The Wall Street Journal-20080126-The Informed Reader - Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080126
The Informed Reader / Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
Economics:
Don't Let Gloom Obscure Global Prosperity
Many people have been in a funk this week, fretting over the possibility of a harsh economic downturn. They should cheer up, says the Economist in its characteristically contrarian fashion, because behind the gloomy headlines lies a world that is more peaceful and prosperous than ever.
The newsweekly notes the souring of attitudes as U.S. economic conditions have grown increasingly unsettled. Americans are becoming more isolationist, and opposition to immigration is growing. In many countries, majorities of people believe globalization hurts them personally.
But those views are belied by evidence showing that conditions are improving in many places. The newsweekly draws that conclusion by looking at three areas: social conditions in poor countries; poverty alleviation; and the incidence of wars.
The number of very poor people in the world is falling fast. Some 135 million people emerged from destitution between 1999 and 2004, a "stunning" sign of progress that owes much to the growing control people in developing nations have over their own fertility. There have been huge gains in access to public services such as clean water, and corresponding improvements in child-mortality rates.
These social advances also can be attributed to economic growth, which has been spread fairly evenly across the globe. There are twice the number of fast-growing countries today than there were from 1980 to 2000.
Living standards are getting a boost from another development -- the decline in wars and in deaths from violence. While terrible violence persists in places such as Sudan, Congo and in parts of the Middle East, the overall toll is dropping.
A slowdown would cause pain in both developed and developing countries, the newsweekly says. But the pervading sense of doom -- and the tendency to blame problems on globalization -- is overwrought.
-- The Economist -- Jan. 26
Management:
Wall Street's Top Women Rarely Lose Their Star Power
A Harvard Business School professor has discovered an interesting twist in his research into the careers of top performers on Wall Street: Star female analysts tend to maintain their status when they switch firms, but their male counterparts don't.
Boris Groysberg, whose work focuses on organizational behavior and management, spotted the performance gender gap while studying earlier research into the work of star stock analysts. His initial research, published four years ago, suggested that companies were taking a big risk when hiring star stock pickers, since both their performance and the market value of the hiring company tends to fall after the switch.
Deeper scrutiny of the data reveals that top female analysts -- defined by their rankings in lists published by Institutional Investor -- are an exception to the trend. Two tendencies seem to explain the discrepancy, says Prof. Groysberg. First, women -- who made up 18% of the analysts in the study -- were more likely than men to have built their success on relationships with clients and companies they covered. Male analysts, by contrast, relied more on internal networks within their companies. The women also considered a wider variety of factors in assessing prospective employers. Male analysts tended to emphasize compensation in their decisions to switch firms.
The female analysts' more successful transitions might be partly inadvertent -- the women could have felt compelled to build external relationships because they had more difficulty than their male colleagues securing in-house mentors. Sexist attitudes could force them to work harder to protect their portability in the industry. And women generally look for organizations "that will welcome them as individuals," raising the odds they will be successful at the new firm.
-- Harvard Business Review -- February
---
See more on our blog, at WSJ.com/InformedReader. Send comments to [email protected].
