Export Stages and Export Barriers: Revisiting Traditional Export Development

This study revisits the stage model dialogue by testing seven hypotheses on the relationship between stages of export development and the influence of export barriers. Empirical data are based on a sample of 145 New Zealand firms, and the analysis combines a six‐stage framework with an illustrative list of barriers, while going a step further than previous research by examining the effect of covariates. Empirical results demonstrate that resource constraints, marketing barriers, knowledge and experience barriers, and export‐procedure barriers are “export stage dependent.” However, regarding export‐stage‐dependent barriers, differences exist only when we compare the early to the very advanced stages of development. These results also refute the grand hypothesis, which suggests an inverse relationship between export stages and the influence of export barriers. While the stage model typology still provides a practicable basis for need‐based segmentation, it does not capture completely the heterogeneity associated with the middle stages. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Shared rewards and goal interdependence for psychological safety among departments in China

Psychological safety has been shown to facilitate learning from experience that can help organizations adapt to the changing marketplace. Shared rewards and cooperative, but not competitive and independent, goals may help department members feel supported and able to discuss open-mindedly their experiences, including mistakes, and learn from them. One hundred and twenty five CEOs and 436 executives from 125 companies in China completed measures of psychological safety, goal interdependence, and shared rewards. The results of two structural equation analyses suggest that shared rewards can convince departments that their goals are cooperative and that this conclusion in turn leads to psychological safety. These results were interpreted as suggesting that shared rewards and cooperative goals are important foundations for organizational psychological safety in China and perhaps other countries as well.     

Information Uncertainty and the Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift Anomaly: Insights from REITs

This is the first study to examine the post-earnings-announcement drift anomaly in a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) context. The efficient markets hypothesis suggests that unexpected earnings should be fully incorporated into asset prices soon after being publicly announced. We hypothesize that publicly announced earnings signals may be more certain for REITs due to the presence of a parallel (private) asset market, suggesting less drift for REIT stocks. However, we find a large REIT drift component that is both statistically and economically significant. Furthermore, while the initial earnings surprise response is more muted for REITs, we find that the magnitude of the drift is significantly larger for REITs than for ordinary common stocks (NonREITs). Thus, information does not appear to move between the private and public asset markets in such a way as to render REIT earnings signals more certain than NonREIT earnings signals.     

Knowledge acquisition processes during the incubation of new high technology firms

High technology incubators have been funded in universities by the UK government as part of the ‘third mission’ for higher education (DTI 2000a). The provision of such facilities is premised on the notion that new technology firms achieve success at least in part from the benefits of incubators as rich networked environments where specialist knowledge acquisition can occur. This paper presents a exploration of how this process takes place, based on a case study of the high-tech incubator at the University of Southampton. The paper shows that firm founders adopt different approaches to the networked environment provided by the incubator; in this case the shift from Directorial support to that embedding in external networks was significant as firms grew. Taking account of this process should enable incubator managers to develop practices that ensure firms gain maximum advantage from the available resources.     

Negative Emotional Reactions to Project Failure and the Self-Compassion to Learn from the Experience

Project failure is likely to generate a negative emotional response for those involved in the project. But do all people feel the same way? And are some better able to regulate their emotions to learn from the failure experience? In this paper we develop an emotion framework of project failure that relies on self‐determination to explain variance in the intensity of the negative emotions triggered by project failure and self‐compassion to explain variance in learning from project failure. We discuss the implications of our model for research on entrepreneurial and innovative organizations, employees' psychological ownership, and personal engagement at work.     

Opportunities and challenges for academic returnees in China

A growing number of Western-educated management PhD graduates are starting their academic career in Chinese business schools. While opportunities are abundant for these returnees, they also face the choice between developing internationally transferable assets and building locally embedded competences. Some possible solutions are discussed, at both personal and institutional levels.

Excess Returns, Inflation and the Efficiency of the Housing Market

This paper examines the influence that unexpected inflation has on the reported time pattern in housing returns. Two alternative models of expected inflation are used to study its effect: a rational expectations model and an adaptive expectations model. Findings indicate that both estimates of unexpected inflation are positively correlated with excess returns to housing. If inflation expectations are assumed to have been adaptive during the 1970s and early 1980s, serial correlation in the excess returns is shown to be greatly diminished when adjusted to control for unexpected inflation. However, substantial inertia in the pattern of the adjusted return series remains.     

SOCIAL SECURITY: OVERVIEW AND OPTIONS

The intense controversy about the future of Social Security is found to be basically political. Adjustments that are relatively minor from an economic point of view suffice to maintain the viability of Social Security and of the economy as a whole. The defined-benefit, pay-as-you-go character of Social Security inevitably produces politically troubling crises as the system matures. Five options for change are considered, with special attention given to a defined-cost system which would gradually adjust benefits and avoid both cyclical and long-term crises