SUPPLY CHAIN INFORMATION SHARING IN A VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY PARTNERSHIP

Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) involves the vendor making the replenishment decision for products supplied to a customer based on various inventory and supply chain policies. Information sharing between supply chain members is required in VMI. Sometimes VMI decisions are delayed and/or the information shared is inaccurate. This research examines the effects of information delay and accuracy, and the sharing of sales and forecast information in a VMI environment facing stationary and nonstationary demand. The simulation experiments show the impact of information delay, information inaccuracy, and information sharing on a variety of performance measures, including inventory levels and fill rates.     

THE ROLE OF FINANCIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN CORPORATE FINANCE

The American corporate financing system, unlike that of most other countries, has not been organized around a set of “universal banks” that perform a variety of functions for their clients. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of American financial history is the number and variety of financial intermediaries, and their relationships with corporations (and one another). Besides commercial banks, there are investment banks, insurance companies, venture capitalists, commercial paper dealers, mutual funds, and many others. The economic role of such intermediaries is to reduce market frictions such as “asymmetric information” and “agency problems” that otherwise raise the cost of outside capital for U.S. companies. This article views the changing menu of such intermediaries and their networks as the driving force behind the evolution of American corporate finance. U.S. financial history is seen as a series of institutional and financial innovations designed in large part to work around costly restrictions on relationships–particularly, limits on the scale and scope of U.S. banks–that do not exist in most other countries. In terms of its success in reducing the information and control costs of corporate finance, the history of the American financial system includes periods of significant progress as well as major reversals. Three relatively successful periods– the early 19th-century in New England, the “incipient” universal banking of the 1920s, and modernday financial capitalism–are separated by periods of drastic reductions in the menu of financial relationships– particularly the Great Depression and its 20-year aftermath. Besides new financial claims like preferred stock and new intermediaries such as venture capitalists, another important innovation is new forms of cooperation among intermediaries– especially among banks, venture capitalists, trusts, pensions, and investment banks–that have enabled the U.S. financial system to provide some of the key advantages of universal banking systems. Some of the largest U.S. commercial banks today can be viewed as positioning themselves to play a central coordinating role in these new coalitions of intermediaries. In so doing, they may become the platform for a distinctively American universal banking system.     

Green marketing strategies: an examination of stakeholders and the opportunities they present

As green marketing strategies become increasingly more important to firms adhering to a triple-bottom line performance evaluation, the present research seeks to better understand the role of “green” as a marketing strategy. Through an integration of the marketing, management, and operations literatures, an investigative framework is generated that identifies the various stakeholders potentially impacted through the environmentally friendly efforts of a firm. Specifically, the inter-connected nature of the core business disciplines of marketing, management (both strategy and human resources), and operations are examined as controllable functions within an organization from which strategies can be enacted to affect a firm’s stakeholders. The prior research in these areas is examined to identify potential research opportunities in marketing while also offering a series of representative research questions that can help guide future research in marketing.     

Consumer-defined sustainably-oriented firms and factors influencing adoption

Guided by stakeholder theory, a pair of exploratory studies identifies factors that influence firms to adopt an environmentally-friendly approach to conducting business, while providing insight into consumers' perceptions of such firms. An analysis of twenty in-depth interviews and a qualitative survey yields a conceptual model, indicating that such firms are motivated by governmental intervention, organizational values, and the potential benefits that can accrue as a result of implementation. Moreover, consumers view sustainably-oriented firms as maintaining procedures, developing products, and portraying themselves accordingly. These findings are relevant to academicians as they describe the underlying rationale for such behaviors and outline a novel conceptualization of the construct, thus invigorating future research. The results are also useful for firms as they shed light on sustainability efforts that are salient to the consumer and provide support for implementation, thereby encouraging the joint maximization of social and economic objectives.     

The Effect of Social Security Contributions on Coverage and Wages: A Gender Perspective Using a Natural Experiment from Colombia

This article investigates, from a gender and marital status perspective, the effects of pension and health care contributions on the employment and wages of workers covered by social security regulations. To do this, I use as a natural experiment a reform implemented in Colombia during the mid‐1990. In particular I employ a differences‐in‐differences estimation based on an endogenous switching‐regression model that accounts for self‐selection into coverage. My results indicate that, for females, a 10% increase in contributions reduces the relative wages of covered workers by 7.2%. On the other hand, for males, the reform increases the relative wages of covered workers by 7.1%. Among females, the effect is predominantly present in single women. Among men, divorced and widowed workers are the only group not to experience an effect on earnings. For most family groups, the social security reform has no significant effect on coverage.     

Two-stage adoption of different types of pollution prevention (P2) activities

Pollution prevention (P2) remains the key pollution reduction strategy in the US despite its limited success in improving environmental performance. To aid the targeting of policies to promote the types of P2 that achieve environmental goals, this study investigates the intricate nature of P2 adoption by (1) distinguishing among three types of P2: procedural changes, input and material changes and equipment and product changes, (2) disentangling the adoption decision into a binary and a count decision, and (3) analyzing benefit- and cost-related factors. Using a sample of facilities of S&P 500 firms, I employ NB hurdle models to analyze how facilities respond to these factors in making P2 adoption decisions. I find that facilities that have lower cost of adoption due to past P2 experience have higher likelihood of adoption and higher rates of adoption of all types of P2. However, those exposed to greater threat of enforcement action find limited scope for P2 in achieving environmental compliance objectives. Some regulatory threat variables even have a negative effect. Facilities also adopt P2 to enjoy market-related benefits: final good producers are more likely to adopt P2 that appeal to consumers (input and material changes), while intermediate good producers are more likely to adopt P2 that is valued by its supply chain (procedural changes). Community characteristics and other knowledge sources are not always positively associated with the likelihood of adoption nor with the rate of adoption.     

Public and private Investment in Mexico and Chile: An empirical test of the complementarity hypothesis

This paper addresses the important question of whether government investment spending, rather than overall public expenditures, exerts a positive effect on economic growth and productivity. Using time-series data for Chile and Mexico, it estimates a linear growth model that incorporates a number of relevant quantitative and qualitative variables for each country. The empirical results suggest that for both Chile and Mexico, increases in public and private investment spending have a positive and significant effect on the rate of growth in productivity. Moreover, the results for Mexico show that increases in government consumption expenditures have a negative effect on the rate of productivity growth, thus suggesting that the composition of government spending is at least as important as the growth rate of these expenditures in affecting economic growth. From a policy standpoint, these findings call into question the current trend among Latin American countries of indiscriminately reducing public spending because they fall disproportionally on capital expenditures—the type of spending needed to secure the long-term efficiency gains from market-oriented programs.     

Transnational corporations' strategies and foreign trade patterns in MERCOSUR countries in the 1990s

Market-seeking strategies predominate in the recent FDI boomin MERCOSUR countries. In the trade performance of transnationalcorporation affiliates a sort of ‘asymmetric integration’is clearly visible: they produce for the internal market and,to some extent, for the regional one, while import inputs andfinal goods from developed countries (and a significant partof these trade flows is intra-firm). Thus, even if affiliatesobtained productivity gains in the 1990s, they have not yetbeen reflected in a significant increase in exports, and evenless in extra-regional exports. Hence, the foreign direct investmentboom seemingly has not yet contributed to a better insertionof MERCOSUR countries into the world economy.