Productivity change and the effects of policy reform in China's agriculture since 1979

During China's rural reforms, policies were frequently adjusted. Most policies favoured the continuation and deepening of reform; but some were contradictory or even led to regression in the reform process. How have the rural reforms affected China's agricultural production over the past three decades; and what lessons can be learned to aid the future course of reform? To answer these questions, this study estimates productivity change in China's agriculture and evaluates the effects of policy on agricultural output during the reform period. Aggregated provincial‐level data for the 1979–2008 period are used in a translog production frontier model to estimate indices of total factor productivity (TFP) change and its three components—technical change, technical efficiency change, and a scale effect—with a focus on explaining the variation in technical efficiency. The estimation results show that the impressive improvement of TFP change is dominated by the technical change component. However, technical efficiency change and scale effects have worked against the improvement in TFP change in most periods. To improve technical efficiency, social welfare policies designed to eliminate the rural–urban divide, and reform polices focusing on factor market reforms, such as reform of the household registration system (hukou) and reform of land rights, seem to hold some potential.     

How Advergame Content Influences Explicit and Implicit Brand Attitudes: When Violence Spills Over

Well-liked advergames foster favorable brand attitudes. Research has been conducted on games where the content offers positive associations (e.g., racing: speed) that may transfer to the brand. Yet games may offer negative associations (e.g., combat: violence). Using the affect transfer and associative-propositional evaluation models, we test the influence of game content (combat, racing) on implicit and explicit brand attitudes. Results of an experiment showed that negative content resulted in less favorable attitudes toward the game and the implicit (unfamiliar) brand attitudes. The relationship between content and explicit attitude toward the brand was mediated by attitude toward the game.     

Exploration and exploitation fit and performance in international strategic alliances

Exploration and exploitation constitute two separate, potentially conflicting strategic choices for firms engaged in international strategic alliances. Our empirical study challenges the ambidexterity argument and demonstrates that exploration and exploitation are separate (though not necessarily antithetical) strategies with different antecedents and performance consequences.Our results show that while competency similarity is conducive to upstream innovative performance, prior experience with the partner is potentially damaging for this type of performance and trust and cultural distance do not play significant roles. When the motive is efficiency and downstream market performance, prior experience with the partner instead is beneficial, as are high levels of trust and low levels of cultural distance. These findings have key implications for literature on strategic fit and alliance performance.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and International Trade

The purpose of this note is to show that a positive effect of exchange rate volatility on export production has a theoretical basis. The key to this claim is that, as the exchange rate volatility increases, so does the value of the real option to export to the world market. Higher volatility increases the potential gains from trade. This may explain part of the mixed empirical findings regarding the effects of exchange rate risk on international trade.     

Should Welfare Administration be Centralized or Decentralized? Evidence from a Policy Experiment

The 2005 reform of the German welfare system introduced two competing organizational models for welfare administration. In most districts, a centralized organization was established where local welfare agencies are bound to central directives. At the same time, 69 districts were allowed to opt for a decentralized organization. We evaluate the relative success of both types in terms of integrating welfare recipients into employment. Compared to centralized organization, decentralized organization has a negative effect on employment chances of males. For women, no significant effect is found. These findings are robust to the inclusion of aspects of internal organization common to both types of agencies.     

Arrow: A flexible architecture for an accounting and charging infrastructure in the Next Generation Internet

Current pricing and charging methods for the Internet are not based on actual usage of this service, which leads to unfairness and more important, it does not deliver the right signals through financial incentives to network providers to upgrade critical links of their networks. The development of new multimedia applications and the convergence to an integrated services network will foster the tremendous growth of the Internet even more. With the Next Generation Internet not only technical services like bandwidth reservation will be introduced, but also new applications will emerge within the Internet. Charging the Internet in a fashion that provides feedback to users and providers has been proposed since the early '90s, however, only a few implementations and real-world examples are known today. This is due to subsidizing the Internet in its early stages and due to a technical development that did not care much about charging. With the recent redesign of the Internet protocol suite and discussions on multiple service classes in the Internet, architectures for charging and accounting have to be revisited, too. Economic models for the Internet cannot be tested fully and validated in non-real-world environments, because of the unknown user behavior. With this uncertainty over what models and pricing schemes to choose, it is evident that a specific charging and accounting platform will never be accepted by the community. In this paper a novel and flexible architecture for charging and accounting is proposed that provides a wide range of mechanisms and lets researchers experiment in an environment as close as possible to the targeted system. As a first step, four different pricing schemes are described, qualitatively assessed on the proposed platform, and a prototypical implementation performed. One of the economic models that have been implemented on Arrow is based on different service classes including reservation and recalculates prices dynamically depending on the traffic situation. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Filling the Empty Shell. The Public Debate on CSR in Austria as a Paradigmatic Example of a Political Discourse

Instead of essentializing and defining what CSR “is”, we analyze CSR as a political discourse in which different actors struggle to fill the empty shell of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with a legitimate interpretation. In this paper we take the current debate on CSR in Austria as an example to demonstrate how this debate is shaped by changes in the greater socio-economic environment. We suggest that this debate might be paradigmatic for the development of CSR in the European/International context. We argue that the debate and the political moves concerning an implicit or an explicit concept of CSR are rooted in a more fundamental question: the societal (re-)embedding or disembedding of companies.