Greasing the Wheels of Trade: A Profile of the Dutch Transaction Sector***

How many resources does a nation spend on transactions costs to ‘grease the wheels of trade’? To examine this question the Dutch economy is used as a case study. The Netherlands are known as a nation of traders and this image was derived in the seventeenth century from successes in long distance trade, shipping and financial innovations. Despite its historical background the trading sector has never been adequately measured. In this paper, we present a first attempt in measuring and describing the Dutch transaction sector. Measurement by means of occupational data points out that approximately 25% of Dutch workers is employed in transaction jobs, and 29% if one includes transport tasks. We make the case that traditional industrial sector categories overestimate the true transaction character of an economy. Traditional ‘trade’ sectors employed 13% of the workers in 1807 and 39 percent in 1998, but these figures conceal the fact that all organizations employ jobs which have transformation and transaction tasks. A counterfactual exercise suggests that the growth of the transaction sector share in employment over two centuries was not 200% but 42%.     

The role of operational flexibility in the expansion of international production networks

Volatile factor cost developments urge manufacturing firms to increase production efficiency by building up facilities in multiple countries. Differing from previous work that examines the quality of individual locations for investment, the study evaluates the net present value, the growth option value, and the operational flexibility value of the existing production network to predict the establishment of a new site. The results on a sample of 352 German manufacturing firms suggest that the direction, uncertainty, and diversity of labor cost movements in the extant locations influence the propensity to set up a new production subsidiary. Analyzing the international production network after the expansion shows that the new location increases the value of the network regarding these dimensions. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multi-channel-retailing und kundenbezogene erfolgsrechnung

Die Kombination von Online-Shops, station?ren Gesch?ften und Versandkatalogen versetzt den Einzelh?ndler in die Lage, seine Kunden an unterschiedlichen Orten zu unterschiedlichen Zeiten zu erreichen. Die Bearbeitung des Marktes mit m?glichst vielen Kan?len kann der Schlüssel zum Erfolg sein. Wissen die Multi-Channel-Retailer aber tats?chlich, welche Kan?le ihre Kunden nutzen und welche Kunden welchen Deckungsbeitrag liefern? Kann es sein, dass bestimmte Kunden nur oder überwiegend den elektronischen Kanal nutzen und mehr Handlungskosten als Rohertr?ge verursachen? Antworten hierauf bietet die kundenbezogene Erfolgsrechnung.     

The crisis of Japanese retailing at the turn of the millennium: a crisis of corporate governance and finance

The year 2000 saw a sudden rise in failures of prominent Japanese retailers. With problems of corporate finance and governance being pointed out as early as the 1970s, the recent problems as well as the continuous rise of companies up to then have to be explained. This article contends that a major explanatory factor is the weakening of the existing stable relationships between retailers and financial institutions. Banks functioned as lenders, shareholders and providers of management resources. Changes in the banking sector led to changes in the relationship at the end of the 1990s. Problems in corporate governance surfaced that might result in a major reorganization of the Japanese retail scene.     

Range and Number-of-Levels Effects in Derived and Stated Measures of Attribute Importance

We study how the range of variation and the number of attribute levels affect five measures of attribute importance: full profile conjoint estimates, ranges in attribute level attractiveness ratings, regression coefficients, graded paired comparisons, and self-reported ratings. We find that all importance measures are affected by the range manipulation. The number of attribute levels affects only two measures. The results allow us to benchmark the magnitude of the number-of-levels effect against the range effect: conjoint importance estimates were approximately equally affected by a threefold increase in the range of attribute variation and by the insertion of two intermediate attribute levels. Our findings show that the number-of-levels effect is most likely due to respondents' tendencies to distribute their mental stimulus representations and their responses uniformly over the corresponding continua.     

Die Kalkulation ausfallrisikobedrohter Finanztitel mit Rating-Übergangsmatrizen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

In Memoriam

Rotterdam, April 1874.