Environmental orientation and corporate performance: The mediation mechanism of green supply chain management and moderating effect of competitive intensity

This study proposes and empirically tests a model delineating the relationship among environmental orientation, green supply chain management (GSCM) activities (green purchase, customer cooperation and investment recovery) and corporate performance. Based on responses from 194 foreign invested enterprises operating in China, this study has generated several important findings. First, it demonstrates that while both internal and external environmental orientations exert a positive and significant influence on the practice of green purchase and customer cooperation, internal environmental orientation further serves as a significant driver for the practice of investment recovery. Second, it shows that the practice of these three major GSCM activities, in turn, significantly enhances corporate performance. Last, the study reveals that competitive intensity strengthens the positive influence of customer cooperation on corporate performance. Overall, the findings explicate the importance for firms, in particular those operating in a highly competitive market condition, to nurture a pro-environmental corporate culture and improve their sensitivity to salient external stakeholders' environmental demands so as to pursue greener supply chain management.     

Strategic implications of the Soviet‐North Korean alliance

Abstract

Globalization is commonly defined as a strict economic path by most previous works, but it is really a fuzzy concept with unrestrained dimensions. While the ideological location of an incumbent political party is a powerful predictor of its policy position, the role of a political party in the globalization-growth nexus has never been fully empirically investigated. By applying Pedroni's panel cointegration technique instead of a time-series or traditional panel data approach, this paper aims to empirically re-examine the co-movement and the causal relationship among economic growth, the overall globalization index, and its three main dimensions—economic, social, as well as political integrations—by using panel data for 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries for 1970 to 2006. Certainly, the political party variable is taken into account as the advanced test is promoted, and we finally discover that all variables move together in the long run. Based on the results of the panel causality test, though the evidence of short-run causality is very weak, it does show long-run unidirectional causality running from the overall index of globalization, economic globalization, and social globalization to growth. Finally, the critical role of the political party is deeply discussed in relation with our results.     

Interest differentials and extreme support for uncovered interest rate parity

This paper addresses two findings from the empirical literature testing uncovered interest parity (UIP): (i) more favorable results when interest differentials (IDs) are large and (ii) instability across samples. Simulations demonstrate that explanations of the results using large IDs based on the hypothesis of a “zone of speculative inactivity” are inconsistent with empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is shown that, if agents forecast IDs based on long-run values, coefficient estimates will be unstable if rates of decay in IDs vary significantly and, for ex post UIP to hold, IDs must decay in absolute value. This is consistent with OECD country data.     

Economic Education Research: Part II,New Directions in Theoretical Model Building

This article on research methodology in economic education is the second in a three-part series. The first, which appeared in the Winter 1983 issue of this Journal, focused on issues and questions economic education researchers should address. The present article provides suggestions for the development of theoretical models in which these issues and questions can be conceptualized, organized, and formally stated as empirically testable hypotheses. The final article will review statistical and econometric techniques appropriate for model estimation and statistical testing of specific hypotheses about teaching methods and other issues related to the production of economic learning.     

The Perverse Effect of Debt Tax Benefits on Firm Investment Decisions

In this paper we question the idea that the deduction of debt interest is always an effective policy instrument to spur firm investment. We analyse the investment decision in presence of a borrowing constraint on the amount of debt that the firm can raise. We show that if the debt interest rate is decreasing in the firm's capital accumulation and another financial resource more expensive than debt is available (at least for levels of debt lower than the upper bound), then the deduction of the debt interest from taxes on capital income may reduce firm investment. This theoretical result is relevant for economic policy decisions when financial intermediaries are not willing to finance beyond a certain threshold but firms have access to other sources of finance.     

The moderating influence of style of information processing on media perceptions and information exposure

This study investigated the extent to which style of information processing relates to media perceptions and information exposure. The results showed that visually oriented individuals were more favourably predisposed to the television medium and reported greater exposure to this medium than verbally oriented individuals. Verbally oriented individuals reported greater exposure to print media information than did visually oriented individuals. An exploratory interaction hypothesis between information processing style and gender was not supported. The implications of these results and future research directions are discussed.     

Furthering Organizational Priorities with Less Than Truthful Behavior: A Call for Additional Tools

Though codes of ethics exist in many businesses, employees still view less than truthful behaviors to be a significant ethical problem. The current study examines the related and somewhat counterintuitive issue of less than truthful behaviors intended to further organizational priorities. Such behaviors risk violating one organizational priority (e.g., adhering to a code of ethics) to achieve another. Data indicated four unique though non-mutually exclusive motivations: (1) to avoid confrontation or conflict; (2) to ensure quality in the delivery of a product or service; (3) to buy time for an organization’s strategy to play out; and (4) for self-protection or self-enhancement. The evidence further suggests that enhanced managerial training, particularly in handling confrontation and conflicts, could reduce the contradiction between stated codes of ethics and actual behaviors.