The Ethical Outlook of Micro Business Operators

This paper reports the findings of an investigation into the ethical outlook of micro business operators. The study was conducted in Australia and is the first such examination of ethical perspectives in this segment of the business population. Micro business is internationally recognizable, economically significant, and strongly entrepreneurial, and it has a high level of control over the values it enacts. The study indicates that ethical considerations are important to Australian micro business operators. While no one single ethical perspective was dominant, nonreligious beliefs and principles were found to be the most important determinant of their ethical values. Some variation was discovered in operator attitudes based on age, gender, and education.     

Developing a Leadership-Rich Culture: The Missing Link to Creating a Market-Focused Organization

Much has been written about the need for organizations to be more market-focused. Authors have addressed a myriad of constructs which promote the realization of the marketing concept. This article examines leadership and its development in the context of creating a market-focused organization. It links the areas of leadership development, leadership skills, and internal customer culture to the strategy development process. The emphasis in a leadership-rich culture is on the relationships between leaders, followers, and customers. This idea parallels existing thought in the relationship marketing literature touting the benefits of relationships in buyer-seller partnerships and network structures. In addition, this article offers a leadership deployment process to create a market-focused organization from top to bottom.     

A meta-analytic review of effectuation and venture performance

Though much research in entrepreneurship makes the fundamental assumption that opportunities are found, new work is emerging which questions this core tenet. Effectuation, for example, positions the entrepreneur as co-creator of opportunities, together with committed stakeholders. In this study, we conduct a meta-analysis of the articles published in the Journal of Business Venturing, summarizing data on 9897 new ventures to connect three of the principles of effectuation positively with new venture performance. In so doing, we offer both specific insight into precisely measuring effectuation and a general method for extracting variables from prior work to measure new constructs.     

New Political Economy

Alberto Alesina and Nouriel Roubini with Gerald D. Cohen, Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy
Avinash K. Dixit, The Making of Economic Policy: A Transaction-Cost Politics Perspective.
Gordon Pepper, Inside Thatcher's Monetarist Revolution     

An alternative approach to determining present and future value interest factors for annuities due

This note presents an alternative approach to determining present and future annuities due interest factors. Many students find the adjustment to present and future ordinary annuities interest factors confusing and, consequently, memorize the rules without fully understanding their concepts. We encourage the use of an intuitive approach that makes adjustments with only one simple rule.     

Spillover effects of human service facilities in a racially segmented housing market

Previous studies of human service facility spillovers on residential property values have been inconclusive, and have failed to take into account the effects of racial segmentation of housing markets. Likewise, studies of racial discrimination in urban housing markets and price differentials between white and nonwhite areas of the city have failed to consider the impacts of service facilities on prices. This study develops an hedonic price model of housing services in a racially segmented housing market, which considers a variety of human service facilities and their spillover effects. Model results for Oakland, California in 1976 indicate that facilities significantly affect housing prices both positively and negatively, and that these effects vary by racial submarket. Implications of these findings for the interpretation of past discrimination studies, facility impact studies, and social policy are considered.     

Consumption asset pricing and the term structure

We investigate the relationship between consumption and the term structure using U.K. interest rate data. We demonstrate that the term structure contains information about future economic activity as implied by the benchmark time separable power utility consumption based capital asset pricing model (C-CAPM) since the yield spread has forecasting power for future consumption growth. Further, we analyze the ability of this benchmark and two alternative models which adopt utility functions characterized by non-separability, namely, the extension to the habit formation model of Campbell and Cochrane (1999) proposed by Wachter (2006) and the housing C-CAPM proposed by Piazzesi, Schneider and Tuzel (2007). Our findings are supportive of the habit formation specification of Wachter (2006), other models fail to yield economically plausible parameter values.     

Issues in New Political Economy: An Overview

A brief overview of the historical background, nature, and rapid growth in volume and scope of new political economy since the early 1980s is provided. the paper continues with some general reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the new political economy approach, illustrated by the other contributions to this special issue of the Journal of Economic Surveys . The final Section summarises these contributions.     

Local search and the evolution of technological capabilities

The assumption that ‘local search’ constrains the direction of corporate R&D is central in evolutionary perspectives on technological change and competition. In this paper, we propose a network-analytic approach for identifying the evolution of firms' technological positions. The approach (1) permits graphical and quantitative assessments of the extent to which firms' search behavior is locally bounded, and (2) enables firms to be positioned and grouped according to the similarities in their innovative capabilities. The utility of the proposed framework is demonstrated by an analysis of strategic partnering and the evolution of the technological positions of the 10 largest Japanese semiconductor producers from 1982 to 1992.     

Shop-floor attitudes to industrial relations change

Whilst the shop-floor workers interviewed showed a high degree of interest in, and knowledge of, the Industrial Relations Bill, there were deep divisions over the necessity of introducing the law into the industrial relations system and of the results of doing so.