Capital costs and profitability

The paper estimates a line-of-business (LB) cost-of-capital and derives explicitly its link — in long-run competitive equilibrium — to profitability measured as LB operating income to LB assets. The ways that observed profitability differs from what would obtain in competitive equilibrium are explored.     

DOES GNP EXAGGERATE GROWTH IN “ACTUAL” OUTPUT? THE CASE OF THE UNITED STATES

Measures of national product can be misleading because there is nonmarket production. There are also distortions due to transactional activities, which are expenditures to support transactions, not actual output consumed. For 1950–89, this study recalculates output for the United States, adjusting for transactional activities and nonmarket production. Due to relatively rapid growth in transactional activities, GNP overstates output growth in the 1950s; because there was slow expansion of transactional activities in the early 1970s, GNP understates actual output. Since 1974, increases in transactional activities and shifts to market production lead GNP to exaggerate improvement of "actual" output per capita.     

An Analysis of the Out-of-Market Gap for DVDs in the U.S.

We examine the out-of-market gap – the time between the end of a film’s theatrical run and its release on DVD – for a sample of U.S. films during 1988-2005. The average gap declined from 58.14 days in 1998 to 27.93 days in 2005; by 2005, 39% of the films were released on DVD prior to leaving the theaters. Probit and hazard models are estimated to explore the factors that influence a distributor’s decision to release a film on DVD before it exits the theaters, and the timing of the release for films that appear on DVD after they leave the theaters.      

THE ROLE OF CORPORATE GOVERNANCE IN SOUTH KOREAN ECONOMIC REFORM

In South Korea, as in some other troubled Asian economies, banks and large public corporations have been run more in the interest of the government and the controlling share-holder group than to maximize efficiency and overall shareholder wealth. Any serious attempt to reform the South Korean economy must thus include significant changes in its system of corporate governance. After discussing in general terms how corporate ownership and control can affect economic performance, this article examines the corporate governance institutions that prevail in different countries, with particular attention to the U.S., Japan, and Germany. From such comparative analysis it then develops a set of criteria for appraising the effectiveness of corporate governance systems that are applied to the specific case of South Korea. The article concludes with number of suggestions for reforming the South Korean corporate governance system, including:

• 1 greater legal protection for minority shareholders from transactions involving potential conflicts of interest; and
• 2 strengthening of the incentives of management and large corporate holders, such as house or main banks, to maximize value (as the author notes, “charging management or the board with a legal mandate to ‘balance’ the interests of various constituencies or stakeholders is merely to diminish any legally enforceable responsibility to shareholders”).

As the article notes in closing, the main beneficiaries of such governance reforms will not be the new shareholders–including those foreign investors who might be persuaded to buy the stocks–but rather the existing owners, whose shares will command a higher price from “outside” investors. And the greatest beneficiary will be the South Korean nation as a whole, since the resulting improvements in corporate performance and reductions in cost of capital will increase productivity and international competitiveness.     

Sale of non-profit hospitals creates new benefits and new risks

If a charitable hospital is sold, the proceeds of the sale may be used to establish a charitable foundation which continues to serve the community. It is the job of the Attorney General to review whether the proceeds serve the public's interest.     

What Is Personalization? Perspectives on the Design and Implementation of Personalization in Information Systems

In e-commerce and mobile commerce, personalization has been recognized as an important approach element in customer relationships and Web strategies. However, there are wide differences in how this concept is defined, characterized, and implemented in the literature. In this article we present a high-level framework for classifying approaches to personalization that delineates fundamental assumptions about personalization in the literature and relates them to strategies for developing personalization systems. The framework consists of 2 parts: (a) a set of perspectives on personalization that guide the design of personalization systems at a general level and (b) a scheme for classifying how personalization can be implemented. The personalization perspectives represent 4 distinct schools of thought on the nature of personalization distilled from the literature of several fields. These perspectives are ideal types and we discuss them in terms of the motivation they supply for personalization, the goals and means of personalization, and the ways in which they conceptualize and model users. The implementation classification scheme is constructed on 3 dimensions of implementation choices. These 3 dimensions pertain to what to personalize (content, interface, functionality, channel), to whom to personalize (individuals or categories of individuals) as well as who does the personalization (implicit or explicit personalization). The personalization perspectives represent particular concepts of personalization that guide general design choices; these choices are implemented via the options described in the implementation classification scheme. The framework contributes to the development of a common theoretical basis for the study of personalization. We discuss implications of the framework for design of personalization systems and future research directions.