Intra- and Inter-industry Externalities from Foreign Direct Investment in the Mexican Manufacturing Sector: New Evidence from Mexican Regions

This paper presents new empirical evidence on externalities from Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in several Mexican regions in the early 1990s. The main findings are threefold. First, the presence of FDI creates negative externalities within industries and positive externalities between industries through backward linkages. Second, FDI-externalities are stimulated by large technological differences between FDI and Mexican firms and by geographic concentration of industries. Third, we identify a substantial level of regional heterogeneity of the externality impact of FDI, in line with the notion that FDI may have contributed to processes of changing regional prosperity under trade liberalization. The findings also imply that maquiladora firms in the border states are generating positive externalities.     

The transition from product to service in business markets: An agenda for academic inquiry

In recent years, industrial manufacturers around the world have deployed growing efforts in developing services in addition to their traditional product business in order to secure long-term growth and to remain competitive in the marketplace. Against this background, the present article introduces the reader to this special issue. It first recalls key aspects of the emerging service-dominant logic of marketing and examines how it relates to the business marketing field. It then illustrates the challenges faced by top executives of industrial companies in the transition from a product-centric to a service-centric business perspective through an interview with the managing director of ThyssenKrupp Service AG. After discussing how the articles included in this special issue advance the extant literature on industrial services marketing, the article finally develops a number of directions for future research on services in business markets.     

The characterization of decisive weighted majority rules

This note supplies a rationale for the adoption of decisive weighted majority rules by small decision-making bodies (n<6). It proves that such rules are the only decision rules that satisfy the two common and quite mild conditions of monotonicity and neutrality.     

Stochastic prices and tests of efficiency of foreign exchange markets

This paper shows that typical specifications of efficiency tests of foreign exchange markets are strictly valid only when individuals are risk neutral and prices are non-stochastic. Empirically, however, the neglect of these factors is shown to be of little significance.     

Toward defining the accountant's role in the evaluation of social programs

Currently a conflict exists in the accounting literature concerning the propriety of extending the accountant's function to include the assessment of social programs. This paper attempts to clarify the issues of debate and evaluate the various points of view. The first two sections discuss the social science literature on evaluation and evaluation problems. The following two sections focus the discussion on the accountant's role in various evaluation activities. The concluding section of the paper offers a schema of the process that can be applied in the evaluation of social programs.     

Social indicators and urban policy analysis

Although there are natural ties among the social indicators movement, productivity studies and urban service delivery research, these have been overlooked. This paper presents a systems framework involving policy variables, performance variables, state variables, citizen behaviors and citizen perceptions, and linking government with citizen subsystems. Four hypotheses derived from this framework are presented for assessing citizens' perceptions of local government performance and of the state of their municipality. Ultimately such a framework should be useful for setting local policy and evaluating its impact.     

The role of attribution theory in control systems

In this paper we develop a revised model of the management control process in light of attribution theory. Attribution theory describes how people seek and use information to structure and to control their social environment. We examine how and why people cognitively interact with feedback information contained in performance reports in making expectancy and variance investigation decisions. We also discuss conflicts that a superior and a subordinate may have due to different attributions used to explain behavior.     

Do Economists Have a Fatherland? How Global and National Efficiency Considerations Influence Economists’ Policy Judgements

This study evaluates whether economists support economic policies such as free trade because they deem them to be good for their home country or because they increase global welfare. In a telephone survey, 100 German economists were asked to judge different policy proposals dealing with immigration, military exports and climate policy. Our results show that the acceptance of the policy proposals is strongly influenced by national efficiency judgements. In contrast, global efficiency judgements exert no significant positive effect on policy proposal acceptance. These effects even hold for economists who self‐reported a global perspective in the assessment of the policy proposals. These judgements might be based on the potentially erroneous assumption that their policy judgements, taken from a national perspective, are consistent with global interests.     

Human capital formation from occupations: the ‘deskilling hypothesis’ revisited

We use HISCLASS to code the occupational titles of over 30,000 English male workers according to the skill content of their work. We then track the evolution of the sampled working skills across three centuries of English history, from 1550 to 1850. We observe a modest rise in the share of ‘high-quality workmen’ deemed necessary by Mokyr and others to facilitate the Industrial Revolution, including machine erectors and operators. But we also find remarkable growth in the share of unskilled workers, rising from 20 % in the late sixteenth century to nearly 40 % in the early nineteenth century, caused mainly by falling shares of semi-skilled, blue-collar workers. Close inspection of the occupational structures within the main sectors of production suggests that deskilling occurred in agriculture and industry alike, prompted by land concentration in agriculture and workshop-to-factory changes in industry.