The growth in the Japanese stock market, 1949–90 and prospects for the future

This paper surveys the growth in size and value of the Japanese stock market from its post-Second World War reopening until the end of 1990. The rise has been spectacular, but there have been many declines along the way. These are discussed along with the close relationship between land and stock prices. The paper concludes with an assessment of the current situation and prospects for the short and long term.     

Oversight Ethics: The Case of Business Licensing

The ethics research community has all but ignored issues of oversight ethics – the vices and virtues of overseers. This study develops a conceptual framework for exploring the ethics of oversight and provides insights into the design of codes of ethics for oversight institutions and for overseers. Analysis of business licensing in Israel reveals prospective and retrospective oversight ethics problems at the levels of national and local policy and implementation: Overseers failed to act on knowledge of breaches of business licensing stipulations and took action known to be slow and ineffective; policymakers neglected their duty to enact significant policy change in an oversight system that was clearly not working. Partially as a result of these oversight failures, over one third of Israeli businesses are unlicensed, 23 people were killed in the collapse of an unlicensed banquet hall, 2 major fires erupted in the same shopping mall, and a fire in a fertilizer warehouse very nearly became a mega-disaster.     

The U.S. industrial marketer's position in international trade

The purpose of this article is to examine some of the interests served by international trade and several of the factors that will affect the environment in which the marketing manager will operate in the next decade. The diverse forces that influence foreign trade are of increasing importance to marketing strategy. Although salesmen are still counseled to “sell-like-hell”, senior marketing people need to have a perspective that permits them to anticipate the threats and oppurtunities these forces create. We will suggest some of the trends and issues to which the marketer must be alert. While our analysis will be most appropriate for American companies, this approach is also applicable for firms based in other countries.The article is divided into five parts. In the first part we examine the importance and motives for U.S. international trade. We then explore U.S. patterns of imports and exports. In the third section we consider the role of technology in trade. Next we consider some of the trends that seem to apply for the next decade. Finally we raise some issues that will probably demand the marketer's attention in the future.     

Optimal capital accumulation and durable goods production

Summary We have examined the optimal production of a consumer durable with the aid of a capital stock subject to deterioration. We assumed the durable was owned by the producer and its services rented; this is equivalent to assuming sale with perfect foresight and used good markets. If the firm has no more than modest initial endowments of productive capital and durable good, the deterioration of capital induces a hump-like profile of the stock of the durable product, with the top of the hump above the eventual steady state level. The rental price of the consumer durable, therefore, falls from its initial level to a low from which it ascends to its steady state value. This implication might be amenable to empirical testing.Among the possible extensions of this work might be an analysis of the relationship between market structure and the choice of durability along the lines of [7] with allowance for deterioration of the capital stock. Recent generalizations of the traditional model of capital accumulation to take into account obsolescence and maintenance, as in [19], [11] and [13], might also be applied to this model. Lastly, policy questions regarding the consequences of an investment credit tax addressed in [4] and [16] might also be investigated in the context of the model presented in this paper.     

An analysis of the impact of the self-sufficiency project on wages

We measure the impact of the Self-Sufficiency Project (a randomized welfare-to-work experiment in Canada; henceforth, SSP) on relative wage progression. SSP provided a generous 3-year earnings supplement to treatment group members who found a full-time job within a year of the start of the experiment (take-up group). We estimate the treatment on the treated for two sub-groups of the take-up group: the incentivized and non-incentivized groups. Using an econometric model of wage determination, we find evidence of large and significant relative wage progression of approximately 9 percentage points during the 3-year supplement period for the incentivized group. The impact for the non-incentivized group is much smaller (at most 3 percentage points). There is also some limited information that the non-incentivized group in New Brunswick and the incentivized groups in both New Brunswick and British Columbia continued to work more after the 3-year supplement period ended.     

Was Expansionary Monetary Policy Feasible during the Great Contraction? An Examination of the Gold Standard Constraint

The recent consensus view that the gold standard was the leading cause of the worldwide Great Depression 1929-1933 stems from the two propositions: (1) Under the gold standard, deflationary shocks were transmitted between countries and, (2) for most countries, continued adherence to gold prevented monetary authorities from offsetting banking panics and blocked their recoveries. In this article we contend that the second proposition applies only to small open economies with limited gold reserves. This was not the case for the United States, the largest country in the world, holding massive gold reserves. The United States was not constrained from using expansionary policy to offset banking panics, deflation, and declining economic activity. Simulations, based on a model of a large open economy, indicate that expansionary open market operations by the Federal Reserve at two critical junctures (October 1930 to February 1931; September 1931 through January 1932) would have been successful in averting the banking panics that occurred, without endangering convertibility. Indeed had expansionary open market purchases been conducted in 1930, the contraction would not have led to the international crises that followed.