Managing New Product Design and Development: an Anglo-German Study

This article reports the results of a study of innovation and product development at 245 manufacturing sites in the UK and Germany. It examines the relationship between design and performance and the competitiveness of the UK and Germany in design and manufacturing. Overall, few sites reached "world-class" standards - 9% in Germany and 3% in the UK, although many sites were not far below these standards.     

Adverse selection in group insurance: The virtues of failing to represent voters

Compared with non-union workers, union workers take more of their compensation in the form of insurance. This may be because unions choose democratically, and democratic choice mitigates adverse selection in group insurance. Relative to individually-purchased insurance, we show that group insurance chosen by an ideal profit-maximizing employer can be worse for every employee, while group insurance chosen democratically can be much better. The reason is that democracy can fail to represent the preferences of almost half the group.Received: January 2003, Accepted: September 2004, JEL Classification: J51, D82, G22     

Tradeable permits,missing markets,and technology

This paper examines the effects of missing markets, heterogeneous pollutants, and the pollution technology of firms on the efficacy of transferable pollution permits. Under the assumption of perfect competition in all markets, we show that if firms can substitute among pollutants, then setting the optimal number of permits for only one pollutant will not, in general, lead to an efficient outcome. The degree of the inefficiency will depend on the information set available to the regulator and the substitutability among pollutants by firms. When establishing transferable pollution rights regulators should, therefore, consider the technology of firms. If firms discharge pollutants in the same fixed proportions, then the regulator need only set a market for one of the pollutants to ensure an efficient outcome. Where firms can substitute among pollutants, however, establishing a market for only one pollutant provides an incentive for firms to substitute to unregulated ones. This is an important policy issue as substitutability among pollutants within and across production processes may dampen the dynamic advantages of a tradeable permit policy.     

Field Experiment Tests for Discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. Rental Housing Market

This article tests for discrimination against Hispanics in the U.S. rental housing market using e‐mail correspondence with landlords advertising units online. We divide Hispanics into two groups: those that appear assimilated into American culture and recent immigrants. We find little difference in the treatment of assimilated Hispanics and whites; however, Hispanics we portray as recent immigrants receive less favorable treatment with margins of net discrimination as large as 6.89% of landlords. We also find discrimination varies significantly at the region level and by the ethnic composition of neighborhoods.     

Trust in financial services: Retrospect and prospect

Fostering and maintaining high levels of trust in the financial services sector is seen as crucial because of the characteristics of many financial service and in order to promote consumer engagement in the sector. In this article, we report evidence from a body of work and other commentary to provide an insight into trends in consumer trust in the sector as a whole, in comparison with other organisations and how different types of financial services provider have performed relative to each other. We show that the financial services sector as a whole is trusted more than some comparator institutions, and that aggregate levels of trust in the sector have fluctuated a relatively small amount subsequent to the financial crisis. However, important differences between provider types are apparent and these differences have become more profound in the recent past. We provide suggestions as to how trust in the sector may be improved and provider an analysis of current initiatives to improve trust levels in the sector in general and in banking in particular.     

Volatility due to offshoring: Theory and evidence

Existing models of offshoring are not equipped to explain how global production sharing affects the volatility of economic activity. This paper develops a trade model that can account for why offshoring industries in low wage countries such as Mexico experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as large as in high wage countries such as the United States. We argue that a key to explaining this outcome is that the extensive margin of offshoring responds endogenously to shocks in demand and transmits those shocks across borders in an amplified manner. Empirical evidence supports the claim that the extensive margin of offshoring is an active margin of adjustment, and quantitative simulation experiments show that the degree of movement of this margin in the data is sufficient to explain relative employment volatility in Mexico and the U.S.     

American and British Clergy Attitudes Towards Marketing Activities: A Comparative Study

Churches, in both the US and the UK, are increasingly seen to be engaging in what have been termed marketing activities. A small of studies have investigated the degree to which clergy in the US view the use of rnarketing techniques as acceptable and appropriate. This article rnakes a contribution to the continuing debate surrounding the use of marketing in a church setting by comparing the extent to which American and British clergy views differ: Results indicate that, in general, British clergy are rnore reluctant to countenance the use of merketing techniques within a church context, although a small number of exceptions emerged. In particular; British clergy appeared to be rnore accepting of changes made to the presentation of church doctrine, given changs in society's views of acceptable behaviour.     

Breaking the cycle of marketing disinvestment: using market research to build organisational alliances

Many marketers find their programmes fall victim to disinvestment, both financial and psychological. While most marketers are avid students of consumer psychology, they tend to overlook the dynamics of organisational psychology, just as the literature on market orientation often fails to emphasise the organisational identity politics and power struggles that frustrate marketing. Discussions of market orientation focus on leadership and team‐building issues, favouring highly visible cases of organisational success at the expense of analysing common factors in marketing failure, many of them grounded in organisational psychology. Allied with knowledge of organisational epistemology, market research can be used as a critical resource in marketers' internal marketing programmes to strengthen market orientation. Ongoing collaborative market research can build positive organisational alliances that contribute to the internal support needed to sustain a successful marketing programme. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Size of home,homeownership, and the mortgage interest deduction

This paper offers an empirical test of the effect of the mortgage interest deduction (MID) on both the extensive (own vs. rent) and intensive (size of home) housing purchase margins. Using state level differences in MID availability to identify, I examine this relationship using standard ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and sample selection estimation techniques. I find the MID to be responsible for a 10.9–18.4% increase in the size of home purchased, but that no relationship exists between the MID and home ownership. These results imply an elasticity of home size with respect to changes in user cost between ?1 and ?1.4.