Understanding the Opportunistic Approach to Disinflation

One approach to achieving price stability is to undertake a deliberate path to an ultimate goal of low inflation—deliberate disinflation. In contrast an opportunistic strategy for disinflation has gained credence in recent years though on the face of it suboptimal. Our procedure is to seek a set of sufficient conditions under which the opportunistic strategy is optimal for a central bank maximising the preferences of the representative agent. We find that such a sufficient set of conditions consists of adaptiveness in expectations and an asymmetry in the Phillips curve of a specific sort.

     

Trading Portfolios Electronically – An Experimental Approach

This paper focuses on a simple axiom – investors prefer to hold diversified combinations of assets. Arguing that pooling vehicles like mutual funds offer approximate solutions, we propose a portfolio trading mechanism that allows individuals to trade diverse combinations of assets through a single order. Given the complexity of the market mechanism, we construct a prototype of this trading system and test it through a series of laboratory experiments with student subjects. We address the quality of the price discovery process, quality of allocations, and efficiency of the market mechanism. Results from a set of laboratory experiments indicate that the performance of such systems is sensitive to design aspects as well as relative experience of participants.     

The Total Product Design Concept and an Application to the Auto Market

As traditional sources of competitive advantage shrink, firms seek new ones. One such source of competitive advantage is product design because of its effects on customer experience. To understand the role and impact of product design on customer experience, we propose an integrated, customer‐based framework for product design that we call the total product design concept (TPDC). We define a product's TPDC as consisting of three elements, namely functionality, aesthetics, and meaning, each of which arises from more elemental product characteristics. We elaborate on the structure of a product's TPDC, its three elements, and the links between those elements and customers' experience with a product. We provide an illustrative application of the TPDC using data from the U.S. auto market. The findings from that application support the proposed three‐dimensional view of the TPDC, and demonstrate heterogeneity both in the TPDC's structure and its effects on customer satisfaction. For all three segments, functionality enhances customer satisfaction. For the largest segment of customers, functionality is the most important factor, followed by aesthetics. For the other two segments, customer satisfaction is most influenced by the meaning element of TPDC. We discuss the implications of these findings for the auto industry in particular, and the potential use of the TPDC more generally.     

Can the facts of UK inflation persistence be explained by nominal rigidity?

It has been widely argued that inflation persistence since WWII has been widespread and durable and that it can only be accounted for by models with a high degree of nominal rigidity. We examine UK post-war data where after confirming previous studies' findings of varying persistence due to changing monetary regimes, we find that models with little nominal rigidity are best equipped to explain it.     

Examining Antecedents to Supply Chain Security Effectiveness: An Exploratory Study

In recent years there has been increasing emphasis on managing risk and security in supply chains. Despite this emphasis, there have been relatively few empirical studies dealing with this issue. In an attempt to partially address this lack of empirical research, the primary purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between security management practices and the perceived effectiveness of supply chain security. With a resource‐based view of the firm and supply chain integration as theoretical underpinnings, the study utilized survey data to test propositions derived from the security literature. Internal and external integration efforts, a nodal planning focus, and proactive motivations related to security measures were found to be positively related to security effectiveness. The article concludes with implications for security stakeholders including suggestions for future research.     

Connected Moral Agency in Organizational Ethics

We review both the aspects of values-related research that complicate ideations of what we ought to do, as well as the psychological impediments to forming beliefs about the way things are. We find that more traditional moral theories are without solid empirical footing in the psychology of human values. Consequently, we revise the notion of values to align with their socially symbolic utility in self-affirmation and reformulate our understandings of moral agency to allow for the practicalities of context, circumstance, and connectedness. We close by discussing the research and practical implications for these revisions.     

Plant Variety Protection, Innovation, and Transferability: Some Empirical Evidence

Under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, all member-countries of the World Trade Organization are required to provide an " effective" system of plant variety protection within a specific time frame. In many developing countries, this has led to a divisive debate about the fundamental desirability of extending intellectual property rights to agriculture. Empirical studies on the economic impacts of plant variety protection, especially its ability to generate large private sector investments in plant breeding and to facilitate the transfer of technology, have been very limited. This paper examines two aspects of the international experience of plant variety protection: ( a ) the relationship between legislation, research, and development expenditures and plant variety protection grants, i.e., the innovation effect and ( b ) the role of plant variety protection in facilitating the flow of varieties across countries, i.e., the transferability effect.     

Financial Distress and Bank Lending Relationships

We use a unique data set of bank loans to examine the wealth effects on lead lending banks when their borrowers suffer financial distress. We find a significant negative announcement return for the lead lending bank when a major corporate borrower announces default or bankruptcy. Banks with higher exposure to the distressed firm have larger negative announcement-period returns. The existence of a past lending relationship with the distressed firm results in larger wealth declines for the bank shareholders. Finally, financial distress also has a significant negative effect on borrower's returns.     

Simplified estimation of parameters in a cauchy distribution

Simplified estimators of the location and scale parameters of a Cauchy distribution are constructed along the lines developed by D ixon [3, 4]. Symmetrically censored samples are considered. The efficiency of these estimators is shown to be high enough to make them useful in practice.