Exchange rates,inflation and growth in small,open economies: a difference-in-differences approach

Financial crises in emerging markets have led many observers to recommend abandoning fixed exchange rates and adopting more flexible regimes. Moreover, some recent research suggests that the correct exchange rate regime may have a significant effect on inflation and even economic growth. The estimated effect found in such studies, however, likely suffers from an upward bias, as countries which choose a given exchange rate regime have other hard-to-measure policies and attributes which also affect economic performance. Utilizing a recent data set on actual, as opposed to official exchange rate regimes, this article employs the difference-in-differences method, currently popular in applied microeconomics, to a set of emerging markets that switched to more flexible currency policies. Results indicate that, contrary to previous studies, exchange rates themselves exert no significant impact on inflation or output.     

Koizumi carried the day: Did the Japanese election results make people happy and unhappy?

This paper investigates whether the Japanese people were happy and unhappy with the general election conducted on September 11, 2005, in which the Prime Minister, Koizumi, won a landslide victory. We conducted a large survey just after the election to ask people how happy they were and which party they had supported. Although there are consistent tendencies that supporters of ruling parties were happier and supporters of opposition parties were unhappier, the effect was not significant. Considering the results of previous studies that showed that Americans demonstrated significant responses to the result of a presidential election, this study suggests that the Japanese people are indifferent to politics.     

Household decision-making for everyday travel: a case study of walking and cycling in Lancaster (UK)

Increased walking and cycling for short journeys in urban areas has many obvious advantages yet so far gains from the promotion of more sustainable travel of this type are mostly small. This paper reports on a large research project which uses a mixed method approach to explore attitudes to and perceptions of walking and cycling, and which examines the process of household decision-making for everyday travel and the constraints that this imposes. Using survey, interview and ethnographic data it is argued that many people hold ambiguous and sometimes contradictory views of walking and cycling as effective means of everyday travel, that what they do rarely matches precisely what they believe, and that the complexity and contingency associated with everyday travel for many households is a major barrier to the use of more sustainable travel modes. It is suggested that better understanding of these processes could help to inform both future transport policy and the promotion of walking and cycling for short trips in urban areas.     

Organizing Continuous Product Development and Commercialization: The Collaborative Community of Firms Model

The increased importance of knowledge creation and use to firms' global competitiveness has spawned considerable experimentation with organizational designs for product development and commercialization over the last three decades. This paper discusses innovation‐related organizational design developments during this period, showing how firms have moved from stand‐alone organizations to multifirm network organizations to community‐based organizational designs. The collaborative community of firms model, the most recent organizational design in this evolutionary process, is described in detail. Blade.org, a purposefully designed collaborative community of firms dedicated to the continuous development and commercialization of blade servers, a computer technology with large but unforeseeable market potential, is used as an illustrative case. Blade.org's organizational design combines a community “commons” for the collective development and sharing of knowledge among member firms with explicit institutional mechanisms for the support of direct intermember collaboration. These design elements are used to overcome the challenges associated with (1) concurrent technological and market experimentation and (2) the dynamic coordination of a complex emergent system of hardware, software, and services provided by otherwise independent firms. To date, Blade.org has developed more than 60 new products, providing strong evidence of the innovation prowess of the collaborative community of firms organizational model. Based on an analysis of the evolution of organizational designs and the case of Blade.org, implications for innovation management theory and practice are derived.