越俎代庖的美联储

在过去几周里,美国联邦储备委员会（Fed）基本上是重新定义了央行应在市场经济中扮演的角色。     

Practicing effective knowledge sharing in international hotel joint ventures

Knowledge sharing can be described as the process by which individuals mutually exchange their knowledge and collaboratively generate new knowledge. Since international hotel joint venture partners typically possess skills in competing areas, this process of knowledge sharing is critical to the success of these alliances. Therefore, this article presents a framework that can be used to foster effective knowledge sharing at the individual joint venture manager level, at the relationship level between individuals, and across the entire organization.     

Cost efficiency modeling in health care foodservice operations

Cost efficiency and cost data in the health care foodservice sector have many interesting features. Traditional productivity approaches and empirical studies are yet to address many of these features, as they are limited to partial ratios and restricted parametric techniques. In this paper, we introduce and demonstrate the Stochastic Frontier Approach to this sector, and analyze the level of cost efficiency and its determinants. The approach is tested in a cross-sectional data set from a sample of 101 health care foodservice operations in Australia and the USA. Results indicate that the average level of cost efficiency is around 76.5% which suggests that health care foodservice operations could reduce their input costs by as much as 23.5% without decreasing their total output. Further, the coefficients of the inefficiency component, estimated simultaneously with the stochastic frontier model, indicate that both the level of manager's experience and the level of manager's education are significant determinants of cost efficiency.     

Examining the cost structure of urban bus transit industry: does urban geography help?

The purpose of this paper is to expand empirical research on bus transit operation costs and test the hypothesis that physical and geographical characteristics are plausible explanatory cost factors. A translog cost function has been estimated, using a panel dataset of 1053 observations over 1996–2002 for a cross-section of 264 transit bus agencies in the US, combined with geographical and physical data processed with GIS technology. The results confirm the importance of geographical factors as determinants of bus transit costs. The trade-offs between geographical factors in shaping the frontier between economies and diseconomies of density are assessed. The implications of the results for public policy regarding competition are discussed.     

Saltatory Ontogeny and the Life-History Model: Neglected Processes and Patterns of Evolution

A single cell – an egg – cannot be in the same stabilized state as a differentiated multicellular embryo or reproducing adult. The entire ontogeny must, therefore, consist of a sequence of stabilized states. Ontogeny of a phenotype cannot progress gradually but is a saltatory homeorhetic system, proceeding via natural thresholds from one self organized state to the next, hierarchically ever more complex and specialized. The natural boundaries of ontogeny – the far-from-stabilized thresholds – represent also states when changes can be easiest inserted or induced, and especially in the early ontogeny, from the intervals where evolution (change) can occur. As a result, ontogeny can also be divided into distinct life-history intervals called periods, be it embryo, larva (infant, pup), juvenile, adult and senescence, each divided in turn into phases, and each of these into natural steps. It is left to the imagination of scholars in social sciences to find parallels of saltation in economics and history.     

Land Development under the Threat of Taking

This paper presents a model of the land developer's response to the threat of regulatory taking. It shows that the threat of regulation affects development timing and density differently than the regulation imposed with certainty. Planned development proceeds at a more rapid pace under the taking threat, whereas the development density varies systematically by location in a spatial land market. Further, property on which regulations are actually imposed will be developed later than planned when the demanded density is falling over time. Regulated property, however, may be developed even more quickly than planned when the demanded density is rising over time.