Virtual Instant Global Entrepreneurship

International entrepreneurship must be hard, because so few firms attempt it. If true, perhaps it is hard because it requires knowledge about people and places far away. It is hard because it requires mastering processes to handle business across borders. And it is hard because it requires trust in the processes and eventually in the customers elsewhere. These three elements, knowledge, mastery and trust in international business are essential to the success of international entrepreneurship for SMEs.     

Rejuvenating wood carving industry in Taiwan Sanyi： A perspective of strategic management

This research aimed at providing suggestions to rejuvenate the wood carving industry in Taiwan Sanyi. The authors conducted interviews with representative store keepers and sculptors to gain industrial insights, and applied the strategic matrix analysis developed by Dr. Seetoo to examine industrial conditions and formulate strategic suggestions for wood carving companies. The industry was found lack of market orientation, which was considered as the critical factor of the long term depression. However, a market of tourism for nostalgic and cultural experience started developing in the near area, providing opportunities for Sanyi wood carving industry to recover. The main suggestions the authors made are （1） restructuring the product scope to respond to the market, and （2） branding with resorts in near area.     

Patterns of Property Tax Exploitation Produced By Infrequent Assessments

A bstract . Out of dace assessments of real property for ad valorem taxation may give rise to systematic inequities in the distribution of the tax burden. One such inequity is the exploitation of a taxing jurisdiction's core area by its periphery. We provide an explanation of how such exploitation may arise. This explanation is tested empirically by observing the patterns of assessment in a sample of Pennsylvania school districts. We find a consistent pattern of overpayments, supporting an hypothesis that core areas are exploited by peripheral areas. The overpayments to school districts could be claimed by city governments.     

Democracy and trade: an empirical study

The theoretical discussion on globalization has suggested that there are linkages between democracy and trade, although the direction of influence is less certain. Formal empirical studies remain scarce, and have often focused on the question of whether democratic regimes influence trade policy, as opposed to the actual relationship between democracy and trade. This paper seeks to answer the question, “Do democracies trade more?” by applying the gravity equation to a large dataset of bilateral trade data for the period 1948–1999, while taking into account the role of democracy. It finds that democracy is positively related to trade flows, but only after controlling for trade pair heterogeneity. In addition, it makes the case for studies of this nature to draw a distinction between trade flows in the pre- and post-1990s period of rapid democratization as well as between developed and developing countries.     

It is merely a matter of time: A meta‐analysis of the causality between environmental performance and financial performance

Research on the relationship between corporate environmental performance (CEP) and financial performance (CFP) continuously receives high attention in both general media and academic publications. One central issue concerns the causal effects between the two constructs. Because existing primary literature is characterized by its heterogeneous study designs and mixed empirical evidence, the aim of this paper is to explicitly shed light on the causality effects between CEP and CFP by means of a meta‐analysis of 893 empirical estimates from 142 CEP–CFP studies. Our findings suggest that in the short run (1 year), financial resources can increase a firm's environmental performance as proposed by the slack resources hypothesis; however, the effects disappear in the long run (after more than 1 year). Conversely, increasing environmental performance has no short‐term effect on a corporate financial performance, whereas a firm significantly benefits in the long term, which is in accordance with the Porter hypothesis. Overall, our results show that the causality between environmental performance and financial performance depends on the time horizon.     

Optimal Consumption-Portfolio Policies With Habit Formation1

This is a companion paper to the authors ‘Asset Prices in an Exchange Economy with Habit Formation” in Econometrica which focuses on consumption demand and asset pricing when preferences are habit forming. Here we prove existence of optimal consumption-portfolio policies for (i) utility functions for which the marginal cost of consumption (MCC) interacts with the habit formation process and satisfies a recursive integral equation with forward functional Lipschitz integrand and (ii) utilities for which the MCC is independent of the standard of living and satisfies a recursive integral equation with locally Lipschitz integrand. Result (i) is demonstrated here for the first time. Result (ii) is novel and enables us to consider Cobb-Douglas utilities without placing lower bounds on the system of Arrow-Debreu prices. We also review and extend our earlier results in the linear case; in particular, we provide new insights about the structure of optimal portfolios. Additional new features of the model include the possibility of finite marginal utility of consumption at zero and habit formation mechanisms with stochastic coefficients. an extension to a financial market model with general processes is outlined. A byproduct of the analysis is a set of fixed-point theorems for recursive integral equations with forward functional Lipschitz or locally Lipschitz integrands.     

Endogenous change and the economic theory of regulation

This paper extends the economic theory of regulation to include endogenous regulatory change. It outlines conditions under which endogenously rising deadweight costs of regulation can alter the policy equilibrium, even if those rising costs are fully anticipated. Within this framework, alternative wealth redistribution mechanisms can alter the equilibrium path if they bias interest groups' organization costs asymmetrically. The history of natural gas regulation is broadly consistent with this theory.