Lower bounds of various discrepancies on combined designs

The foldover is a useful technique in construction of two-level factorial designs. A foldover design is the follow-up experiment generated by reversing the sign(s) of one or more factors in the initial design. The full design obtained by joining the runs in the foldover design to those of the initial design is called the combined design. In this paper, some lower bounds of various discrepancies of combined designs, such as centered L ₂-discrepancy, symmetric L ₂-discrepancy and wrap-around L ₂-discrepancy, under a general foldover plan are obtained, which can be used as a benchmark for searching optimal foldover plans. Our results provide a theoretical justification for optimal foldover plans in terms of uniformity criterion.     

Extending Business Education Beyond Traditional Boundaries: A Case Study in Negotiated Problem Resolution in a Remote Regional Indigenous Community in Australia

It is widely accepted that the concepts and practices of management can only be of benefit when they are anchored to the contextual architecture of people, processes, structures, and technologies. The challenge of establishing a bridging program for providing managerial competencies to Australian Indigenous people has become a serious one for multinational mining companies. As the wings of globalization interact with the long-ignored reality of marginalized local milieu, a need for an innovative management education system has become a major imperative compelling multinational mining companies to work collaboratively with the government, educational institutions, and Indigenous communities. The article outlines a specific decision-making dilemma in an Indigenous context, while explaining the imperatives for educators, who have the challenging task of instructing potential graduates how to manage the unique contextuality of rural Australian Aboriginal communities. The article presents implications for large-scale modern multinationals as they move to geographically remote regions of the world where large number of marginalized local people need to be drawn into the workforce not only as an act of a social responsibility imperative, but also as sound business pragmatism.     

Financing Public Investment through Foreign Aid: Consequences for Economic Growth and Welfare*

The paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanism through which foreign aid affects macroeconomic performance. The authors find that the long‐run impact of an aid program and the nature of the transitional dynamics it generates depend crucially on (i) the elasticity of substitution in production, (ii) whether the aid flow is tied to investment activity or not, (iii) how the recipient government chooses to react to the flow of external assistance, and (iv) whether the aid program is permanent or temporary. Structural characteristics of the recipient are important in determining the extent to which external assistance can aid growth and welfare.     

A road to assimilation: immigrants and financial markets

This paper compares the financial market participation of immigrants and native-born Americans. Financial asset ownership is examined after controlling for the immigrants’ country of origin using a nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey (NLSY79) data set. The determinants of preference for financial asset ownership and the amount of financial equity held by households are estimated using a two-stage procedure. The results indicate that immigrants are less likely to own financial assets and more likely to have lower financial equity than native-born residents. Income uncertainty and risk tolerance of immigrants are associated with their preference for financial investments. Immigrants’ years of residence in the United States also increase their financial asset ownership. A discussion of the implications of these findings for policy makers, immigration researchers, and scholars of household savings behavior is also included.     

The increasing financial obligations burden of US households: who is affected?

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors associated with changes in the proportion of households with high financial obligations ratios in the United States. The proportion of households paying more than 40% of income for debt, rent, vehicle leases, property taxes and homeowners’ insurance, which we refer to as having a heavy burden, increased from 18% in 1992 to 27% in 2007. Multivariate analysis of a combination of six Survey of Consumer Finances data sets indicates that the likelihood of having a heavy burden was positively associated with homeownership, self‐employment and retirement status. Those with an optimistic 5‐year expectation of the economy were more likely to be in a household with a heavy burden. Education was positively related to having a heavy burden, suggesting that having a heavy burden is not simply a cognitive error.     

A typology of brand alliances and consumer awareness of brand alliance integration

Brand alliances, which involve intentionally presenting two or more brands together, appear in many different forms. For example, Subway stores placed within Wal-Mart, Airbus A380 airplanes with Rolls-Royce Trent engines, and Nike + iPod co-developed personal trainers are among the more well-known manifestations of this strategy. Our study contributes to the literature on brand alliances by conceptualizing and measuring a typology of brand alliance types based on their degree of integration. We also empirically test and find that consumers are sensitive to varying degrees of brand alliance integration. We then link these findings to the managerial decision of how and with whom a brand should form an alliance. We use extensive examples, conversations with managers, and survey-based experiments to show that brand alliance integration is relevant and impactful to both managers and consumers.     

Multi‐product exporters,variable markups and exchange rate fluctuations

In this paper we investigate how firms adjust markups across products in response to fluctuations in the real exchange rate. We estimate markups at the market–product–plant level using detailed panel production and cost data from Mexican manufacturing between 1994 and 2007. Exploiting variation in the real exchange rate in the aftermath of the peso crisis in December 1994, we provide robust empirical evidence that plants increase their markups and producer prices in response to a real depreciation and that this increase is greater for products with higher productivity. Thus, we provide direct evidence for the theoretical mechanism of variable markup response behind incomplete and heterogeneous exchange rate pass‐through on producer prices. Our empirical methodology allows us to decompose the producer price response to exchange rate shocks into a markup and a marginal cost component using our markup estimates. Using these estimates, we establish that marginal cost at the product–plant level increases more in response to real exchange rate depreciation if the plant has higher share of imported inputs.     

A TRACTABLE CITY MODEL FOR AGGREGATIVE ANALYSIS

An analytically tractable city model with external increasing returns is presented. The equilibrium city structure is either monocentric or decentralized. Regardless of which structure prevails, intracity variation in endogenous variables displays exponential decay from the city center, where the decay rates depend only on parameters. Given population, the equilibrium of the model is generically unique. Tractability permits explicit expressions for when a central business district (CBD) will emerge in equilibrium, how external increasing returns affect the steepness of downtown rent gradients, and how wages and welfare vary with population. An application to urban growth boundary is presented.