From an Implicit Christian Corporate Culture to a Structured Conception of Corporate Ethical Responsibility in a Retail Company: A Case-Study in Hermeneutic Ethics

This research investigates the impact of various factors on ethical behavior of 180 not-for-profit hospital employees. Ethical behavior of peers, ethical behavior of successful managers, and emotional intelligence had a significant positive impact on ethical behavior of respondents. Physicians and hospital employees with political connections within the organization were significantly less ethical than other employees. The results have many implications for researchers and healthcare practitioners.     

Testing the martingale hypothesis for futures prices: Implications for hedgers

The martingale hypothesis for futures prices is investigated using a nonparametric approach where it is assumed that the expected futures returns depend (nonparametrically) on a linear combination of predictors. We first collapse the predictors into a single‐index variable where the weights are identified up to scale, using the average derivative estimator proposed by T. Stoker (1986). We then use the Nadaraya–Watson kernel estimator to calculate (and visually depict) the relationship between the estimated index and the expected futures returns. We discuss implications of this finding for a noninfinitely risk‐averse hedger. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 28:1040–1065, 2008     

Specification and testing of models estimated by quadrature

This paper proposes a test to check the specification of models with unobserved individual effects integrated out by quadrature and also a simple way of increasing the flexibility of this type of model. The results of a Monte Carlo study and an application using a well‐known dataset illustrate the finite sample properties of the proposed methods and their implementation in practice. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Universal Values and Virtues in Management Versus Cross-Cultural Moral Relativism: An Educational Strategy to Clear the Ground for Business Ethics

Journal of Business Ethics - Despite the fact that business people and business students often cast doubt on the relevance of universal moral principles in business, the rejection of relativism is...     

Determinants of Alliance Portfolio Complexity and Its Effect on Innovative Performance of Companies*

Alliance formation is often described as a mechanism used by firms to increase voluntary knowledge transfers. Access to external knowledge has been increasingly recognized as a main source of a firm's innovativeness. A phenomenon that has recently emerged is alliance portfolio complexity. In line with recent studies this article develops a measure of portfolio complexity in technology partnerships in terms of diversity of elements of the alliance portfolio with which a firm must interact. The analysis considers an alliance portfolio that includes different partnership types (competitor, customer, supplier, and university and research center). So far factors that determine portfolio complexity and its impact on technological performance of firms have remained largely unexplored. This article examines firms' decisions to form alliance portfolios of foreign and domestic partners by two groups of firms: innovators (firms that are successful in introducing new products to the market), and imitators (firms that are successful at introducing products which are not new to the market). This study also assesses a nonlinear impact of the portfolio complexity measure on firms' innovative performance. The empirical models are estimated using data on more than 1800 firms from two consecutive Community Innovation Surveys conducted in 1998 and 2000 in the Netherlands. The results suggest that alliance portfolios of innovators are broader in terms of the different types of alliance partners as compared to those of imitators. This finding underlines the importance of establishing a “radar function” of links to various different partners in accessing novel information. Specifically, the results indicate that foremost innovators have a strong propensity to form portfolios consisting of international alliances. This underlines the importance of this type of partnership in the face of the growing internationalization of R&D and global technology sourcing. Being an innovator or imitator also increases the propensity to form a portfolio of domestic alliances, relative to non‐innovators; but this propensity is not stronger for innovators. Innovators appear to derive benefit from both intensive (exploitative) and broad (explorative) use of external information sources. The former type of sourcing is more important for innovators, while the latter is more important for imitators. Finally, alliance complexity is found to have an inverse U‐shape relationship to innovative performance. On the one hand, complexity facilitates learning and innovativeness; on the other hand, each organization has a certain management capacity to deal with complexity which sets limits on the amount of alliance portfolio complexity that can be managed within the firm. This clearly suggests that firms face a certain cognitive limit in terms of the degree of complexity they can handle. Despite the noted advantages of an increasing level of alliance portfolio complexity firms will at a certain stage reach a specific inflection point after which marginal costs of managing complexity are higher than the expected benefits from this increased complexity.     

Expectations Hypotheses Tests

We investigate the expectations hypotheses of the term structure of interest rates and of the foreign exchange market using vector autoregressive methods for U.S. dollar, Deutsche mark, and British pound interest rates and exchange rates. We examine Wald, Lagrange multiplier, and distance metric tests by iterating on approximate solutions that require only matrix inversions. Bias-corrected, constrained VARs provide Monte Carlo simulations. Wald tests grossly overreject the null, Lagrange multiplier tests slightly underreject, and distance metric tests overreject. A common interpretation emerges from the small sample statistics. The evidence against the expectations hypotheses is much less strong than under asymptotic inference.     

Inter-ethnic trust and reciprocity: results of an experiment with small businessmen

We investigate inter-ethnic trust and reciprocity by having subjects from distinct ethnic origins play the trust game [Games Econom. Behav. 10 (1995) 122]. The participants in the experiment are male small businessmen of Turkish or Belgian ethnic origin, all of whom have a business in the same city (Ghent, Belgium). Our main finding is that the average levels of trust and reciprocity are independent of ethnic origin and, moreover, independent of the ethnic origin of the opposite party.     

Some remarks on the undersized sample problem in econometrics

This paper discusses three approaches to the problem of undersized samples: the estimable function, the generalized inverse and the principal component method. It turns out that the k-class estimation methods amount to ordinary least squares if use is made of estimable function or generalized inverses. The generalized inverse approach is a special case of the estimable function approach and of the principal component solution.