Optimal inventory and pricing policies for remanufacturable leased products

In this paper we consider a company which leases new products and also sells remanufactured versions of the new product that become available at the end of their lease periods. When the amount of end-of-lease items in stock is not sufficient to meet the demand for remanufactured products, the firm may purchase additional cores from a third-party supplier. We develop a dynamic programming formulation for determining the optimal price of remanufactured products, and optimal payment structure for the leased products. Our objective is to maximize the discounted system-wide profit over a finite horizon. The profit function consists of revenues that are obtained from remanufactured product sales and leasing, remanufacturing and manufacturing costs, inventory holding and shortage costs. We consider a consumer choice based demand model for mapping a potential customer into one of the product segments (a remanufactured product customer or a customer for a leased product with a particular lease period) for a given price/lease payment vector. We explore several properties of the discounted profit function and provide insight on the behavior of pricing and inventory policies. We also investigate the effect of key product characteristics such as deterioration in age, cost of shortage in remanufacturable product inventory, and key market characteristics such as relative willingness-to-pay for buying a remanufactured product and relative willingness-to-pay for leasing a new product on optimal pricing policies through a computational study.     

Thirlwall’s Law and the Stability of Export and Import Income Elasticities

The aim of this paper is to examine the stability of income elasticities used in Thirlwall's law to approximate a country's long-term growth and to see empirically how non-constancy will affect these predictions. For this purpose, three countries - Canada, New Zealand and the UK - are analysed, using annual time series data from 1973 to 1995. These three countries were chosen on the basis of their contrasting trade patterns. The results obtained are different for each country but they still suggest the predictive power of one of the two specifications of Thirlwall's law is good.     

Corporate Sustainability Reporting: A Study in Disingenuity?

Over recent years, there has been a focus in corporate activity upon the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and one of its central platforms, the notion of sustainability, and particularly sustainable development. We argue in this article that the use of such a term has the effect of obfuscating the real situation regarding the effect of corporate activity upon the external environment and the consequent implications for the future. One of the effects of persuading that corporate activity is sustainable is that the cost of capital for the firm is reduced as investors are misled into thinking that the level of risk involved in their investment is lower than it actually is. We analyse the effects of this misrepresentation and argue for a fuller debate about sustainability.     

Government expenditure,money supply and unemployment in the USA: an analysis of the pre-war and post-war functional forms

A new frame work to measure the impact of an increase in government expenditure and/or money supply on unemployment is provided. The model and procedures introduced are used to estimate a long-run aggregate demand function for the US economy.     

Domestic and foreign country bias in international equity portfolios

Distinguishing two components of the preference for geographical proximity – the domestic country bias assessing investors’ holdings within the domestic market, and the foreign country bias assessing investors’ bilateral holdings within a particular host, I document a number of stylized facts related to international equity portfolios. First, investors in emerging countries hold systematically larger shares in their local markets compared to investors in developed countries. Second, while investors generally allocate trivial shares to most of the available destinations and completely disregard the remaining ones, I report several positive country bias ratios suggesting that the source country's investors overweigh the destination market. Third, the portfolio equity held in only a small number of destination markets generates much of countries’ existing foreign assets. I refer to this observation as the geographical shrinkage suggesting that the domestic bias coexists with an equally imperfect diversification of investors’ foreign asset holdings.     

The Harrod foreign trade multiplier and economic growth in Asian countries

The validity of the Harrod foreign trade multiplier for 11 Asian countries is tested. The results obtained generally support Thrilwall's specification of the multiplier. This suggests, in an open economy, relevant economic management is the factor that manipulates the income elasticities of exports and imports.