Financing R&D in mature companies: An empirical analysis

We study financing patterns of publicly traded R&D-intensive manufacturing firms in Israel. We further characterize R&D-intensive firms by size, physical capital intensity, and whether they issued stocks in the United States, asking whether these features are associated with particular financing patterns. To address these issues, we present, for the first time, adjusted flow of funds charts that treat R&D expenses as a capital outlay (rather than an operating cost that reduces profits, as standard accounting principles prescribe). We also address the question of how R&D inputs should be measured - using R&D expenses or R&D personnel. We construct both expenditure- and personnel-based R&D measures for each firm in our sample, and investigate to what extent these measures are mutually consistent.     

Market timing: A global endeavor

This paper employs daily fund and index data, the classical Treynor and Mazuy timing model, and two multi-factor extensions to measure the market timing ability of global asset allocation funds. These funds differ from traditional global or international funds in that they face fewer investment constraints and are known to actively shift funds across a wide variety of asset classes. When using the classical Treynor and Mazuy timing models, I find evidence of poor market timing ability. However, this evidence disappears when timing ability is examined using two multi-factor models. The results from Treynor and Mazuy are spurious since both multi-factor extensions do a much better job in explaining the variation in average fund returns.     

保障措施存在的合理性及其在全球贸易中的应用

在全球关税和非关税壁垒大幅降低的情况下,保障措施已成为进口国保护弱势产业的一种新的合法有效方式。通过对保障措施存在的合理性以及实施保障措施的条件进行剖析,分析了WTO成立后,保障措施在全球贸易中的应用状况及国外对中国产品实施保障措施的情况,认为保障措施是一把双刃剑,进口国在决定是否实施时,应综合多方面的情况,权衡利弊得失。     

企业并购风险分析

企业并购虽然是使企业短期内获得发展的有效途径,但从国内外大量的并购数据来看,成功的并购案例很少。因为在并购过程中,存在大量的风险因素,而企业并购风险存在于企业并购的整个过程之中,任何一个环节出现问题,都可能导致并购的失败。本文将并购过程分为四个主要的流程,从而将风险分散化,具体化,使并购过程规范化。进而提出了并购流程分析的方法,对并购的整个过程进行分段分析,从而提高并购的成功率。本文着重从定性分析的角度对并购整个过程的风险进行相关分析,总结出了并购过程中可能出现的大量风险因素,即使对于不同的企业,也可以从并购的各个流程中找到适合自身的风险因素,从而加以分析与控制。     

Mobile people, mobile capital and tax neutrality: Sustaining a market for Offshore Finance Centres

This paper examines the self-reported effects on business performance, sustainability and confidence following international initiatives to regulate Offshore Finance Centres (OFCs). Since the late 1990s small countries and territories have been encouraged and pressured by multilateral organisations and supranational institutions to exchange information on civil and criminal tax matters. Interview based research in Australia, Andorra, Guernsey, Samoa and Singapore has been carried out to determine how OFC clients have reacted to these initiatives along with their impacts on the offshore sector, including local economies and societies. This paper shows that these international programs have caused contraction and reorganisation in leading OFCs. However, their diverse clientele and access to established markets for global financial services continues to make them attractive locales for fund management, trusts, captive insurance and private banking. The effects on OFCs located in smaller, developing countries have been much more severe, with reports that these jurisdictions are facing major problems sustaining a share of the worldwide market for financial services and products. This suggests that because of the uneven consequences of international efforts to regulate offshore finance in selected jurisdictions, these initiatives may actually increase tax competition rather than reduce it, at least in the short term. For multilateral policies to be effective, it may well be necessary for wealthy and poor nations, including OFCs (which include some of the world's poorest and wealthiest jurisdictions) to determine if tax competition contributes to or ameliorates the inconsistencies and contradictions of globalisation and the uneven development that it produces on a worldwide scale.     

Why integrating purchasing with marketing is both inevitable and beneficial

The shift away from manufacturing in Western developed economies has resulted in economies in which service industries are dominant. Marketing itself has undergone a paradigmatic shift from a focus on the exchange of goods to the provision of capabilities. This paper examines the relationship between marketing and purchasing as a result of the shift from product- to capability-focused commerce. We suggest that the marketing and purchasing departments will become closer due to two major reasons. First, as marketers increasingly become solution-oriented rather than product-focused, they will need to source products and services from third-party vendors and will require deeper involvement of the purchasing department. Second, with the emergence of customer-centric marketing coupled with build-to-order manufacturing, marketing and purchasing will have to be better aligned to deliver solutions to customers. These new dimensions in the marketing–purchasing interaction will also lead to changes in the selection, training, and recruitment of marketers and purchasers as well as their roles in the supply chain. We elaborate on these changes likely to occur in business-to-business organizations and along with implications for managers.     

GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAIN RISK MANAGEMENT

Global supply chains face a multitude of risks. A review of the recent literature reveals a few structured and systematic approaches for assessing risks in supply chains. However, there is no conceptual framework that ties together this literature. The purpose of this paper is to integrate literature from several disciplines ‐ including logistics, supply chain management, operations management, strategy, and international business ‐ to develop a model of global supply chain risk management. The implications for stakeholders and how future research could bring more insights to the phenomenon of global supply chain risk management are also discussed.     

Future S&T management policy issues—2025 global scenarios

This article presents four scenarios depicting science and technology (S&T) management dilemmas of the next two decades. The scenarios concern the balance between risk and promise, between the need to steer the directions of S&T, to minimize risk, and the need to maintain a free and unconstrained S&T agenda. These scenarios were constructed in the third year of the Millennium Project's study of this topic. The scenarios were formed in an interactive process with the project's international participants. The key policies that were found to be useful in all of the scenarios include (1) when considering the possibility of the misuse of weapons of mass destruction by terrorists, include the possibility of misuse by a single individual, acting alone; (2) establish mechanisms and techniques for making possible the explicit unintended consequences of scientific research and technology, including malicious uses; (3) for desirable technologies, where it may not be possible to avoid significant risks, develop mitigation strategies in parallel; (4) teach science ethics.     

新冠肺炎疫情对全球食物安全的影响及对策

当前,新冠肺炎疫情已在全球扩散,许多本就因为冲突、自然灾害或气候变化而深陷食物不安全的国家和地区的防疫形势也日益严峻。虽然目前全球食物供给总体充足,食物价格稳定,但疫情的快速蔓延将给全球食物安全带来威胁。由于隔离和边境关闭,市场、供应链和贸易受到波及,全球食物的供给受到影响。食物流通渠道可能因运输中断和更加严格的检疫措施而受阻,运输成本和贸易成本增加、效率降低。一些国家为保障国内食物供应而采取限制出口的行为,将影响依赖于粮食进口的国家进口粮食,也不利于依赖于出口初级农产品的低收入发展中国家出口农产品。封锁措施带来的经济影响使居民收入和购买力下降,居民获得充足的营养食物变得更加困难。食物安全不再是一个区域性问题,而是一个需要共同应对的全球性问题,各国应当共同努力,加强合作和全球治理,对最弱势群体采取迅速的保护和援助措施。既要确保国内食物供应链的正常运行,同时,应该保持贸易开放,并利用和创新电子商务保障食物供应,保障全球粮食安全。     

Corporate social responsibility reporting: A comprehensive picture?

This study develops a content analysis framework that provides information on the comprehensiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, an important aspect of social and environmental accountability. Comprehensive reporting, as defined here, requires three types of information for each disclosed CSR item: (i) vision and goals, (ii) management approach, and (iii) performance indicators. The feasibility of the framework to assess the comprehensiveness of CSR reporting is demonstrated using the 2005 annual reports of a sample of publicly traded Belgian companies. The content analysis reveals a low level of comprehensive reporting. This finding complements those of prior studies on the completeness of CSR reporting and, therefore, feeds the debate regarding the extent to which CSR reporting can be considered a mechanism for discharging social and environmental accountability.