Einzelbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Responses to externally induced innovation: Their effects on organizational performance

Innovation may be externally induced; that is, an external threat or challenge such as the accident at the Three Mile Island (TMl) nuclear power plant sets the stage for outside parties such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to propose that new practices be adopted. Managers then must make choices about how their organizations will respond. This study shows how prior performance can affect organizational responses and how these responses in turn can affect subsequent performance. Vicious cycles are shown to exist in which poorly performing organizations respond with rule-bound behavior, a response which only perpetuates their poor performance. Better-performing organizations, on the other hand, retain their autonomy, a response which reinforces their strong performance.     

Olive oil in the EC: Gift from the gods or Trojan Horse

The European Commission fears huge olive oil surpluses as a result of Spain's accession to the Community. It believes it can prevent this, at great cost, by increasing consumer aid for olive oil and adopting a protectionist policy towards other vegetable oils and fats. Thus, the burden would be shifted to consumers of other products and the outside world. Trade relations would suffer. The author considers that the Commission's analysis is unfounded and the Commission's remedies should be questioned. The author also points to possible budgetary savings in the Community's expenditure on olive oil.     

A spectral decomposition for structural VAR models

Based on structural VARs, this paper proposes a spectral decomposition which allows to infer the effects of changes in one variable on the other variables in the frequency domain. It is shown that there is a close relationship between this concept and conventional forecast error variance decomposition techniques for VARs. An empirical example demonstrates the usefulness of this additional tool in analyzing the relationships among time series.     

Information inductance and its significance for accounting

Information inductance is the process whereby the behavior of an individual is affected by the information he is required to communicate. Inductance is seen to be a formally distinct, useful and necessary concept in its own right for an informational approach to the study of behavior in social systems. This is demonstrated by reference to the particular case of accounting information—both for internal reporting in the firm and the firm's external reporting.     

Long waves,depression and innovation

Summary Schumpeter's (1939) proposition concerning long economic cycles which are given impetus by waves of radical innovations has been strongly criticized by Kuznets (1940). It is argued that in view of more recent research. Schumpeter's proposition appears to be highly realistic: First, there is evidence in recent history of a long wave pattern in indicators of general economic activity of various countries; secondly, innovation data on various definitions independently confirm that radical innovations are not distributed randomly over time but tend to cluster in the late depression and early upswing period of the long waves; thirdly, arguments are brought forward to explain the waves of innovations as an endogenous element of the long wave process.My research was supported by grants from the Dutch Ministry of Science Policy and by the Ministry of Economic Affairs.     

The Case for Economic Thought

Does the current state of the British economy provoke a sense of déjà vu? Sir Alfred Sherman, the co-founder and former Director of Studies at the Centre for Policy Studies, argues that monetarism is not enough.     

Rezension

Ohne Zusammenfassung

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Rezension

     

The Relationship Between Unsystematic Security Returns and Earnings Forecast Errors*

This paper extends the Australian evidence on the information content of earnings announcements by considering both the sign and magnitude of unexpected earnings for a sample of 120 firms in the period 1964–1972, and a further 117 firms for 1972–1980. Results at both the portfolio level and the individual security level are highly significant and are consistent with those documented in both the United States and New Zealand.     

On real interest rate persistence: the role of breaks

The role of structural breaks in long spans of ex-post real interest rates for 10 industrialized countries is studied. First, the persistence of the real interest is assessed with newly proposed low-frequency tests of Müller and Watson (2008). Second, the test of Leybourne et al. (2007) for a change in persistence of a time series is applied to the real interest rate. The results show that real interest rates over the full sample period do not fit a covariance-stationary or unit-root model, nor a fractionally integrated, near-unit-root or local-level model. Instead, the persistence of real rates changes over time and there are periods when the real rate is covariance-stationary and other periods when it follows a unit-root process.