The Modern Census: Evolution,Examples and Evaluation

A national census provides important information on a country's population that is used in government planning and to underpin the national statistical system. Therefore, the quality of such information is paramount but is not as simple as the crude accuracy of population totals. Furthermore, changes in the pace and nature of modern life, such as the growing geographical mobility of the population, increasingly pose challenges to census practice and data quality. More recently, even the need for a census has been questioned on grounds of financial austerity and widespread availability of alternative population information sources. This article reviews how the modern census originated and how it evolved to confront these challenges, driven by indicators of quality and needs of users, and provides reflections on the future of the census within the national statistical infrastructure. To illustrate our discussions, we use case studies from a diverse range of national contexts. We demonstrate the implications that a country's needs, circumstances and experiences have on the census approach and practice while identifying the fundamental demographic assumptions.     

Narrative and organizational control: corporate visionaries,ethics and power

The purpose of this paper is to explore the language of corporate visions with particular reference to its strategic persuasiveness, the ‘narrative’ of the visions. It explores the nature and content of vision discourses to identify the main dimensions of visions with regard to strategic decision making, to the legitimation of business objectives and to motivation, and relates the vision phenomenon to the literature of narrative and social control. While the futurist elements to visions, their attempts to restructure the relationship of the organization to the environment, and the intuition on which individuals claim that their visions are based are all recognized as essential to the visionary narrative, the key dimension of visions is argued to be their ethical appeal. It is this appeal on which the power to motivate those towards whom the visions are directed is based. The paper concludes by considering the significance of the status of visionary discourse in the understanding of strategic decisions. We can either take visionary discourse on its own terms, and recognize the ethical dimensions of visions and their legitimate role in transforming the organization's relationship with its environment; or we can see them primarily as a further dimension of control which needs to be integrated analytically into the way we view the identification of strategic issues. Either way, visions call upon and reflect power in a significant way.     

Michalos and the Theory of Ethical Theory

The paper replies to Professor Alex Michalos' keynote address, "Ethics Counsellors as a New Priesthood". Michalos argues that an intractable diversity of opinion about fundamental issues in ethical theory precludes substantive, well-founded ethical counselling. However, Michalos has inappropriately modelled his understanding of an acceptable structure and application for ethical theory on natural scientific theory. For we may countenance a less severe understanding of theory for ethical theory than in the hard sciences. In particular, instructive moral reasoning may tolerate a degree of disagreement across human beings in their conception of moral good. On condition that such variance is not so considerable as to undermine a necessary commonality of language on ethical matters, there will be an adequate basis for warranted theory-construction in ethics and effective moral counselling underwritten by such theory. And, on the available historical evidence, such a condition can be met.     

Survival of the best fit: Exposure to low-wage countries and the (uneven) growth of U.S. manufacturing plants

This paper examines the role of international trade in the reallocation of U.S. manufacturing within and across industries from 1977 to 1997. Motivated by the factor proportions framework, we introduce a new measure of industry exposure to international trade that focuses on where imports originate rather than on their overall level. We find that plant survival and growth are negatively associated with industry exposure to low-wage country imports. Within industries, we show that manufacturing activity is disproportionately reallocated towards capital-intensive plants. Finally, we provide the first evidence that firms adjust their product mix in response to trade pressures. Plants are more likely to switch industries when exposure to low-wage countries is high.     

Toward a Typology of University Spin-offs

This paper discusses existing definitions of USOs in order to reconcile them and to provide criteria for classifying and understanding the different facets of this multi-headed concept. Drawing the boundaries of this concept and elucidating its variety through a typology are therefore the two main objectives of this paper. USOs are defined as new firms created to exploit commercially some knowledge, technology or research results developed within a university. The proposed typology is based on two key discriminatory factors, namely (1) the status of individuals involved in the new business venturing process (researchers or students) and (2) the nature of knowledge transferred from university to the new venture (codified or tacit), inducing the nature of the USO activities (product or service-oriented).     

Consumer Segments Based on Attitudes Toward Luxury: Empirical Evidence from Twenty Countries

This article proposes an international segmentation of consumers based on their attitudes toward luxury. We perform a two-stage empirical study with a data set that combines samples from 20 countries. We provide a substantive interpretation of the results to show that three attitude segments dominate in a Western cultural context. We discuss several directions for future research based on the findings.     

The Penn Effect revisited: New evidence from Latin America

In this paper, we examine the role of relative productivity growth in real misalignment of exchange rates in Latin American countries. Specifically, we verify the validity of the Penn Effect for selected countries in this region. Our sample consists of 15 countries for the period 1951 to 2010. We employ both short‐ and long‐panel data techniques, which allow us to experiment with estimators suitable for short and long time dimensions of panel data. The Penn Effect is found to be supported for the entire sample, and for subsamples. Relative productivity growth is dominant in the real exchange rate movement during periods of mild or weak speculative attacks, as compared with periods of severe speculative attacks. To correct for real misalignment of currencies in Latin America under speculative attacks, relative productivity growth must be sizeable.     

Products and Productivity*

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity reflects both characteristics of the firm and attributes of the products that are non‐randomly chosen by the firm. This paper develops a model of industry equilibrium in which firms endogenously sort across products and characterizes the resulting bias in measured firm and aggregate productivity. Calibrating the model's parameters, we show that endogenous product selection can have quantitatively important effects on measured firm and aggregate productivity and their response to changes in parameter values.