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An American Dilemma: The Financial Costs and Economic Impact of Obesity in the United States

Guarino Arthur S.

The obesity crisis in the United States has reached epidemic proportions. Not only does this epidemic affect the health of the nation, but it also has economic and financial ramifications. An obese and overweight population impacts medical costs, the cost of health insurance that businesses provide for their employees and the productivity of firms. The obesity crisis will mean a diverging of financial assets from areas such as research and development to combating the increasing girth of average Americans. Obesity has caused cases of diabetes, heart problems, hypertension and cancer to increase at a higher rate. However, this epidemic is not only having an impact on adults, but also children and young adults which will affect the United States in the future in terms of its competitiveness in the global markets.

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Strategic Adaptation: A Key to Sustainable Business Growth

Singh Satyendra Kumar

Every organization operates in a business environment of its own. As the business environment is continually changing, the organization can grow and sustain its growth only if its strategy also changes in response to its business environment i.e. its strategy adapts to changing business environment. If the organization’s strategy remains static vis-à-vis its changing business environment, its growth is hampered, it suffers financial losses and may eventually become sick or die. This paper makes a case study of two Indian companies, viz Hindalco Industries Limited and Kingfisher Airlines Limited wherein it analyses their strategic adaptability to the changing business environment with the impact on their growth and financial health.

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Relationship of Gender Patterns in Communication and Organizational Culture at Workplace: The Role of Gender and Organizational Type

Merlin Mythili S.

Gender inclusive governance (to genderize governance) has been finally accepted as a necessity for sustainable human resource development. Yet, women appear to be trapped in junior and middle management levels because of the rampant existence of vertical and horizontal segregation. The plethora of studies that have attempted to explain this marginalisation of women in senior management positions have done so by documenting gender differences in workplace related characteristics/style/behaviour and organizational culture. One such extensively researched workplace characteristic from a gender point of view is communication. The present study attempts to identify whether the preference for feminine patterns in communication by employees in the organisations under study is related to organisational culture and the moderating effect of gender on that relationship in the two types of organizations under study; 3 academic organizations and 2 IT and ITES organizations. The results indicate that feminine patterns of communication are increasingly the preferred type of communication at workplace and organisational culture plays an important role in defining the preferred gender patterns in communication at workplace.

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The Balanced Scorecard: A Comparative Study of Accounting Education and Experience on Common Measure Bias

Kaskey V.L.

The Balanced Scorecard is a management tool that utilizes common and unique measures of an organization and/or division. Lipe and Salterio14 found that individuals disregarded unique measures of the Balanced Scorecard. Instead, individuals concentrated on common measures with which they were familiar. This defeats the purpose of the Balanced Scorecard intended by Kaplan and Norton.9 Since common measures are traditionally financial measures, managers are predominately using financial informa-tion to make strategic organizational decisions. The following study supports information that managers with accounting education and/or experience do not place more emphasis on the common measures of the Balanced Scorecard than managers without the same education and/or experience. Accounting education and/or experience do not impact an individual’s bias for the common measures of a Balanced Scorecard. Reasons for common measure bias should continue to be researched so that the benefits of the Balanced Scorecard can be fully utilized.

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A Study on Work-Life Balance in Chennai Port Trust, Chennai

Karthik R.

The objective of this research is to study the work life balance of employees in Chennai port trust, Chennai. Work life balance entails attaining equilibrium between professional work and other activities so that it reduces friction between official and domestic life. Work life balance enhances efficiency and thus, the productivity of an employee increases. It enhances satisfaction in both the professional and personal lives. The ultimate performance of any organization depends on the performance of its employees, which in turn depends on numerous factors. These factors can be related to work or family or both. The relationship between personal and professional life can be achieved through emotional intelligence. Better emotion management is necessary in order to accomplish day-to-day objectives of life. Convenience sampling technique was adopted for the study. Data were collected from 80 employees through questionnaire method from the department of traffic, finance, administration and engineering. Statistical tools such as Chi-square, ‘F’ Test and ‘T’ Test are used in the study to derive the results. The findings of the study reveal the majority of the employees feel comfortable in their work place irrespective of their trivial personal and work place irritants.

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Volatility in Indian Stock Market- A Case Study of Selected Indices

Nalina K. B.* and Karthik N. B.

Traditional econometric models assume a constant one period forecast variance. However, many financial time series display volatility clustering, that is, auto-regressive conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH). The aim of this paper is to estimate conditional volatility models in an effort to capture the salient features of stock market volatility in India and evaluate the models in terms of out-of sample forecast accuracy. The paper also investigates whether there is any leverage effect in Indian companies. The estimation of volatility is made at the macro level on two major market indices, namely, S&P CNX Nifty and BSE Sensex. The fitted model is then evaluated in terms of its forecasting accuracy on these two indices. In addition, 50 individual companies’ share prices currently included in S&P CNX Nifty, are used to examine the Heteroskedasticity behaviour of the Indian stock market at the micro level.

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Estimation of Export Demand Functions for Iran’s Pistachio

Safdari Mehdi1 and Motiee Reza2*

This paper estimates the major determinants of Pistachio export demand and investigates the elasticity’s of demand for Pistachio export in Iran. This study uses annual time series data (1970-2008) and unit root tests and analyzes them using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model21. This co-integration technique accommodates potential structural breaks that could undermine the existence of a long-run and significant relationship between Pistachio export demand and its main determinants. Error correction coefficient is negative and small and is equal to – 0.54 and it shows that if there is any shock or imbalance in total production, the system will be back to stability after a 3-year period. Together the independent variables explained 91% of the variance in the dependent variables. The remaining 9% was due to unidentified variables. In relation to that, we can conclude that explanatory power is high for the equation.

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Factors Influencing Korean Consumers' Ethical Decision Making

Jungbok Ha

Ethics studies in business are more popular and their importance is also recognized more than ever. This conceptual study tries to shade light on consumer ethics study especially in cross-cultural context. Based on previous consumer ethics study, factors such as Hofstede's four dimensional cultural typology, Moral Philosophies and Machiavellianism, influencing consumer ethics decision making were identified and several propositions were formulated regarding to these factors.

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Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Foreign Institutional Investment (FII)

Sudheer Kumar B.* and Malyadri G.

Foreign investment refers to investments made by the residents of a country in the financial assets and production processes of another country. The effect of foreign investment, however, varies from country to country. It can affect the factor productivity of the recipient country and can also affect the balance of payments. Foreign investment provides a channel through which countries can gain access to foreign capital. It can come in two forms: foreign direct investment (FDI) and foreign institutional investment (FII). Foreign direct investment involves in direct production activities and is also of a medium- to long-term nature. But foreign institutional investment is a short-term investment, mostly in the financial markets. FII, given its short-term nature, can have bidirectional causation with the returns of other domestic financial markets such as money markets, stock markets and foreign exchange markets. Hence, understanding the determi-nants of FII is very important for any emerging economy as FII exerts a larger impact on the domestic financial markets in the short run and a real impact in the long run.

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