The Model of a Gender-Segregated Low-Income Economy Reconsidered: Evidence from Uganda

This paper examines Darity's model of gender-segregated low-income agrarian society in light of evidence from Uganda. It identifies three important features of the interactions between men and women which are likely to have economic effects but which are subsumed within Darity's schematic presentation. It suggests a reformulation of the Darity model in terms of a bargaining framework. This facilitates greater insights into gendered economic processes that otherwise are ignored, and investigation of a wider range of macro outcomes.     

How to Become Central in an Informal Social Network: An Investigation of the Antecedents to Network Centrality in an Environmental SCM Initiative

Environmental supply chain management (SCM) initiatives often evolve as informal, grassroots efforts that are driven by policy entrepreneurs at lower management levels in an organization. These individuals usually are not in positions of power or authority to convince others to support the initiative. They thus rely on central positions in informal networks to gain access to and influence over other employees to be better able to sell these initiatives. This study examines how individuals arrive at positions of centrality within the networks surrounding environmental SCM initiatives. Linking social network theory and social capital theory with findings from the organizational behavior and environmental arena, the study investigates how an individual's proactive personality and commitment profile—affective, normative, and continuance commitment—might affect network centrality through the mediating role of championing behavior. Investigating the implementation of an environmental SCM initiative at a multinational enterprise, the authors identified a 90‐actor social network surrounding the initiative. The results provide evidence that championing behavior fully mediates the relationship between commitment and network centrality and to a lesser extent between proactive personality and network centrality. These findings suggest that championing behavior can enable an actor to become more central in social networks. Further, the results indicate that in an environmental SCM context, engendering the right type of commitment is a much more important driver of championing behavior than the proactive personalities of individual actors. This finding suggests that even employees who do not have proactive personalities can champion environmental initiatives and become central within the informal networks that surround these initiatives, if they strongly desire to support the initiative and believe that the initiative will lead to positive change.     

Women and Minorities in Introductory Economics Textbooks: 1974 to 1984

The authors conducted a painstaking review of widely used economics textbooks to determine if or how issues relating to race and gender are treated. In doing so, the authors also shed light on the nature of the treatment of these issues.     

Sectoral Heterogeneity in New Service Development: An Exploratory Study of Service Types and Success Factors

The service industry is of fundamental relevance for the economies of industrialized countries, as the service industry produces the highest growth in the gross domestic product. In this regard, new service development (NSD) represents a critical resource for competitive survival and a decisive factor of growth in the service industry. However, service firms across many industries are increasingly faced with the challenge of determining how best to manage their development of new service offerings. Although researchers have shown growing interest in NSD issues, this area is still underutilized. Furthermore, although the heterogeneity of the service industry has been emphasized for years, the current body of research on NSD mainly focuses on specific service environments, providing data that are often not comparable across different service sectors. Additionally, there is no study to date that comprehensively examines innovation activities and the relevance of service innovations’ success factors within different service industries. The aim of this exploratory study is to establish a more balanced picture of the nature of innovation activities in terms of NSD characteristics and success factors in the heterogeneous service industry. From this perspective, this paper begins with an examination of the factors that contribute to the success of NSD. Based on a meta‐analysis of new service success factor studies, 17 different success determinants are classified and aggregated to service‐related success determinants. Subsequently, a cluster analysis of 1016 service companies is used to identify different service innovation types. For the service sector, four service innovation types are determined: efficient developers, innovative developers, interactive adopters, and standardized adopters. Furthermore, based on interviews with service innovation managers, the previously identified success factors are examined for each innovation type using a standardized survey. Finally, based on the results of this exploratory study, the paper concludes with recommendations for NSD management and research propositions for each service innovation type. These propositions support innovation managers to successfully manage service innovations for the innovation type they are operating in.     

Communication and mobility behaviour – a trend and panel analysis of the correlation between mobile phone use and mobility

The paper examines the assumption about the complementarity between telecommunications and transport on the level of individual persons. Taking into account that previous studies have shown the particularly strong correlation between mobile phone use and travel behaviour, telecommunications use is considered by focussing on the mobile phone. Using panel data from Germany for the years 2004 and 2007 the first step consisted in an investigation of changes in mobile phone use taking into consideration also the level from which potential changes started. About one half of the respondents had changed their mobile phone use, in most cases by an increase of use. In a second step a comparison was made to potential changes in travel behaviour of the observed persons. The results show that in those groups of persons where the mobile phone use was on a high level or even increased from a high level in 2003, travel behaviour in terms of travel frequency decreased less than for all other persons or even increased. The assumption that changes in “life circumstances” such as new place of residence or change of household size trigger the change in mobile phone use or travel behaviour could be generally confirmed.     

Term structure modelling of defaultable bonds

In this paper we present a model of the development of the term structure of defaultable interest rates that is based on a multiple-defaults model. Instead of modelling a cash payoff in default we assume that defaulted debt is restructured and continues to be traded.The term structure of defaultable bond prices is represented in terms of defaultable forward rates similar to the Heath-Jarrow-Morton (HJM) (Heath et al., 1992) approach, and conditions are given under which the dynamics of these rates are arbitrage-free. These conditions are a drift restriction that is closely related to the HJM drift restriction for risk-free bonds, and the restriction that the defaultable short rate must always be not below the risk-free short rate. In its most general version the model is set in a marked point process framework, to allow for jumps in the defaultable rates at times of default.Financial Assistance by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 303, at the University of Bonn and the DAAD is gratefully acknowledged.I thank Pierre Mella-Barral, David Lando and David Webb for helpful conversations, and the participants of the FMG Conference on Defaultable Bonds (March 1997) in London and the QMF 97 conference in Cairns for helpful comments. All errors are of course my own.     

Adapting cases for a team approach

When groups of students are assigned a joint case, they are most likely to achieve the objectives of positive interdependence, individual accountability, heterogeneous interactions, and attention to group processing when the case assignment is selected and designed to promote common task activities by each participant. This article provides aids for selecting appropriate cases for a team approach, structuring assignments into individual and group components, forming teams effectively, and structuring peer feedback. The technique of assignment design is both described and applied to the “Corn & Hogs” case from Cases on Recognition and Measurement from the FASB [Johnson, L. T., & Petrone, K. R. (1996a). The FASB cases on recognition and measurement (2nd ed.). New York: Wiley]. In addition, a list of published case resources is provided for instructors to use with this pedagogy.