Strategic intensity: a conversation with world chess champion Garry Kasparov

It's hard to find a better exemplar for competition than chess. The image of two brilliant minds locked in a battle of skill and will-in which chance plays little or no apparent role-is compelling. Even people who have scant knowledge of the game instinctively recognize that chess is unusual in terms of its intellectual complexity and the strategic demands it places on players. Can strategists learn anything from chess players about what it takes to win? To find out, H BR senior editor Diane L. Coutu talked with Garry Kasparov, the world's number one player since 1984. Kasparov believes that success in both chess and business is very much a question of psychological advantage; the complexity of the game demands that players rely heavily on their instincts and on gamesmanship. In this wide-ranging interview, Kasparov explores the power of chess as a model for business competition; the balance that chess players strike between intuition and analysis; the significance of his loss to IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue; and how his legendary rivalry with Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov's predecessor as World Chess Champion, affected his own success. Kasparov also shares his solution to what he calls the champion's dilemma, a question for all world masters, whether they are in business, sports, or chess: Where does a virtuoso go after he has accomplished everything he's ever wanted to, even beyond his wildest imagination? If you are lucky, says Kasparov, your enemies will push you to be passionate about staying at the top.     

Equilibrium leadership in tax competition models with capital ownership: a rejoinder

This paper reconciles two opposite results in the tax competition literature. Kempf and Rota-Graziosi (J Public Econ 94(9–10):768–776, 2010) and Hindriks and Nishimura (J Public Econ 121:66–68, 2015) have shown that the two Stackelberg outcomes prevail as the subgame perfect equilibria when capital is entirely owned by nonresidents. However, Ogawa (Int Tax Public Finance 20(3):474–484, 2013) has shown that the simultaneous-move outcome prevails when capital is entirely owned by residents. We develop a model in which capital ownership can vary freely between these two polar cases. We show that there exists a unique degree of residential capital ownership such that the equilibrium switches from the Stackelberg to the simultaneous-move outcomes. The chance for the simultaneous-move outcome to prevail increases with the extent of production asymmetry between regions. Partial ownership also induces a novel effect of tax leadership that we call the preference reversion effect.     

Technology and human vulnerability. A conversation with MIT's Sherry Turkle

For most of the last 50 years, technology knew its place. Yes, we all spent a lot of time with it, but even five years ago, few people would seriously claim that technology had taken over their lives. It's very different today. Technology is not only ubiquitous but has become highly intrusive as well. On the Internet, people invent imaginary identities in virtual chat rooms, playing out the lives they wish they really lived. Children are growing up with interactive toy animals that respond to them like real pets. Indeed, some critics claim that technology has not just entered our private lives but started to define them. If we want to be sure we'll like who we've become in 50 years, we need to take a closer look at the psychological effects of current and future technologies. The smartest people in technology have already started. Universities like MIT and Caltech have been pouring millions of dollars into researching what happens when technology and humanity meet. To learn more about this research, HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu spoke with one of the field's most distinguished scholars: Sherry Turkle, MIT's Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the author of Life on the Screen, which explores how the internet is changing the way we define ourselves. In a conversation with Coutu, Turkle discusses the psychological dynamics that can develop between people and their high-tech toys, describes ways in which machines might substitute for managers, and explains how technology is redefining what it means to be human. She warns that relatively small differences in technology design can have disproportionate effects on how humans relate to technology, to one another, and to themselves.     

Lessons in power: Lyndon Johnson revealed. A conversation with historian Robert A. Caro

No one can lead who does not first acquire power, and no leader can be great who does not know how to use that power. The trouble is that the combination of the two skills is rare. Amassing power requires ambition, a focused pragmatism, and a certain ruthlessness that is often at odds with the daring, idealistic vision needed to achieve great things with that power. The tension is as real in business as it is in politics. This magazine is replete with examples of successful senior managers who could not make the switch from ambitious executive to corporate leader because they did not know what to do with the power they had so expertly accumulated. Robert Caro is a student of power. For the past 27 years, the two-time Pulitzer prize-winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson has focused on the question of how Johnson amassed and wielded power. Caro's deep understanding of the inner workings of power offers senior executives a nuanced picture of leadership at the highest level. In this wide-ranging conversation, Caro shares his insights about the nature of power, the complexity of ambition, and the role that the greater good can play in the making of a leader. Power doesn't always corrupt, he insists. But what it invariably does is reveal a leader's true nature. "Today, when CEOs have acquired more and more power to change our lives," Caro says,"they have become like presidents in their own right, and they, too, need to align themselves with something greater than themselves if they hope to become truly great leaders."     

Tax competition and federal equalization schemes with decentralized leadership

Regional governments compete by setting capital taxes in anticipation of the central government’s fiscal equalization and income redistribution policies. I start by demonstrating that the constrained socially optimal allocation satisfies the Pareto efficient conditions; therefore, it may be first best. It is also shown that the subgame perfect equilibrium for the game played by regional and central governments is socially optimal. The anticipation of equalization of marginal utilities of public consumption and equalization of marginal utilities of private consumption provides regional governments with correct incentives in the setting of capital taxes, preventing the phenomenon known as “race to the bottom.”     

Inflation and the Transition to a Market Economy: An Overview

European socialist economies were commonly characterized bylow or negligible open inflation, full employment, and stablerelative prices and real incomes. Associated features were significantrepressed or hidden inflation and disequilibria in goods markets.More recently, as economic and political reform has advanced,attention has shifted to translating repressed into open inflation.Where such reforms have proceeded against a background of amonetary overhang, the implications of that overhang for demand-sidepolicies have figured prominently. In all instances, however,the key underlying issue has been the transmission mechanismfor inflation once the initial impulse associated with priceliberalization has been imparted.     

Ecomuseums as cross-sector partnerships: governance,strategy and leadership

Ecomuseums are attracting increasing attention as means of preserving heritage and also impacting positively on social and economic issues. This paper contrasts ecomuseums with previous forms of cross-sector partnerships. The authors focus on the governance, strategy and leadership of the Flodden 1513 Ecomuseum. The findings have lessons for ecomuseums and other cross-sector partnerships both in and outside the UK.     

Impure public goods,matching grant rates and income redistribution in a federation with decentralized leadership and imperfect labor mobility

We examine the decentralized provision of an impure public good by regional governments in a federation similar in certain respects to both the European Union and the United States. The central authority redistributes income and provides matching grants on a per rate basis after it observes the regions’ contributions to the impure public good. Imperfectly mobile workers react to regional and central governments’ policies by establishing residence in their most preferred region. We show that the allocations of the impure public good and the population are generally efficient in a federation with decentralized leadership.     

Liquefying a Market: The Transition of LNG to a Traded Commodity

The Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry has grown significantly since it began a half‐century ago, and it will continue to diversify both its sources of supply and the contractual arrangements between suppliers and users. Economic theory says that contracting modes adapt to facilitate gains in efficiency, and that this process of adaptation responds to changes in technological, market, and regulatory factors. When an industry relies heavily on highly specialized assets with limited alternative uses, as is true of LNG, the use of longterm contracts (or vertical integration) will generally be more efficient than short‐term dealings. But once conditions begin to encourage vigorous competition among buyers and sellers, it becomes increasingly economical to rely on shorter‐term (and spot) markets for exchange. The history of the LNG industry supports these theoretical predictions, and illustrates the transition from one contracting mode to another. For most of its history, the specialization and scale of LNG assets dictated the predominant use of long‐term contracting. In recent years, however, market and regulatory changes have raised the demand for short‐term and spot contracting, which in turn has provided the impetus for a virtuous cycle of market liquidity. As buyers and sellers have become increasingly able to obtain or dispose of LNG in an active market, they have needed less protection against the opportunism of trading partners that long‐term contracts have provided in the past. Given this self‐reinforcing process, it is likely that the LNG market will soon look nothing like it did as recently as a decade ago. Buyers and sellers will rely on shorter‐term contracts, and the longerterm contracts that do exist will be linked to spot LNG prices rather than crude oil. Consumers and producers will also benefit from more flexible pricing that more accurately reflects rapidly changing fundamentals of supply and demand.     

Back-to-Back Loans: A Fraud in Transition

Case law relating to an auditor's detection of fraud has identified three fraud categories: ingenious, those that arouse or ought to arouse the auditor's suspicions, and well-known frauds. This paper argues that the extensive publicity given to Bond Corporation's use of back-to-back loans in 1988-89 to siphon $1.2 billion from Bell Resources resulted in this fraud being transfomed from ingenious to well-known. Detection processes have been developed for well-known frauds and this paper identifies certain red flags' associated with the back-to-back loan fraud that should facilitate its detection.     

Educating and Training Accountants in Syria in a Transition Context: Perceptions of Accounting Academics and Professional Accountants

This study focuses on accounting education in the Syrian transition context and in the international context of globalization. It offers insights into accounting education and into the interrelationship in this respect between the accountancy profession and academia in this context. We elaborate an historical and contextual analysis of the Syrian context in relation to accounting education. We report on a series of interviews (conducted in 2002 and 2005) of professional accountants and accounting academics in Syria that elaborates the views of these key parties on a number of interrelated matters: the current limitations of tertiary accounting education in Syria; the role of the accountancy profession in providing education and training; and the developing interrelationship between the profession and academia. In concluding, we summarize some key insights and elaborate on the relevance of the study and the future research it suggests.     

The Dynamic Speed of Cash-Holding Adjustment in a Transition Economy: A New Approach and Evidence

Using a new approach, we estimate the speed of cash-holding adjustment for a typical transitional economy by using Chinese listed firms’ samples over 1999–2011. First, we use model-averaging techniques to identify reliably important cash-holding determinants. Second, we conduct Monte Carlo simulation using the real finance data to evaluate appropriateness of the empirical estimator from a variety of dynamic estimation methods and suggest an optimized system of generalized method of moments (OPT-GMM) as an appropriate econometric approach for speed estimation. Finally, we get the speed of 46 percent, which is significantly lower than the contemporary speed in the United Kingdom and the United States.     

Sleep deficit: the performance killer. A conversation with Harvard Medical School Professor Charles A. Czeisler

Companies today glorify the executive who logs 100-hour workweeks, the road warrior who lives out of a suitcase in multiple time zones, and the negotiator who takes a red-eye to make an 8 A.M. meeting. But to Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, this kind of corporate behavior is the antithesis of high performance. In fact, he says, it endangers employees and puts their companies at risk. In this interview, Czeisler describes four neurobiological functions that affect sleep duration and quality as well as individual performance. When these functions fall out of alignment because of sleep deprivation, people operate at a far lower level of performance than they would if they were well rested. Czeisler goes on to observe that corporations have all kinds of policies designed to protect employees- rules against smoking, sexual harassment, and so on-but they push people to the brink of self-destruction by expecting them to work too hard, too long, and with too little sleep. The negative effects on cognitive performance, Czeisler says, can be similar to those that occur after drinking too much alcohol: "We now know that 24 hours without sleep or a week of sleeping four or five hours a night induces an impairment equivalent to a blood alcohol level of .1%. We would never say, 'This person is a great worker! He's drunk all the time!' yet we continue to celebrate people who sacrifice sleep for work." Czeisler recommends that companies institute corporate sleep policies that discourage scheduled work beyond 16 consecutive hours as well as working or driving immediately after late-night or overnight flights. A sidebar to this article summarizes the latest developments in sleep research.     

Smooth Transition ARCH Models: Estimation and Testing

In this paper, we suggest an extension of the ARCH model, the smooth-transition autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (STARCH) model. STARCH models endogenously allow for time-varying shifts in the parameters of the conditional variance equation. The most general form of the model that we consider is a double smooth-transition model, the STAR-STARCH model, which permits not only the conditional variance, but also the mean, to be a function of a smooth-transition term. The threshold ARCH model, the Markov-ARCH model and the standard ARCH model are special cases of our STARCH model. We also develop Lagrange multiplier tests of the hypothesis that the smooth-transition term in the conditional variance is zero. We apply our STARCH model to excess Treasury bill returns. We find some evidence of a smooth transition in excess returns, but in contrast to previous studies, we find almost no evidence of volatility persistence once we allow for smooth transitions in the conditional variance. Thus, the apparent persistence in the conditional variance reported by many researchers could be a mere statistical artifact. We conduct in-sample tests comparing STARCH models to nested competitors; these suggest that STARCH models hold promise for improved predictions. Finally, we describe further extensions of the STARCH model and suggest issues in finance to which they might profitably be applied.     

Financial Convergence in Transition Economies: EU Enlargement

This paper analyzes the financial effect of the enlargement of the European Union (EU) to include ten new Central and East European countries (CEECs) on firms' business and financial structures. We employ quantitative analytic techniques and financial ratios to discover whether firms in the new EU member states tend to converge with businesses in the EU-15 in terms of the structure of their financial statements. We examine the extent to which the increasing integration of the former may foster the convergence of productive structures. We analyze the evolution of twelve financial ratios in a sample of firms obtained from the AMADEUS database, performing a dynamic factor analysis that identifies the determining factors of the joint evolution of deviations in financial ratios from the average values of EU-15 firms. This allows us to analyze the convergence in each of the CEECs toward the EU-15.     

Choosing a System of Unemployment Income Support: Guidelines for Developing and Transition Countries

Mounting evidence suggests that excessive job protection reducesemployment and labor market flows, hinders technological innovations,pushes workers into the informal sector, and hurts vulnerablegroups by depriving them of job opportunities. Flexible labormarkets stimulate job creation, investment, and growth, butthey create job insecurity and displace some workers. How canthe costs of such insecurity and displacements be minimizedwhile ensuring that the labor market remains flexible? Eachof the main unemployment income support systems (unemploymentinsurance, unemployment assistance, unemployment insurance savingsaccounts, severance pay, and public works) has strengths andweaknesses. Country-specific conditions—chief among themlabor market and other institutions, the capacity to administereach type of system, and the size of the informal sector—determinewhich system is best suited to developing and transition countries.