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The flow of cash funds from employer‐sponsored pension plans into mutual funds has been an important driving force behind the mutual fund industry's unprecedented recent growth. The increased attractiveness of mutual funds to pension investors is due to a shift from defined benefit to defined contribution plans, to changes in the tax laws, and to the growing recognition of certain types of mutual funds as suitable long‐term investment vehicles. Accompanying the tremendous growth in defined contribution plans, however, has been a shift in investment risk from employers to employees. Using the responses from a nationwide telephone survey of 2,000 mutual fund shareholders, this paper analyzes various characteristics and investment knowledge of purchasers of mutual funds through employer‐sponsored pension plans. The results show that overall, pension investors are as knowledgeable about the costs, risks, and returns associated with mutual funds as investors who purchase mutual funds through other distribution channels. However, when dividing the sample of pension‐plan investors into two subsamples consisting of those who purchase mutual funds solely through the pension channel and those also employing other distribution channels, pension‐channel‐only investors are found to be significantly less knowledgeable. These results suggest that there is much room for improvement in investor education for a large segment of pension‐channel investors.

This exploratory article examines the issue of state government procurement. It uses original survey data to create a measure of reformed state procurement practices, as suggested by the literature, and explores the ability of several variables from the state policy literature to explain observed differences in state procurement. Findings suggest that the states’ procurement practices possess varying degrees of reform characteristics, that interest group diversity, legislative professionalism, results-oriented management, and regional effects each have significant relationships to state procurement practices, and that several “classic” explanations of state policy are not significantly related to state procurement practices. One implication is that procurement, like other forms of state administrative policy, may not be readily explained by widely utilized theories of state policy.

The advent in 1982 of a Labor Government in Victoria, Australia, led to a new approach towards the administration of education, emphasising the democratisation of educational administration. The new approach was outlined in ministerial papers, one of which dealt with the establishment of the regional board of education. The representational aspect of a regional board using data collected over 12 months is outlined and some of the contradictions in its operation are highlighted.

This issue of Managerial Finance brings together five papers that explore the manifold dimensions of pension issues. The papers document and explain the dynamic changes occurring in the management and functioning of private pension plans within an evolving institutional and regulatory framework. Although the papers predominantly focus on the U.S. pension system, the issues addressed and the attendant implications are relevant to economies in the throes of developing or reforming pension security arrangements for market participants.

Phenomenologists are among the strongest opponents of logical positivism. Mostly associated with Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is essentially an analytical method or framework for describing and explaining social relationships and psychological orientations. Phenomenologists attempt to account for the subjective qualities which logical positivists and empiricists assume to be unreal or are mistakenly treated as objective observable phenomena. The authors note that phenomenology has been absorbed into the literature and the language of the field especially in terms of how people do and do not relate to bureaucratic organizations and government programs.

This paper aims to investigate the production of sugar cane ethanol in Brazil for the time period 1983-2016, separating the data by geographical location.

For this purpose, the authors use techniques based on the concept of fractional integration.

The authors show that the data corresponding to the total production is highly persistent, with an integration order smaller than 1 but close to it. In fact, the unit root hypothesis cannot be rejected implying that shocks have a permanent nature, and thus requiring policy measures to recover the level from exogenous shocks. Separating the data into two sub-regions, namely, North–Northeast and Central–South, higher levels of persistence are detected in the latter, while the former presents some evidence of mean reverting behavior, implying that shocks will disappear by themselves in the long run in the former regions. These results are obtained from all the different methods used.

The originality is based on the time series techniques used in the paper that departs from the classical methods based on unit roots and integer degrees of differentiation.

This article makes the case that for leaders to be effective they also need to be credible. Credibility is achieved by practicing leader behaviors focusing on vision, trust, modeling the way, risk taking, and rewarding others. Leaders who possess high credibility are able to more successfully adapt to environmental change, because employees throughout the hierarchy will accept change mandates as legitimate. Leadership credibility is associated with the transformational model of leadership, and this article suggests that public managers would be advantaged by practicing this particular leadership strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to define a systematic management structure that helps police practitioners institutionalize performance management and analysis in more rational‐technical ways.

The design is based on Gold's “complete participant” field researcher method.

The findings suggest a performance management model is more rational than the traditional command‐control model and may increase consistency in police management by systematically collecting and reporting on streams of data to measure performance instead of relying on rote compliance.

The model is limited because it does not account for important intangible qualities of performance (e.g. attitude, initiative, judgment); in the hands of autocratic managers it can be oppressive and cause more problems than it solves; it may constrain officer discretion; it has not been advanced as a learning instrument; and performance indicators are subject to measurement error.

Most police agencies are already capturing the necessary data elements to implement a performance management model. Police executives and policymakers can use this model to definitively measure how well police agencies and individual programs are performing.

The paper represents an opportunity for police practitioners to embrace a new management process intended to improve performance and accountability. The framework is a universal management process that can be applied to any size police agency or any police program.