, and non-electrical machinery. Other sectors that suffer large employment and output losses when the dollar appreciates are stone, clay and glass products, transportation, instruments, and chemicals. Estimates are also presented for non-production and production workers in the U.S. employment of the latter is more sensitive to the real exchange rate, especially in the durable goods sectors. This suggests the possibility of hysteresis in trade. For Japan, we find significant effects of movements in the yen on employment and output in the durable goods sectors, especially those producing machinery. In particular, yen appreciation causes substantial losses in employment and output in fabricated metal products, general machinery, and electrical machinery. The results for Japan are not as clear as for the U.S., perhaps because we have only annual data for Japan, but quarterly data for the U.S.. Nevertheless, the importance of movements in the real exchange rate for employment and output in manufacturing is evident in both cases.

Decision Context, Associative Learning and Preference Formation in Risky Choic

Despite all the differences offered in theories of utility formation and decisions from experience/ descriptions, they share common assumption – decision makers have stable and coherent preferences, informed by consistent use of psychological strategy/processing (computational or sampling) that guide their choices between alternatives varying in risk and reward. In contrast, we argue for the non-existence of stable risk preferences; we propose that risk preferences are constructed dynamically based on strategy selection as a reinforcement-learning model. Accordingly, we found that decision context and associative learning predict strategy selection and govern risky preferences; rather having fixed preferences for risk, people select decision strategies from current context and learn to select decision strategies that are most successful (in terms of effort and reward) for a given context

Information systems evaluation: Mini-track introduction

abreast of technological innovations. Yet, companies are becoming more aware that a competitive advantage can not be achieved, or even maintained by utilizing the latest technology. Indeed, it is becoming more apparent that a strategic competitive advantage will not be achieved through embraced technology alone but, in the way companies approach the evaluation, management and exploitation of their human, organizational and technology based assets and infrastructure. In support of this, Sohal et al. (2001) reported the results of a large-scale survey that demonstrated the limited Information Technology (IT) enabled business benefits resulting in service and manufacturing sectors. The survey highlighted that many of the benefits achieved through adopting IT/IS were limited to improvements in productivity and cost alone. Clearly, such results are surprising given the emphasis the normative literature has placed on the strategic benefits achievable from IT/IS. As a result of the far reaching conclusions reported by Sohal et al. (2001), many organisational have begun to question the scope and depth of those IT-enabled business benefits that are not achieved by those companies proactively adopting IT/IS

Youth and the future: effective youth services for the year 2015

This report provides an understanding of the services required by young people in the year 2015, based on a thorough analysis of recent trends and expert projections of those trends. The report analyses key social and economic changes for young people in Australia over the past 10 to 20 years including movements in population, education, employment/unemployment and the labour market, incomes, family and household structure, health, and crime and justice

Food-based dietary guidelines for the patient with diabetes

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Investment, protection, ownership, and the cost of capital

We investigate the cost of capital in a model with an agency conflict between inside managers and outside shareholders. Inside ownership reflects the classic tradeoff between incentives and risk diversification, and the severity of agency costs depends on a parameter representing investor protection. In equilibrium, the marginal cost of capital is a weighted average of terms reflecting both idiosyncratic and systematic risk, and weaker investor protection increases the weight on idiosyncratic risk. Using firm-level data from 38 countries, we estimate the predicted relationships among investor protection, inside ownership, and the marginal cost of capital. We discuss implications for the determinants of firm size, the relationship between Tobin's Q and ownership, and the effect of financial liberalizations.Investor protection, ownership, investment, cost of capital, agency costs