Environmental Innovations in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Supporting and accelerating the adoption and diffusion of environmental innovations amongst small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) is a major challenge to environmental policy makers. Research suggests that whilst SMEs possess high flexibility, their innovative capacity may be limited to incremental changes within their existing technology system and network. Twenty case studies examining the innovation adoption process in SMEs in four sectors and in five countries within the ENVIS project (commissioned by the EU) revealed great variety in factors driving this process. Findings indicate that this variation can be attributed to the character of the environmental innovation, the specific business opportunity, the regulatory setting and pressure experienced by the sector. Based on these findings an analytical framework is suggested, whereby the environmental innovative capability of SMEs is conceived as the result of an interplay between the competencies, the network relations and the strategic orientation of the company (the 'dynamic triangle'). This indicates that policy to support SME's adoption of environmental innovations has to take an integrated form, i.e. addressing and developing competence, networks and strategic orientation of SMEs simultaneously whilst remaining systemic and context sensitive.     

Organizing foreign market activities: From entry mode choice to configuration decisions

This article takes a critical look at the extant foreign entry mode research and argues that a richer and more and dynamic view is needed in order to provide a realistic presentation of how firms organize their foreign activities. While researchers have typically assumed a very limited range of foreign operation modes, we propose a systemic rather than a myopic view of foreign operation modes by modeling the entry mode decisions of the firm as a corporate-level process. We substantially broaden the scope of mode choice, thereby moving toward a configuration decision approach. We model and provide numerical examples of how international interdependencies impact mode configuration, and then extend the analysis by incorporating dynamic aspects.     

Questioning the impact of the ‘graduatization’ of the managerial labour force upon the management of human resources in the Scottish hotel industry

This paper outlines the findings of a questionnaire survey returned by 125 Scottish hotels from a sample of 500 small and middle‐sized enterprises. We asked questions on the level of impact that hospitality graduates have had upon human resource management practices within individual units. The research reports that, although the cumulative graduatization of the managerial workforce appears to be under way, the main route to a permanent management post still remains one of practical work experience, rather than the attainment of a hospitality‐related degree. Although manpower planning is widely used by line managers for managing the conditions of local/external labour markets and operatives’ jobs, there is less evidence of a systematic approach to the management of graduate careers/skills or of the management of internal job structures and labour market processes in order to improve the quality of customer service. Our work suggests a need for smaller hotels to strike a fresh balance between traditional operationally driven approaches to people management and strategic human resource management frameworks.     

Missed opportunities? Reaching the ethnic consumer market

Changing population demographics within the UK have become a source of increased interest to marketers as companies have realized the importance of targeting their products and advertising efforts towards minority and ethnic groups. In addition, as the UK’s ethnic minorities grow in both numbers and in terms of prosperity, so does the commercial significance of this market. A clearer understanding of both the nature of changing markets and the relative importance of different minority ethnic groups as consumers is imperative to facilitate both consumer understanding and business development; marketers need to understand better how to target these people, what they have in common with the mainstream and where the differences lie. This paper seeks to describe current understanding of ethnic consumers and their impact on the marketplace while highlighting an area where future research is potentially of considerable benefit.     

Searching an Ex Situ Collection of Wheat Genetic Resources

A theoretical model is developed and applied to the search for disease and pest resistance in ex situ collections of wheat genetic resources, employing actual data on frequency distributions, disease losses, and search costs. Experiments developed from case studies clarify several misperceptions about the value of gene banks and their utilization by breeders. The observation that wheat breeders "use" gene banks rarely does not imply that marginal accessions have low value. High costs of transferring genes with conventional breeding techniques mean that it may be efficient to store certain categories of genetic resources (such as landraces) 'unused' for many years.     

The rise of regulatory capitalism and the decline of auditor independence: A critical and experimental examination of auditors’ conflicts of interests

This study investigates the decline of auditor independence coinciding with the rise of regulatory capitalism. A critical analysis supported by experimental evidence reveals regulatory capitalism's influence on auditor independence. Regulatory capitalism began in the United States during the 1970s when state enforced neo-liberal free-market doctrines of competition and deregulation commercialized the profession. Since then, regulatory capitalism's economic neo-liberal agenda has transformed the auditing profession and the employer firms into a transnational network of professional services firms that now promote and diffuse regulatory capitalism worldwide. Regulatory capitalism is further facilitated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the PCAOB that provide interconnections of powerful non-democratic private regulators such as the IFAC and IAASB. An experiment reveals auditors’ ethical predisposition to provide consistently high quality independence judgments required by IFAC's code of ethics. The majority of this sample of 174 Danish auditors was not consistently independent in the context of client economic factors, indicating that the code of ethics’ appeal to auditors’ altruistic behavior has failed. Moreover the transformed profession has become the transformer but at a price, the loss of public confidence and the decline of auditor independence. Conflicts of interests still abound.     

Semiparametric inference in a GARCH-in-mean model

A new semiparametric estimator for an empirical asset pricing model with general nonparametric risk-return tradeoff and GARCH-type underlying volatility is introduced. Based on the profile likelihood approach, it does not rely on any initial parametric estimator of the conditional mean function, and it is under stated conditions consistent, asymptotically normal, and efficient, i.e., it achieves the semiparametric lower bound. A sampling experiment provides finite sample comparisons with the parametric approach and the iterative semiparametric approach with parametric initial estimate of Conrad and Mammen (2008). An application to daily stock market returns suggests that the risk-return relation is indeed nonlinear.     

Interest Rate Dynamics and Consistent Forward Rate Curves

We consider as given an arbitrage‐free interest rate model M, and a parametrized family of forward rate curves G. We study the question as to when the given family G is consistent with the dynamics of the interest rate model M, in the sense that M actually will produce forward rate curves belonging to G. We allow the interest rate model to be driven by a multidimensional Wiener process, as well as by a marked point process, and we give necessary and sufficient conditions for consistency. As test cases, we study some popular models, obtaining both positive and negative results about consistency. We also introduce a natural exponential‐polynomial family of forward rate curves, and for this family we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of consistent interest rate models with deterministic volatility functions.