Incorporating Ethics into Business Students' Research Projects: A Process Approach

Student research projects involving human intervention are being utilised in more and more business subjects. It therefore is essential that students understand the various ethical issues and implications related to undertaking such projects. As such academics need to integrate an ethical evaluation of student projects. While there are many attempts to "teach" ethics, the literature does not address the issue of including ethics in student research projects. A process by which this can be applied is suggested, which is based on a formal ethics approval process used at one Australian university. While the focus of this paper is student based research projects, the process described could be applied to staff research with minimal modifications, which are identified throughout the paper.     

Is the dollar peg suitable for the largest economies of the Gulf Cooperation Council?

The slumping of the GCC currencies against other major currencies and the ensuing rising imported inflation have sparked an ongoing debate about the viability of the dollar peg. This paper extends and applies the contribution of Berger et al. (2001) to the largest economies of the GCC, namely Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, by introducing a foreign inflation dimension. Empirical estimations suggest little or no evidence supporting the suitability of a fixed exchange rate regime in any of the three analyzed economies. It is this paper's contention that policy makers ought to play an immediate and active role in identifying a suitable more flexible exchange rate regime as well as an achievable timeline and road map to effectively abandoning the dollar peg.     

Ownership Structure, Firm Performance and Top Executive Change: An Analysis of UK Firms

The results of this paper reveal a significantly negative relationship between the equity stake owned by a senior executive and the likelihood that this executive will be removed from office. We also establish the existence of a strong positive relationship between poor company performance and the likelihood that the top managers responsible will be forced out of their firms; this forced departure only tends to occur when the managers' stake in the firm is less than 1%; as the level of ownership rises, managers become increasingly entrenched in their posts. The stock market reaction to management change is greatest (a) when the departure is unexpected and (b) when the dismissed executive owns more than 5% of the equity of his company. This study also examines the influence of other aspects of ownership structure and board composition upon the likelihood of a top executive dismissal.     

Chapter 15 Recognition in the United States: Is a Debtor “Presence” Required?

A recent appellate decision in the USA (In re Barnet) confuses the foreign debtor with the foreign insolvency representative. Notwithstanding the focus of US bankruptcy law on a foreign proceeding as the object of an ancillary case under Chapter 15, with the foreign representative as its emissary, the decision dismayed the international insolvency community by ruling that section 109(a) of the Bankruptcy Code applies to recognition under Chapter 15. The result is to require that the debtor in a foreign proceeding has some minimum jurisdictional presence in the USA as a condition of Chapter 15 recognition. Such a presence might include a domicile, a place of business, or property. While there might be a “backdoor” device avoiding this result, the decision creates serious confusion and a potential obstacle to full international recognition. Copyright © 2015 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd     

Exports and antitrust: Complements or substitutes?

Conflicting arguments have recently been voiced concerning the impact of antitrust statutes on the export performance of U.S. industries. On the one hand, opponents of vigorous enforcement have argued that antitrust constraints prevent firms from achieving efficiencies, thereby hampering competitiveness on world markets. On the other hand, proponents of antitrust have argued that vigorous enforcement tempers monopolistic pricing, thereby improving export performance. This paper presents an empirical test of these competing arguments. Our results indicate that Sherman Act Section 1 (price-fixing) enforcement has a positive effect on export shares, while Clayton Act Section 7 (merger) enforcement appears to have a negative effect.     

Cooperative R&D with product market competition

A simple model RJV is presented to examine the private and social incentives for cooperative R&D in the presence of product market competition. The key assumption to our analysis was that the spillover rate increases with cooperation in R&D and total industry profit decreases as the spillover rate increases due to intensified post-innovation competition. This leads to a negative impact of cooperative R&D, introducing a trade-off in the model. It is shown that private firms prefer a cooperative R&D to non-cooperative R&D competition when spillover rates are high and that the private incentive for cooperative R&D is less than the social incentive.     

Effects of the Private–Label Invasion in Food Industries

Using supermarket scanner data, we test a variety of hypotheses from trade journals about the invasion of private–label food products. According to conventional industry wisdom, name–brand firms defended their brands against new private–label products by lowering their prices, engaging in additional promotional activities, and increasingly differentiating their products. Our empirical evidence is inconsistent with these beliefs.