The HWWA econometric model for economic forecasts

Econometric models are often used to forecast economic developments. Does the use of computer-based econometric procedures help sharpen our view of the future or are we blinkered by the supposed ‘precision’ of such models? What problems arise when building national economic models and when these models are used for forecasting purposes? These issues are examined with reference to the HWWA model.     

“We make the shoes,you make the story” Teenage girls’ experiences of fashion: Bricolage,tactics and narrative identity

This article explores the ways that French teenage girls use fashion discourse to construct their evolving identity from their recently left childhood to their future as fully grown women. Verbatim texts of 14 phenomenological discussions concerning clothing, accessories, make‐up and fashion are interpreted using the concepts of bricolage (Lévi‐Strauss), tactics (Certeau) and narrative identity (Ric?ur). The findings resonate with Thompson and Haytko’s portrayal of a dialogical relationship between consumers and a system of countervailing fashion meanings and with Murray’s exposition of a dialectical and discursive tension between sign‐experimentation and sign‐domination. But beyond this we elucidate the process by which teenagers also acquire, from personal social milieu, skills and tactics through which they toy with preconstrained sartorial symbolism to construct the plot line of their own lives which, in turn, reflects their past, defines their present self and presages their future.     

Hypocrisies of Fairness: Towards a More Reflexive Ethical Base in Organizational Justice Research and Practice

Despite becoming one of the most active research areas in organizational behavior, the field of organizational justice has stayed at a safe distance from moral questions of values, as well as from critical questions regarding the implications of fairness considerations on the status quo of power relations in today’s organizations. We argue that both organizational justice research and the managerial practices it informs lack reflexivity. This manifests itself in two possible hypocrisies of fairness. Managers may apply organizational justice knowledge but fail to increase the actual levels of fairness in employment relations. Researchers, on the other hand, may claim to promote fairness through their work while actually providing managers with tools that enable or even encourage them to feed the hypocrisy of fairness identified above. As␣part of our argument, we identify three types of mechanisms managers may use to influence and manage the formation of fairness perceptions. We consider how the exercise of power is related to the potential application of organizational justice knowledge across individual, interpersonal and social levels. Our approach makes power dynamics and moral implications salient, and questions the purely subjectivist view of justice researchers that deliberately discards normative aspects. The questions opened up by considering alternative mechanisms for creating fairness perceptions have led us to formulate a research agenda for organizational justice research that takes multiple stakeholder interests, power dynamics and ethical implications into account. We believe that the fields of organizational justice and normative justice can benefit from combined research. Marion Fortin (Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the Durham Business School, Durham University. Marion previously worked in the financial industry and also was a visiting scholar at the Stern School, NYU. Marion’s main research interest lies in the role of justice judgments in the workplace. Her current and past research projects also involve issues of organizational change, power mechanisms, and the role of emotions in organizations. Martin R. Fellenz (Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the School of Business, University of Dublin, Trinity College. His research interests include organizational justice, organizational transformation and change, teaching and learning, and the development of theory and theory schools. He regularly contributes to executive education programs in a variety of countries and consults with leading international public, private and not-for-profit organizations on matters of leadership, management development, and organizational transformation. A previous version of this paper was originally presented at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, for the 14th International Symposium on Ethics, Business and Society: “Towards a Comprehensive Integration of Ethics Into Management: Problems and Prospects”. May 18–19, 2006).     

From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning

Reviewing landscape developments in the last decades evidently shows that in the future most pressing changes can be expected for the land surface. This indispensably calls for strategic approaches based on visions and transdisciplinary creativity. Hence, this paper critically reviews the Leitbild concept, an idea on spatial planning which has been widely discussed in the German-speaking planning literature but which has received scant attention elsewhere. Although the term has been translated as a ‘vision’, this paper shows that the concept is far richer in its content than these casual translations suggest. The paper shows that it defines a particular paradigm for landscape planning that embodies a transdisciplinary approach in which lay-people and experts develop both goals and strategies for realising their joint visions. A systematic overview of the key characteristics that make up the Leitbild approach is provided and set in relation to already available approaches for decision makers. Although there are similarities between the Leitbild approach and other planning and decision-support tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA) and Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA-sust), the paper shows that the particular combination of issues considered when developing a Leitbild makes it distinctive. Through an iterative process, the development of a Leitbild allows new approaches to spatial planning in which space and place can be considered as a social construct, and in which the values and understandings of local actors can be better represented.     

Affirmative action programs and business ownership among minorities and women

Affirmative action programs are commonly used as a means to level the playing field for minority- and women-owned firms in public procurement markets, and therefore may be a positive factor in business entry and survival. To the extent that affirmative action programs also apply to traditional labor markets, however, they may alter the opportunity cost of starting a business. We utilize the elimination of affirmative action in California and Washington States through voter initiatives to identify the effect of affirmative action on minority and female self-employment rates. In our base specifications, we find evidence of modest increases in self-employment among minorities and women in both California and Washington after elimination of affirmative action, consistent with the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of starting a business fell due to restricting opportunities in the traditional labor markets. The sign of the estimated effect, however, is not uniformly positive when considering specific race/gender groups, and the statistical significance of the main results is somewhat sensitive to the choice of control states.     

Developing entrepreneurial attitudes and management competence among scientists: the Groupe ESC Lyon's experience

Many studies have shown the role played by scientific or engineering universities as incubators of new technology-based firms or new knowledge-based firms. But, at least in Europe, very few cases show business schools developing an entrepreneurial spirit and management knowledge among scientists, or nurturing new knowledge-based firms.

In this field, we present as a case the role played by the Groupe ESC Lyon since 1984.     

Corporate governance and risk management: The role of risk management and compensation committees

This paper examines the role of compensation and risk committees in managing and monitoring the risk behaviour of Australian financial firms in the period leading up to the global financial crisis (2006–2008). This empirical study of 711 observations of financial sector firms demonstrates how the coordination of risk management and compensation committees reduces information asymmetry. The study shows that the composition of the risk and compensation committees is positively associated with risk, which, in turn, is associated with firm performance. More importantly, information asymmetry is reduced when a director is a member of both the risk and compensation committees which moderate the negative association between risk and firm performance for firms with high risk.     

Festival Tourism: A Contributor to Sustainable Local Economic Development?

Towns, villages and cities are increasingly keen to share their culture, environment and spending opportunities with visitors by the promotion of festivals. The fact that income can be generated by such festivals is clear but the true value of visitor spend is more complex to calculate with accuracy. This paper considers the contribution of festival tourism to sustainable local economic development. A festival typology is created that broadly identifies three festival types termed 'home-grown', 'tourist-tempter' and 'big-bang'. Here three festivals matching the typology are analysed against the model of sustainable local economic development activity created by the environment charity Forum for the Future. Results suggest that although festivals may have the potential to provide opportunities for sustainable local economic development such opportunities frequently remain unexploited. Nevertheless, some festival scenarios do indicate a closer match to the model of sustainable local economic development activity than others. This paper analyses why this should be and suggests ways in which festival tourism's contribution to local economies might begin to be better understood, and consequently, improved.     

Don’t blame the P2P file-sharers: the impact of free music downloads on the purchase of music CDs in Canada

This study measures the extent to which P2P file-sharing activities act as substitutes or complements to music purchases in markets for CDs. The paper breaks with the mainstream economics approach which dominates the music file-sharing discussion. Whereas such models assume relationships at the micro level (e.g. between file-sharing and purchases) based on observations made at the macro level, our evolutionary economics approach measures the direct effects using micro data representative of the Canadian population. The behavioral incentives underpinning free music downloading, novel to this paper, are the multiple effects of: ‘unwillingness to pay’ (market substitution), ‘hear before buying’ (market creation), ‘not wanting to buy a whole album’ (market segmentation), and ‘not available in the CD format or on electronic pay-sites’ (market creation). Although the two first mentioned incentives significantly influence CD album purchases—i.e. there is a negative and significant market substitution effect and a positive and significant market creation effect—on the whole, these two effects ‘cancel’ one another out, leading to no association between the number of P2P files downloaded and CD album sales.     

A method for calculating export supply and import demand elasticities

This article has a dual aim. First, it sets out to underline a learning-by-exporting effect in Spanish firms between 1991 and 2002. It further seeks to outline the conditions allowing firms to benefit from these spillover effects. Using a propensity score matching method, a group of firms having entered the export market (treatment group) is compared with a similar group of non-exporting firms (control group), and difference-in-differences regressions are carried out. The results show a cumulative productivity differential of 32% for the first four years of exporting, with continuous improvement in productivity. After three years of exporting, productivity gain is still approximately 10%. This study shows that increases in capacity utilisation and competitive pressure from foreign markets are insufficient to explain this causal link between exporting and total factor productivity (TFP). It is thus possible to deduce the presence of a learning-by-exporting effect, benefiting firms with sufficiently qualified employees and which are already engaged in international relations (due to foreign suppliers and/or foreign equity participation).