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Abstracts - Volume 13 Part 2

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Going ‘Absent’, Then Just ‘Going’? A Case Study Examination of Absence and Quitting (p.1)
by D Cassidy and J Sutherland

This paper makes use of personnel data to examine absence, variously defined, and quitting in a call centre. It seeks to examine the hypothesis that absence and quitting are related, both being indicative of a lack of commitment on the part of the worker but offering different adjustment strategies to this problem. In the case study, absence is seen to be positively correlated with tenure, occupation and type of employment contract and negatively correlated with gender and age. The impact of the individual's operations manager is not without significance. For example the inclusion of this set of variables reduces absence, however defined, for certain occupational groups and grades. Quitting is seen to be negatively correlated with age, tenure and type of employment contract. There is a positive correlation between quitting and an individual's absence record prior to making the decision to leave, although the results are not statistically significant and the quantitative effects of the relationships are negligible.

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Financial Development in Kenya: a Dynamic Test of the Finance-led Growth Hypothesis(p.21)
by Nicholas M Odhiambo

This study examines the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth in Kenya using a dynamic Granger causality model. The study has been motivated by the current debate on the inter-temporal causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in developing countries. The thrust of this debate has been whether there exists a finance-led growth response or a growth-led finance response between the two variables. To this end the study uses three proxies of financial development against real GDP per capita (a proxy for economic growth). The empirical results reveal that, although the causality between financial development and economic growth in Kenya is sensitive to the choice of measure for financial development, on balance the demand following response tends to predominate. The study, therefore, concludes that the argument that financial development unambiguously leads to economic growth can only be taken with a pinch of salt.

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A Dynamic Efficiency-Wage Model with Continuous Effort and Externalities (p.37)
by Marco Guerrazzi

This paper provides a general equilibrium efficiency-wage model in which employment evolves according to the rules of the Shapiro-Stiglitz’s (1984) shirking model. The proposed framework allows us to endogenise in a continuous manner the effort decision undertaken by the individual worker and it may resolve the indeterminacy arising from a model with exogenous (and constant) effort. Moreover, by exploiting an externality argument, we allow the model to capture different local dynamic patterns in which are found convergent fluctuations and persistent cycles. Finally, we show that in our framework unemployment may actually act as a worker discipline device, i.e., equilibria with higher (lower) unemployment rates are also characterised by higher (lower) effort levels.

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The Evolution of Electricity Prices in The EU since the Single European Act (p.59)
by T Robinson

The development of a single European market for electricity has been a goal of EU policy makers since the Single European Act of 1986. This paper considers the impact of EU Directives on the evolution of electricity prices. Three empirical tests for convergence are applied to prices for ten EU countries; a simple test for ß-convergence; a cointegration test; and Nahar and Inder's (2002) test. Although mixed, the results suggest that convergence did occur for most of the countries in the sample over this period.

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