School of Business and Economics

Banks were excessively exposed to market and credit risks in the recent financial crisis. Some failed or were saved only by Government support.

In this lecture Professor Milne will discuss how banks can use standard tools of financial economics to improve their risk-decisions and better protect themselves in such periods of financial stress.

The seminar will consider the findings from two on-going studies examining whether the recent UK regulatory decision to introduce a blanket ban on the joint provision of lending and credit or payment protection insurance was justified. This case has wide regulatory implications following international concerns that the sale of payment protection credit insurance has been detrimental to customers due to overpriced insurance and a possible cross subsidy from insurance to lending. The seminar will examine these concerns of cross-subsidy and over-priced payment protection insurance for the UK unsecured lending and mortgage markets respectively. It is reported that while the cross-subsidy from payment protection insurance to unsecured lending is theoretically plausible this behaviour is not a universal practice across all suppliers and at all times. When examining mortgage payment protection insurance it is reported that these policies are over-priced when sold jointly with, rather than independently from mortgages. The distinct policy implications of prohibition of joint sales of payment protection insurance with lending in these two markets are discussed.

What do you actually research when you research careers? Jobs? Or more appropriately, good jobs? Or jobs that people do for a long time?

Many people take the concept of career for granted, and might assume that a careers researcher works in a careers service, or is behind those internet surveys that match individuals up to (often implausible) occupations.

In this lecture, Professor Cohen will unpack some everyday assumptions about what careers are and how they happen, and will explain why she finds it a compelling subject for research. She will also discuss a current project on women entrepreneurs.

Back in 1993 Professor Cohen conducted in-depth interviews with women who had left their jobs in organizations and set up their own businesses. Seventeen years later she went back to them for follow up interviews. Although movement over time is fundamental to the concept of career, most careers research fails to capture this temporal dimension, instead providing snapshots of people’s experiences at particular, often fleeting moments.

While careers researchers extol the virtues of longitudinal research, in practice it rarely happens. In the lecture Professor Cohen will highlight some of the key findings from her study.

To analyse the impacts of globalization upon inequality and unemployment in both advanced and emerging countries, we build a North-South HOS model with efficiency wages based on relative deprivation. Globalization is characterised by the South growing in size and significant differences in skill endowments between the two areas. We generate three stages of globalization depending on the size of the South and showing substantial divergences in terms of inequality, unemployment and productivity. The North is characterised by growing inequality and unemployment and by a decrease in productivity at the early stages of globalization. The South shows a decrease in inequality and unemployment at the first stage of globalization and growing inequality and/or unemployment at the later stage.

Most marketing and management research involves the collection of data from respondents, be they consumers, employees, managers or whatever. Ratings scales are the most common way to collect such data, but they can have response bias problems that impact negatively on the results obtained and on our understanding of the phenomena being investigated. The seminar will discuss the Best Worst Scaling (BWS) approach, which is useful in many situations. BWS forces people to make choices and overcomes many of the responses biases that are inherent in ratings scales. Research undertaken to examine personal values and organisational positioning will be used to demonstrate the BWS approach and to show its usefulness in a variety of research contexts.

Brands are important economic entities – the top 20 global brands are estimated to be worth more than the GDP of Mexico, South Korea or Switzerland.

Companies spend large sums on developing new brands and yet the top 10 global brands have changed very little over the past decade although there are some spectacular successes and failures.

Traditional marketing sees the brand as key to developing a customer offering which is different from the competition. It is claimed that building a successful brand results in loyal consumers who will generate superior profits. The way that brands operate is also often described using theories from consumer psychology.

Rather than examine the psychological basis for branding, in this lecture, Professor Stern will explore some of the realities of how consumers buy brands and look at how these patterns compare with the received wisdom in marketing.

Brand differentiation and brand loyalty will be discussed using examples from familiar consumer markets as well from other examples, including prescription pharmaceuticals.

Despite a decade of debate around the importance of talent management for success in the increasingly competitive business environment, the concept of talent management is still lacking in definition and theoretical development. In addition its conceptual and intellectual boundaries, its application in practice remains unclear and the field continues to suffer from a number of theoretical and practical limitations. This paper critiques talent management, presents a theoretical model of the construct and considers some of the key challenges which the area faces.

The internet driven information revolution is frequently cited as one of the key drivers (re-)shaping contemporary consumption. In particular the internet has been seen as disrupting established conventions in professional services.

Popularly, it has been viewed as a liberating medium, a mechanism by which consumers and citizens have been able to challenge the authority of the professional establishment.

Yet research evidence across a range of sectors suggests that consumers seeking to negotiate a new settlement with professionals and reconfigure the service encounter are not only presented with new opportunities but also new uncertainties and challenges. This is due to the intrinsically multi-dimensional and multi-layered nature of the internet and the new informational spaces it creates.

Balancing the paradoxes created by these emergent informational spaces is at the core of the challenge confronting contemporary service consumers. Irrespective of the nature of that space, the effect is to create a driver for change, challenging the established practices of both consumer and professional to reshape the service encounter.

Operations is an essential function for any manufacturing or service organisation and Operations Management is concerned with the planning and effective use of the organisation’s resources to operate the manufacturing or service system.

Operational research can help to when analysing an organisation’s operations and offer improved solutions to operations management problems.

In this lecture, Professor Liu will demonstrate through examples, the application of operational research techniques in solving various operations management problems in manufacturing and transportation logistics systems.

These include a capacity planning problem for airport ramp services, a quay crane allocation problem at container terminals, and a lot-streaming problem in production.