The effects of the keiretsu on the export performance of Japanese companies: help or hindrance?

This study investigates the effect that membership in a financial keiretsu has on the export performance of Japanese manufacturing companies. Companies that belong to one of the six major financial keiretsu are found to have lower export ratios than similar companies who are not members. The negative effects of keiretsu membership appear confined to producer goods companies where intergroup linkages such as preferential trading relationships are tightest. Additional evidence from the producer goods sector showing that keiretsu members do less well on other measures of company performance supports the argument that the cartel-like properties sometimes ascribed to the keiretsu actually reduce competitiveness, thus dampening export performance. In general, the data do not support recommendations that non-Japanese companies might look to keiretsu-type alliances as an organizational strategy that will lead to competitive advantage in global markets. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shadow pricing diversity in U. S. national forests

Tobit estimation of the market value of timber sales in national forests of North Carolina demonstrates the important effect of stand diversity on the formulation of bid prices for mixed-species timber tracts. The hedonic model generates a shadow price for diversity according to changes in bid prices, an effective shift in the demand curve for auctioned tracts due to stand diversity attributes. This approach contrasts with traditional shadow price analyses that focus on the supply effects of environmental constraints. Results are corrected for the effects of bidder participation, market conditions, production costs, and other stand attributes. Econometric results demonstrate that stand heterogeneity is a highly significant factor influencing the market value of timber sales from national forests of the Appalachian region. Greater heterogeneity results in lower bid prices for timber sales, indicating a positive shadow price for maintenance of stand diversity.     

Corporate credit risk modeling and the macroeconomy

Despite a surge in the research efforts put into modeling credit and default risk during the past decade, few studies have incorporated the impact that macroeconomic conditions have on business defaults. In this paper, we estimate a duration model to explain the survival time to default for borrowers in the business loan portfolio of a major Swedish bank over the period 1994–2000. The model takes both firm-specific characteristics, such as accounting ratios and payment behaviour, loan-related information, and the prevailing macroeconomic conditions into account. The output gap, the yield curve and consumers’ expectations of future economic development have significant explanatory power for the default risk of firms. We also compare our model with a frequently used model of firm default risk that conditions only on firm-specific information. The comparison shows that while the latter model can make a reasonably accurate ranking of firms’ according to default risk, our model, by taking macro conditions into account, is also able to account for the absolute level of risk.     

The Corporate Identity Management Process Revisited

This paper has two objectives. It attempts firstly to define a number of related concepts in the corporate identity management process and secondly, to update one of the earlier models of this process. Recent developments in the corporate identity management theory are discussed and models of this process are reviewed. An up-to-date model of the corporate identity management process is proposed.     

Favor trading in public good provision

Favor trading is common. We do something nice for someone and they do something nice in return. Several motives might underlie such behavior, including altruism, strategic motives, and direct or indirect positive reciprocity. It is not yet well-understood how these fit together to affect behavior, how they interact in various institutional structures, and how they play out over time. We use a laboratory experiment to study the elements and dynamics of favor trading in a particular setting: the private provision of a public good. In our experiment, giving subjects the ability to practice targeted reciprocity by making a simple, low-cost change in information provision increases contributions to the public good by 14 %. Subjects reward group members who have previously been generous to them and withhold rewards from ungenerous group members. Strategic concerns cannot explain all of this behavior, and it must be at least partly due to direct reciprocity. When someone cannot directly benefit from favor trading, he gives much less to the public good. People thus excluded from the “circle of reciprocity” provide a clean and strict test of indirect reciprocity. Contrary to previous studies in the literature, we do not observe indirect reciprocity.     

Working time, employment, and work sharing: Evidence from Sweden

We study three questions which are important for work sharing to increase employment. First, is there a negative long-run relation between working time and employment? Second, are hours per worker exogenous with respect to wages and employment? Third, can policy makers influence actual hours per worker? We formulate a theoretical model for employment, hours per worker, production, and real wages. A VAR model with cointegrating constraints is estimated by maximum likelihood using Swedish private sector data 1970:1–1990:4. We find (i) no long-run relation between hours per worker and employment, (ii) that hours per worker are endogenous with respect to the estimation of long-run parameters, and (iii) that legislated working time and hours per worker are related to each other in the long run. First version received: September 1997/final version accepted: June 1999     

From command economy to market economy with a human face: The potential role of the stakeholder approach

This article questions the wisdom of the tendency to adopt managerial capitalism, in its purest form, as the only guiding principle of the new organizational philosophy now evolving in Eastern Europe. The article's main thesis is that following the demise of the command economy, the stakeholder approach can play a pivotal role in providing social legitimacy to organizations attempting to transform and revitalize in the newly created market economy in Eastern Europe. Rather than viewing maximization of profits to the stockholders as the enterprise's sole responsibility, this approach calls for a management strategy that matches the enterprise's “values” to the “values” of all its stakeholders optimizing, over the long-term, the net (social and economic) value added to society. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Manly Boys and Enterprising Dreamers: Business Ideology and the Construction of the Boy Consumer, 1910-1930

Early twentieth-century advertising discourses on the archetypalboy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of consumption thatbroke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven femaleshopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prizedtechnological innovation and influenced parents and peers. Whiletouting boys'ample consume appetites, promoters of the boy consumealso depicted boys'interest in advertised goods as worthy ofentrepreneurial-minded self-improvers. The ideal of the boyconsumer thus harmonized the potentially hedonistic ethos ofconsumerism with older ideals of productivity and industriousness.Newideologies of manhood that valorized enthusiasm, loyalty,and salesmanship confirmed the boy consumer's manly vitality.