Looming stations: Valuing transport innovations in historical context

We investigate the impact of transport innovations on the productivity of urban locations in 1890–1936 Berlin, Germany. We find an increase in land value of up to 2.5% per 100 m decline in distance to urban railway station.     

Foreign informational lobbying can enhance tourism: Evidence from the Caribbean

There exist legal channels for informational lobbying of US policymakers by foreign principals. Foreign governments and private sector principals frequently and intensively use this institutional channel to lobby on trade and tourism issues. This paper empirically studies whether such lobbying effectively achieves its goal of trade promotion in the context of Caribbean tourism, and suggests the potential for using foreign lobbying as a vehicle for development. Panel data are used to explore and quantify the association between foreign lobbying by Caribbean principals and US tourist arrivals to Caribbean destinations. A variety of sensitivity analyses support the finding of a strong association. The policy implications are obvious and potentially important for developing countries.     

Congenital learning in the Spanish telecommunication industry

Knowledge provided by a firm's founder(s) is one of the most important success factors for SMEs. This paper aims to identify the impact of the founder's knowledge on business performance in today's organization. It is with this in mind that we propose a specialized organizational learning process, which we refer to as the congenital learning process, by which the firm transforms the tacit and explicit knowledge of the founder into knowledge which is available to the firm and its members. The research model and hypothesized relationships are empirically tested using the structural equation modeling (SEM) approach, validated by factor analysis of 130 SMEs in the Spanish telecommunications sector. Two structural equation models, derived from the literature, have been used, resulting in the conclusion that organizational performance is positively affected by the transfer and transformation of knowledge as long as the organization has implemented processes that lead to the creation of what we refer to as an open organizational context.     

Modelling the Extensive Margin of World Trade: New Evidence on GATT and WTO Membership

Recent literature has argued that, contrary to the results of a seminal paper by Rose (2004), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO) membership does promote bilateral trade, at least for developed economies and if membership includes non‐formal compliance. We review the literature to identify open issues. We then develop a simple extension of the gravity model that gives rise to an extensive country margin of trade separating positive trade from zero trade country pairs. The model is used to identify WTO membership effects at both the intensive and the extensive margins. Empirical estimation of this model, based on Poisson pseudo‐maximum likelihood methods with exporter and importer fixed effects, allows us to readdress the empirical issue of whether GATT/WTO membership does or does not promote trade. We find that GATT membership was successful on the extensive margin of world trade but not on the intensive margin. For the recent WTO episode (1995–2008), we find consistent and robust evidence for a substantial trade‐creating role of membership which is driven primarily by the intensive margin. WTO membership results in higher bilateral trade of about 40 per cent.     

Corporate response to an ethical incident: the case of an energy company in New Zealand

The ethical behaviour and social responsibility of private companies, and in particular large corporations, is an important area of enquiry in contemporary social, economic and political thinking. In the past, a company's behaviour would be considered responsible as long as it stayed within the law of the society in which it operated or existed. Although this may be necessary, it is no longer sufficient. In this paper, we examine an energy company's response to an ethical incident in New Zealand which prompted different responses across the country about the role of business in society. Thus, we argue that when a corporation is accused of unethical behaviour, executives of the company are usually compelled to offer responses to defend their actions and corporate image. Further, we use communicative response model, social issue life cycle theory, and organisational learning, to analyse the incident and how the company responded. Using social issues life cycle theory and organisational learning theory, we demonstrate that sustained pressure can potentially trigger a change of strategy that may serve to improve the ethical posture of a corporation and thereby improve the corporate image long term. We conclude that, although corporations may understand the significance of social issues to the performance and success of their business, this same understanding does not always translate into meaningful social action.     

IMMIGRATION AND NATIVE WELFARE*

This article unifies two approaches for identifying the welfare and wage effects of immigration, one emphasizing the immigration surplus, the other stressing a potential welfare loss due to a terms‐of‐trade effect. We decompose the native welfare effect into a standard complementarity effect, augmented by a Stolper–Samuelson effect, and a terms‐of‐trade effect. We illustrate the welfare and wage effects of endogenous goods prices in a stylized‐specific factors model. Finally, we calibrate this model to a generic OECD economy and provide simulation results. The key insight is that endogenous goods prices play a quantitatively important role, sometimes even overturning received results.     

Corporate Headquarters Relocation: Evidence from the Capital Markets

This paper assesses the stock market reaction to announcements of corporate headquarters relocations and examines financial and geographical factors related to wealth effects and factors that influence the decision to relocate corporate headquarters. The results indicate that announcements of relocations are associated with significant positive stock price effects. On average, the stock price of relocating firms increases by 1.29% during the two-day period around the announcement. Abnormal returns are positively related to the availability of labor and negatively related to the cost of living in the new location and the change in employment levels. A logit analysis indicates that the probability of a firm relocating is partially determined by the firm size and the rental expenses/sales ratio. The results also indicate that firm size, the employment/asset ratio levels, and listing in the NYSE/AMEX affect the decision to relocate to a Fortune-ranked city. Finally, firms relocating to Fortune -ranked cities are characterized by a high level of insider ownership relative to firms moving to non-ranked cities.     

Estimating Disequilibrium Cost Elasticities in Agricultural Production

A restricted cost function is estimated using annual data for western Canadian agriculture over the period 1961–84. Using the parameter estimates, disequilibrium cost elasticities are calculated. The elasticities for the sector indicate that the ex ante market prices of quasi-fixed inputs were higher than their shadow values. That is, quasi-fixed factors were underutilized during the sample period. Excess agricultural land contributed most to the cost of disequilibrium.     

Ethics of managing interpersonal conflict in organizations

Although managers spend over twenty percent of their time in conflict management, organization theorists have provided very few guidelines to help them do their job ethically. This paper attempts to provide some guidelines so that organizational members can use the styles of handling interpersonal conflict, such as integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising, with their superiors, subordinates, and peers ethically and effectively. It has been argued in this paper that, in general, each style of handling interpersonal conflict is appropriate if it is used to attain organization's proper end.M. Afzalur Rahim is Professor of Management at Western Kentucky University. He holds B.Com. (Hons.) and M.Com, M.B.A., and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Rahim teaches courses on organizational behavior, strategic management, and management of organizational conflict. He is the author of over 65 articles and book chapters, five cases, and three research instruments on conflict and power. He is the author of six books, four of which are on conflict management. He is the editor of theInternational Journal of Conflict Management and theInternational Journal of Organizational Analysis. He is the founder of the International Association for Conflict Management and President of the International Conference on Advances in Management.Jan Edward Garrett is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Western Kentucky University. His recent publications include Persons, Kinds and Corporations: An Aristotelian Perspective, which appeared inPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Unredistributable Corporate Moral Responsibility, which appeared in this journal.Gabriel F. Buntzman is Associate Professor of Management at Western Kentucky University. His current research interests concern relationships between ethics, conflict and the strategic management of organizations. His work in the area of conflict management has appeared in theInternational Journal of Conflict Management, theJournal of Psychology, and three books.     

Are Private Vices Public Finance Virtues? An Empirical Investigation

The article investigates the impact of widely accepted private vices (smoking and alcohol and gasoline consumption) on public finance. Introducing the concept of “vice-related deficit,” which aggregates the positive effects on public finance on the revenue side (cash inflows) and the negative effects on the expenditures side (cash outflows), the article looks upon cigarette, alcohol, and gasoline consumption as determinants of vice-related deficit for a number of 68 countries for year 2012. We found that smoking had a negative effect on vice-related budget balance, while alcohol and gasoline consumption had a positive effect. As control variables, we used life expectancy and size of the economy, both having been found with negative effects. The results prove robust to different sample adjustments. We also found that the negative effect of private vices on public finance is stronger for Christian countries than for non-Christian countries. Policy recommendations were made accordingly.