Stamps versus postal permits: A decisional guide for return postage in mail questionnaires

Considerable evidence indicates that stamped return envelopes prompt higher rates of response than business reply permits. The authors use a measure of margin efficiency gains between return postage types to develop optimum cost guidelines to aid mail survey researchers in their choices between return mailer types.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue:
Roger Bean and Russell W. Radford
The Business of Innovation: Managing the Corporate Imagination for Maximum Results
Elaine Dundon
The Seeds of Innovation: Cultivating the Synergy That Fosters New Ideas
Jacqueline Byrd and Paul Lockwood Brown
The Innovation Equation: Building Creativity and Risk Taking in Your Organization
Books received for possible review in a future issue:
Ashish Arora, Andrea Fosfuri, and Alfonso Gambardella
Markets for Technology: The Economics of Innovation and Corporate Strategy
Paul Belliveau, Abbie Griffin, and Stephen Somermeyer, editors
The PDMA Toolbook for New Product Development
Vincent Bozzone
Speed to Market: Lean Manufacturing for Job Shops
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
   The Social Life of Information
Amiya K.Chakravarty
Market Driven Enterprise: Product Development, Supply Chains, and Manufacturing
Henry Chesbrough
Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology
Kenneth Carlton Cooper
The Relational Enterprise: Moving beyond CRM to Maximize All Your Business Relationships
Edmund B. Fitzgerald
   Globalizing Customer Solutions
Eliezer Geisler
   Creating Value with Science and Technology
Tim Jones
Innovating at the Edge: How Organizations Evolve and Embed Innovation Capability
Robert C. Megantz
Technology Management: Developing and Implementing Effective Licensing Programs
David Moschella
Customer-Driven IT: How Users Are Shaping Technology Growth
Jeffrey H. Rohlfs
Bandwagon Effects in High-Technology Industries
Gerald Zaltman
How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
The reviews of three recent books on innovation in this issue are by Kumar Nochur, Ph.D., president of Vidya, Inc.     

Trade policies,imperfect competition,and endogenous growth

Summary This paper analyses the effects of trade policies in a general equilibrium two-conutry model with imperfect competition. This model generalizes the models of monopolistic and Cournot competition. Trade is shown to be welfare-increasing in the monopolistic completition model. The same holds true in the case of endogenous growth. In the model of Coumot competition, the welfare effects of trade policies depend upon the type of entry and exit. Indeed, it is possible for two countries to increase their welfare by pursuing a coordinated policy of protection. In an endogenous growth setting, the validity of the latter finding depends upon the consumer rate of time preference.At the time of writing, the author was affiliated with the Ministry of Economic Affairs. An earlier version of this paper was presetned at the ECOZOEK-day, June 11, 1993, Tilburg and was awarded theKVS-prize 1993 of the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. The author would like to thank an anonymous referre, P.A.G. van Bergeijk, R.A.de Mooij, A. Nieuwenhuis, F. van der Ploeg, J. van Sinderen, S. Smulders, and P.M. Waasdorp for useful comments. The views expressed in this paper are strictly presonal.     

In search of sustained competitive advantage: the impact of organizational culture,competitive strategy and human resource management practices on firm performance

We develop and test a dynamic model of co-specialized resources for competitive advantage. Using matched data from senior executives and human resource managers, we test the direct and interactive effects of high-performance human resource (HPHR) practices and organizational culture on firm performance. Although the HPHR practices were not an important influence on performance, our findings indicate that organizational culture can be a valuable resource for companies.     

Some benefits of cyclical monetary policy

We show that modeling monetary circulation and cyclical activity offers insights about monetary policy that cannot be had in representative-agent models. Two fundamental ideas emerge: (i) the reflux of money back to the hands of those making current expenditures can be inefficient, and (ii) expansionary policy may accommodate more trade during high-demand seasons, at the expense of less trade in low-demand seasons and a less valuable currency. The paper provides a foundation for the optimality of a cyclical monetary policy. We thank Steve Williamson and, especially, an anonymous referee for helpful comments, as well as insightful discussions in presentations at the Cleveland Fed (2003), University of Iowa (2004), Queen’s University (2004), and more recently at the Chicago Fed, the New York Fed, the Institute of Advanced Studies, Simon Fraser University and the Universities of Vienna, British Columbia, and Victoria.     

The future labour market for R&D Manpower in The Netherlands

An adequate supply of qualified research and development (R&D) personnel is an important precondition for a government policy that aims for a strongly knowledge-intensive economic growth. As in many other OECD countries, there is great concern in The Netherlands about meeting this crucial condition in the next decades. This article tries to show to what extent this current concern is justified. For that purpose, forecasts of future supply and demand for research manpower in the science and engineering fields (including agriculture and health) have been produced, extending to the year 2010. Sensitivity analyses show that the fore-casts are not very sensitive to alternative assumptions on economic growth, investments, replacement demand and labour supply.
From a methodological point of view the forecasting approach differs from the more traditional manpower forecasting. Firstly, the demand for R&D personnel is split up into an increase in total employment for R&D manpower ( expansion demand ) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the need for replacements for researchers who retire, die or switch to other occupations ( replacement demand ). Expansion and replacement demand are considered in three sectors of R&D work: universities, research institutes and private enterprises. Expansion demand and replacement demand together determine the job openings for newcomers. These job openings are confronted with the supply of new R&D manpower, which is largely determined by the output of the educational system. The confrontation of demand and supply forecasts shows that, in general, severe shortages of R & D manpower will result if there are not adequate manpower policy adjustment. The article closes with a discussion of the policy implications of the expected disequilibria in the market for R & D manpower.     

Outsider Assistance as a Knowledge Resource for New Venture Survival

An emerging theory of outsider assistance as a knowledge resource suggests that new ventures obtain a unique blend of tacit and explicit knowledge through the judicious use of outside assistance. Using data from a longitudinal study of one outsider assistance program at a point in time four to eight years beyond the provision of startup counseling assistance, we present evidence supporting the theory. Results suggest that the ventures studied enjoyed survival rates in excess of those in the general population. More importantly, logistic regression analysis indicates a positive, curvilinear relationship between survival and the time spent in venture preparation under the direction of an outside counselor, a proxy measure of new knowledge acquired. We conclude with a discussion of the directions future research should take to test more fully the relationships implied by the theory.     

The antecedents of union commitment and participation: evaluating moderation effects across unions

This article evaluates whether the nature of the union moderates the antecedents of union commitment and participation, based on a study of member attitudes in Voice, formerly the Professional Association of Teachers, and the National Unions of Teachers, often seen as the most ‘moderate’ and ‘militant’ teacher unions, respectively.