An examination of the intraday behavior of the yen/dollar exchange rate: The relationship between trading activity and returns volatility

This paper provides additional empirical evidence of the relationship between the volatility of returns and trading activity in foreign exchange markets. Five-minute yen/dollar returns exhibit significant skewness, kurtosis, negative first-order autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity. Market activity (as measured by the intensity of quote arrivals) has a positive and statistically significant effect on conditional returns volatility. Such evidence is consistent with predictions of mixture of distrubutions models.     

Are more resources always better for growth? Resource stickiness in market and product expansion

We examine how managerial growth logics combine with financial and human resource slack to influence the short‐term revenue growth of a sample of 112 manufacturing firms drawn from a unique database provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Our results provide evidence that firms pursuing product expansion logics generally grow more slowly than firms that are not expanding their product base, but that financial slack positively moderates this relationship. We also find that human resource slack enhances short‐term market expansion, but slows down short‐term product expansion. We discuss the implications of these results for resource‐based views of growth. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of presubscription and other attributes on long-distance carrier choice

This article describes how Japanese residential customers choose among long-distance carriers. Based upon a 1993 survey, the model indicates that the time required to register customers, whether extra digits are required to use a carrier, and whether a carrier can provide both local and long-distance calls, as well as the carrier's brand identity are significant service attributes that affect competitive outcomes. The effects of these services differences are quantified. Simulations are used to illustrate the competitive impacts of reducing service differences among carriers.     

Coauthorship and publication efficiency

This study extends a recent paper by Jean Louis Heck and Peter A. Zaleski [1991] on trends in economics journal publication from 1969–89. The primary purpose of the work is to analyze the impact on article production of an observed dramatically increasing tendency toward coauthorship among scholars in economics. A simple model is tested with total (per capita) articles as a function of time, American Economic Association (AEA) membership, and articles coauthored per year. Results suggest that the increasing trend toward coauthorship enhances productivity in total and per-capita article production. The authors would like to thank Gary Shelley, Janet K. Smith, Peter Zaleski, and an anonymous referee for comments on previous versions of this paper.     

Small‐Firm Performance: Modeling the Role of Product and Process Improvements*

Entrepreneurial and small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) firm performance is a complex, multifaceted construct that should be examined with an eye toward its complexity. Our research study seeks to accomplish this examination by proposing a conceptual model of SME performance with two distinct but related outcome dimensions—growth as one dimension and profitability as another. We propose hypotheses for relationships between four antecedent factor conditions— environmental hostility, firm size, innovation capability, and internationalization—and an SME's likelihood to pursue either product improvement or process improvement as their primary strategic orientation. Furthermore, we propose that an SME product improvement orientation likely has greater influence on growth and profit performance than will a process improvement orientation. The findings of the study suggest that internationalization and innovator position have a positive impact on new product and process improvements, while environmental hostility, internationalization, and product improvement have positive influences on growth as a performance dimension. In addition and as hypothesized, the product improvement orientation is positively associated with growth and in turn profitability, whereas the process improvement orientation showed no statistical relationship to growth and ultimately profitability.     

THE STOCK PRICE REACTION TO SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT ADVERTISEMENTS AND COMPANY VALUE

The research examines the stock price reaction to the announcement of the adoption of supply chain management‐enhancing tools and technologies to determine whether there is a significant response from the capital markets. The results show that the adoption of supply chain management‐enhancement tools appears to be value creating. The strength of the stock price reaction is positively related to the degree of certainty regarding the publication date of the publication.     

The fertility of the Irish in the United States in 1910

The relatively high marital fertility of the Irish in the United States in the 19th century has long been interpreted as evidence for the persistence of a distinctive Irish culture in the United States. This claim echoes a similar view of Irish-American marriage patterns. Recent work has shown that the marriage patterns of the Irish in the United States were similar to native-born whites with similar occupational and other characteristics. This paper studies the reasons for the high fertility of Irish-Americans in 1910. Irish-born women in that year had much larger families than the typical native-born woman, and little of the difference can be attributed to other characteristics. Second-generation Irishwomen were less distinctive in this regard, although even they differed from the natives primarily because of a different proclivity to have a large family. Our results signal the complexity of immigrant adjustment to a new environment; the Irish largely abandoned one aspect of Irish demographic behavior while clinging to another.     

An empirical investigation of the effects of impact fees on housing and land markets

This paper presents the results from estimating the effects of development impact fees on the prices of new and existing single-family homes and undeveloped residential land using unique data for Dade County, FL. The results show that an additional US$1.00 of fees increases the price of both new and existing housing by about US$1.60 and reduces the price of land by about US$1.00. These findings are shown to be consistent with the new view but not the old view theory of impact fee incidence.     

Agency costs and business cycles

Summary. This paper develops a model with endogenous agency costs that is otherwise quite similar to the canonical real business cycle model. The traditional assumption in the literature is that these agency costs arise in the production of investment goods. In contrast, this paper assumes that these costs are all encompassing in the sense that they arise in the production of aggregate output. The paper explores both the importance of the investment vs. output assumption for business cycle dynamics, and the conditions under which these agency models can deliver amplification and/or persistence. The paper has two principal conclusions. First, in terms of amplification and propagation, the output model performs worse than does the investment model. This arises because a variable distortion in the investment market has more of an impact than a comparable distortion in the output market. Second, in this model with optimal consumption choice by entrepreneurs, there is a clear tension between amplification and persistence. Received: December 30, 1997; revised version: April 1, 1998