You Are Not Alone

这个不关心政治的博爱主义者，用自己充满创造力的意志影响并改变了大众的欣赏品位。他仍然要做流行音乐之王并且保持个人隐私。     

Why Are Foreclosures Contagious?

This article investigates the mechanism by which foreclosed properties depress neighboring property prices. Using a novel dataset on housing capital expenditure, I verify as accurate the claim of disinvestment theory made in earlier studies. When capital expenditure investment, neighborhood price trends, number of Multiple Listing Service listings and neighborhood fixed effects are controlled for, the negative effect on property prices is significant from nearby foreclosures, real estate owned (REO) listings and REO sales, but not from default and delinquent properties. The effect is larger in a depressed market than in an appreciating market. I argue that the most plausible explanation for these results is that a foreclosure discount drives down the reference prices for nearby properties and depresses neighborhood values. This discount information is revealed to the public through foreclosures, REO listings and REO sales.     

The Spools Are Still Spinning Fast

A Sum Up of the Development ofChina Textile Industry for the FirsThree Quarters of2005Finally,after an intense three months of negotiationthe dispute between the United States and China has solved,and the'bra wars'with the European Union this summerwas said to have put Europe's textile industry under siege.All these disagreements as well as the stubbornness of highcost in Chinese textile production have slowed the speedfor export down for the first three quarters of2005.Nevertheless,Chi…     

“低成本生活”Are you ready?

原本与"底层生活"紧密联系的"低成本生活",突然成了一种时尚,勒紧裤带过紧日子,环球同此凉热。在法国,"零欧元生存"已经成为一种时尚,廉价商店门口泊着越来越多的高档车;在美国,越来越多的人成为"简朴生活"的信徒;在中国大陆,市民进入高校食堂进餐悭钱一时成风;在台湾地区,政府力推"节能减碳",世界各国的     

Why Are Quit Rates Lower Among Defense Contractors?

This paper presents empirical evidence of lower quit rates at small manufacturers with defense contracts and examines whether this is associated with differences in their human resource policies and organizational practices and strategies. We take advantage of an original data set to compare labor quits, workforce skills, and occupational structure between defense‐contracting and noncontracting small manufacturers in eastern Pennsylvania. We find that the remarkably large defense contractor advantage in quit rates—7 percentage points—is almost totally explained by differences in skills, operational strategies, and workforce management and training practices, suggesting a mediation effect through these HR practices. Defense‐contracting status emerges as an important overlooked variable in HRM studies.     

Which Are The Main Drivers Behind Residential Electricity Prices?

Over the last decade the residential electricity price in most EU Member States has been increasing. Even after the introduction of significant reforms such as the liberalisation of the electricity market. This upward trend is in response to the development of different price components along the electricity supply chain. In order to identify and analyse these components for EU-Member States, a more detailed price apportionment than those offered by public sources like Eurostat and IEA is necessary. The methodology proposed in this study analyses the development of the residential electricity price and its main components between 2002 and 2012 for Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom. The main drivers of the price trends observed for these four countries are subsequently identified, quantified and compared. Furthermore, the residential expenditure on electricity in each country is examined in connection with the evolution of residential electricity consumption. The results show how and to what extent the residential electricity price for the selected EU Member States depends on price components such as the electricity wholesale price, the gross margin, network expenditures, energy taxes and other levies related to the decarbonisation of the national energy system. Furthermore, this detailed analysis of residential electricity prices throughout the last decade provides a sufficient data basis to draw some prospective conclusions in terms of a short-term price outlook.     

Are really new product development projects harder to shut down?

Just as a good houseguest knows when it's time to say good-bye, effective managers must recognize when it's time to terminate a new product development (NPD) project. As a product progresses toward commercialization, a manager's reluctance to terminate a failing project becomes increasingly expensive. Despite this growing expense, however, many managers are reluctant to shut down failing NPD projects. Jeffrey Schmidt and Roger Calantone hypothesize that this reluctance may be even more pronounced for innovative new products than for incremental NPD efforts. They suggest that perhaps the excitement that really new products engender within a company makes managers more reluctant to shut down the NPD project, even in the face of clear-cut evidence that the project is not a winner. To test these assumptions, they conducted a decision-making experiment in which managers were asked to make go/no-go decisions at each stage in a hypothetical NPD project. One project involved an innovative new product; the other project involved an incremental development—that is, a line extension that offered only marginal size and cost reductions compared to current models. At the outset of the experiment, participants were given market share and profit objectives for assessing the new product's performance. At each stage in the hypothetical NPD project, the participants then received updated performance data. The performance data provided to participants was identical for the two hypothetical projects, and fell increasingly farther below the performance objectives as the project progressed. The results of the experiment support the hypothesized relationship between product innovativeness and managers' reluctance to terminate a failing NPD project. Given identical, poor, performance forecasts, the managers who participated in this experiment were more optimistic about the likelihood of success, were more committed to the project, and were more likely to opt for continuing the project when it involved the more innovative product. In fact, the participants were more likely to allow the highly innovative NPD project to proceed all the way through commercialization, notwithstanding the progressively ominous performance feedback.     

Are incentives without expertise sufficient? Evidence from fortune 500 firms

Agency theory predicts that incentives will align agents' interests with those of principals. However, the resource‐based view suggests that to be effective, the incentive to deliver must be paired with the ability to deliver. Using Fortune 500 boards as an empirical context, this study shows that the presence of directors who lack top‐level experience but own large shareholdings is negatively associated with firm value, an effect that increases in the number of such directors. Firm value rises after such directors depart from boards, with the greatest increases occurring when many of these directors leave. While agency theory highlights the importance of the right incentives being in place, this research suggests that this can be ineffective if the right resources are not also in place. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are Employers Omniscient? Employer Learning About Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills

Do employers recognize noncognitive skills at the beginning of a career or is there a learning process? Does learning transfer perfectly across employers or is there a degree to which learning resets as employees change jobs throughout their careers? This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 to incorporate measures of noncognitive skills into a model of symmetric employer learning described originally by Altonji and Pierret ( 2001 ) and nested in a model of asymmetric employer learning as in Schönberg ( 2007 ). I find evidence that employers reward self‐esteem, internal control, and schooling initially, while rewarding cognitive skills and motivation over time.     

Are family‐friendly workplace practices a valuable firm resource?

We study the determinants and consequences of family‐friendly workplace practices (FFWP) using a sample of over 450 manufacturing firms in Germany, France, U.K., and U.S. We find a positive correlation between firm productivity and FFWP. This association disappears, however, once we control for a measure of the quality of management practices. We further find that firms with a higher proportion of female managers and more skilled workers, as well as well‐managed firms, tend to implement more FFWP. Conversely, a firm's environment does not have a significant impact on the FFWP it provides. © 2010 The Authors. Strategic Management Journal published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.     

Open innovation: Are inbound and outbound knowledge flows really complementary?

One novel implication of the open innovation paradigm is that inflows and outflows of knowledge are complementary. We argue that engaging simultaneously in buying and selling knowledge should allow firms to increase innovation outcomes. At the same time, we identify some of the relevant costs (cognitive, transaction, and organizational costs) that “open” firms can reduce by combining knowledge inflows and outflows. Empirically, however, we find no evidence for such complementarity in a sample of Belgian manufacturing firms. Firms buying and selling knowledge do increase their sales of new products, but at the same time their R&D costs increase more than proportionally. Our findings, therefore, indicate the need for research into a better understanding of the drivers of actual costs of organizing for open innovation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are pricing policies an impediment to the success of customer solutions?

In an era of declining pricing power and increased global competition, customized solutions appear to be an effective way to build competitive advantages without the debilitating effects of price competition. Solutions involve provision of an integrated combination of goods and services that are designed to meet a business customer's specific needs. Premium prices and higher margins can be extracted by solution providers, who now have considerable incentives to design and market innovative solutions for their customers. We examine the applicability of various pricing frameworks and pricing practices in the context of two industries — business process outsourcing and power generation equipments. Our interviews suggest that firms predominantly use traditional pricing strategies; new strategies for solution pricing are only emerging; and, successful firms are currently using hybrid pricing models. We find that the solutions that we observed among practitioners are not what theory would suggest as true solutions but what would be described by theory as bundled products. We also find that solutions are in the eye of the beholder, i.e., if customers can de-bundle offerings, they are not true solutions. We extend our findings to academic theory and to the practice of developing and pricing solutions.     

Are Rising College Premiums Capitalized into House Prices? Evidence from China

Many areas in China experienced steeply rising house prices beginning in 2003. We test whether a change in local residency requirements may have played a role in driving up house prices in some places by tying access to Chinese universities to local homeownership status in the presence of a rising college premium. We generate a novel dataset that combines China housing market and neighborhood data with household and university admission data. We find evidence of capitalization effects and a sizable increase in the likelihood of homeownership postpolicy change in places with the greatest preferential access to China's elite universities.     

Bidder Asymmetry in Infrastructure Procurement: Are There any Fringe Bidders?

Asymmetric auctions are among the most rapidly growing areas in the auction literature. The potential benefits from intensified auction competition could be enormous in the public procurement context. Entrant bidders are considered a key to enhance competition and break potential collusive arrangements among incumbent bidders. Asymmetric auction theory predicts that weak (fringe) bidders would bid more aggressively when they are faced with a strong (incumbent) opponent. Using data from official development projects, this paper shows that entrants actually submitted aggressive bids in the presence of incumbent(s) in the road sector and to a certain extent in the water sector. For electricity projects, the general competition effect is found to be particularly significant, but the entrant effect remains unclear. The results suggest that auctioneers should foster competition in public procurement, including fringe bidders, to contain public infrastructure investment costs.     

Searching for Relationship Value in Business Markets: Are We Missing Something?

Economic value has always been the main consideration in decisions regarding alternative courses of action in management. The relationship perspective that became popular in service and business marketing research and practice involves the application of the value concept to business relationships. Recent research in marketing on the value of relationships has been concerned with identifying the various dimensions of relationships content that can, in principle, give origin to costs or benefits for the parties involved. The way in which parties in a business relationship perceive and interpret value and how their perceptions affect their behaviors have not been at the center of this research. We will argue in this paper that perceptions impact parties' behaviors and the way business relationships develop, and report findings of a longitudinal study of how buyers and suppliers perceive and interpret value of business relationships. We then revisit the concept of value and formulate three propositions regarding the meaning of value in the context of supplier-customer relationships.     

Don't Forget the Gravy! Are Bonuses Just Added on Top of Salaries?

The press often depicts bonuses as extra payments to the already well compensated and calls for reform. Yet, these calls typically ignore the efficiency argument that bonuses are potentially risky performance pay that substitute for salary compensation. This paper uses representative UK data to estimate that bonuses appear not to substitute for salary in cross‐sectional estimates. Yet, when controlling for time‐invariant characteristics in panel data, bonuses emerge as partial substitutes. Each pound of bonus comes at a cost of 40 pence in other earnings. The degree of substitution is far larger at the bottom of the earnings distribution and far smaller at the top of the earnings distribution where, indeed, bonuses look more like gravy.     

How Different Are Safeguards from Antidumping? Evidence from US Trade Policies Toward Steel

Use of temporary trade barriers (TTBs) has proliferated across countries, industries, and even policy instruments. We construct a panel of bilateral, product-level US steel imports that are matched to a unique data set on trade policy exclusions that are associated with the 2002 US steel safeguard in order to compare the trade impacts that result from application of various TTB policies over 1989–2003. We find that the trade effects of an applied safeguard—which is statutorily expected to follow the principle of nondiscriminatory treatment—can nevertheless compare closely to the application of the explicitly discriminatory antidumping policy. Our results on trade policy substitutability complement other recent research on these increasingly important forms of import protection.     

Are network effects really all about size? The role of structure and conduct

Rooted in neoclassical economics, network effects research has revolved around size, arguing that the more users a network has, the more valuable that network will be to each user. I argue that a network's structure (feasibility of transactions, centrality of members, structural holes, network ties, the number of roles each member plays) and its conduct (opportunistic behavior, reputation signaling, perceptions of trust) also have significant impacts on a network's value to users and to network providers. Network research that neglects structure and conduct and focuses only on size can lead to wrong strategies or a misleading research agenda. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Are Interactive TV-Pioneers and Surfers Different Breeds? Broadband Demand and Asymmetric Cross-Price Effects

We consider two different qualities of broadband access, one that simply means greater access speed to Internet applications and content, and a premium version that also gives access to interactive TV services. Based on a market survey we find that potential consumers of this premium broadband access do not consider basic broadband Internet access as a substitute. The price of basic broadband does not constrain the price that may be charged for the premium broadband that allows for interactive TV services.     

Are Unions Good or Bad for Organizations? The Moderating Role of Management's Response

Union impact research has been hindered by an underdeveloped conceptualization of management response, contributing to inconclusive empirical findings. Integrating the collective voice/institutional response model with the appropriateness framework, we propose that an employee‐focused business strategy is a critical moderating variable in the relationship between union density and organizational outcomes that mitigates the negative effects of unions and enhances the positive effects by sending a clear signal of management's intentions to co‐operate. Using a panel dataset of Canadian organizations over six years, we provide empirical evidence to support our arguments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.