Trade Liberalization,Nature of Mergers and Employment

This paper investigates the roles of comparative advantage and market size in the international location of manufacturing production. Building on the conventional Helpman and Krugman (1985) general equilibrium framework, our analysis extends the present literature by incorporating both effects in the same model, while allowing trade costs to vary almost continuously from autarky to free trade. The main result of our exercise is that market size effects offset comparative advantage if countries have similar factor proportions. A large country with a slight comparative disadvantage in manufacturing production may thus be a net exporter of manufactures. A small country with the same comparative disadvantage would be a net importer of manufactures. When countries are very dissimilar in their relative factor endowments, land-abundant countries specialize in the production of food, irrespective of market size, if manufactures are a labour-intensive sector. Labour-rich countries of any size are manufacture cores. However, land-abundant countries with large markets can sustain a domestic manufacturing industry until trade costs are very low, and in some cases only specialize in agriculture at free trade.     

Urbanisation and Food Insecurity Risks: Assessing the Role of Human Development

The phenomenon of rapid urbanisation across the world has become a topic of increased scholarly inquiry. Yet, little attention has been paid to how urban growth affects countries’ food security and whether this association is modified by a country's level of development. The present study aims to fill this lacuna by examining the association between urbanisation and food security applying statistical modelling. The analysis uses country-level data, from the World Development Indicators and the United Nations’ World Urbanization Prospects. Using a Food Insecurity Risk Index (FIRI) as the outcome variable, the results confirm a significant negative impact of urban growth on food security at the country level. It further finds that rapidly urbanising countries with the lowest levels of human development are most at risk of food insecurity.     

Causal inferences on the cost overruns and schedule delays of large‐scale U.S. federal defense and intelligence acquisition programs

A study was undertaken to understand why cost overruns and schedule delays have occurred and continue to occur on large‐scale U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence community programs. Analysis of data from this study infers the causes of cost overruns and schedule slips on large‐scale U.S. federal defense and intelligence acquisition programs to ineffective human resources policies and practices, consolidation of the aerospace industry, and too many stakeholders. In this article, each inferred cause and the resulting systematic effects are discussed in detail. Moreover, block diagrams have been developed for each cause and illustrate the sequential flow from inferred cause to systematic effects and reveal key interrelationships among each cause.     

Rural women leaders

This research project was designed to study the determinants of leadership development in rural women. The first phase of the study involved individual interviews with women recognized as leaders within a rural community. Each of the 25 rural women leaders interviewed was raised on a farm or in a community with a population smaller than 2,000. The second phase of the study was administered via Survey Monkey to 133 women using a modified version of the Review of Personal Effectiveness with Locus of control (ROPELOC) instrument, which included the key domains of interest and was expanded to include additional questions focusing on unique challenges to leadership among women living in rural communities. The project used leadership‐related community groups as an entry point to identify women across rural Kansas for the survey. The results from these two methods identified six themes: lifelong learners, bias and discrimination, self‐efficacy and overcoming barriers, community influence and social capital, leadership mentors, and expression of leadership.     

Pensions and fertility incentives

Abstract.  This paper discusses the welfare implications of a pay‐as‐you‐go pension reform by introducing a child benefit in an endogenous fertility setting. In the model of a small open economy, higher fertility is associated with a reduction of lifetime labour supply. The optimum share of fertility‐related pensions is always below unity, but generally positive. The former is true, since individuals do not take into account the impact of their labour supply choice on the parent generation. It is demonstrated that child allowances are equivalent to fertility‐related pensions as instruments to achieve the optimum allocation. JEL classification: H23, H55, J13     

Fish Consumers: Environmental Attitudes and Purchasing Behavior

The objective of this study was to expand on the limited awareness of the U.S. fish consumer. Measures were tested through a Web-based national survey. The final survey consisted of 40 questions, including environmental awareness, food neophobia, fish consumption, reasons for consuming fish, and demographic variables. Correlations and t tests were used to analyze relationships between eating fish in restaurants and other variables. Hierarchical cluster analysis was used to segment respondents into two groups based on their environmental awareness and neophylic/neophobic attitudes. EcoFish consumers were more likely to be male, eat fish for health and the environment, and eat fish at restaurants significantly more than the Indifferent Fish consumers. Restaurants can use these results to market to eco-friendly, health-conscious fish consumers.     

Leadership in your midst: tapping the hidden strengths of minority executives

All companies value leadership-some of them enough to invest dearly in cultivating it. But few management teams seem to value one engine of leadership development that is right under their noses, churning out the kind of talent they need most. It's the complicated, overburdened but very rich lives of their minority managers. Minority professionals-particularly women of color-are called upon inordinately to lend their skills and guidance to activities outside their jobs. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, who heads the Center for Work-Life Policy, and her coauthors, Carolyn Buck Luce of Ernst & Young and Cornel West of Princeton, present new research on the extent to which minority professionals take on community service and other responsibilities outside the workplace and more than their share of recruiting, mentoring, and committee work within the workplace. These invisible lives, argue the authors, can be a source of competitive strength if companies can learn to recognize and further cultivate the cultural capital they represent. But it's hard to convince minority professionals that their employer respects and values their off-hours responsibilities. A lack of trust keeps many people from revealing much about their personal lives. The authors outline four ways companies can leverage hidden skills: Develop a new level of awareness of minority professionals' invisible lives; appreciate the outsize burdens these professionals carry and try to lighten them; build trust by putting teeth into diversity goals; and, to finish the job of leadership development, help minorities reflect on their off-hours experiences, extract and generalize the lessons, and apply what's been learned in other settings.     

Exploring the Curvature of the Relationship Between HRM–CSR and Corporate Financial Performance

Journal of Business Ethics - This article contributes to the general literature on the relationship between corporate social performance and corporate financial performance, as well as to the...     

Teaching Business Ethics Through Strategically Integrated Micro-Insertions

This article identifies an integrated teaching strategy that was originally developed for engineers, the so-called ‘micro-insertion’ approach, as a practical and effective means to teach ethics at business schools. It is argued that instructors can incorporate not only generic or thematic learning objectives for students into this method (i.e., the intended content of what is being taught: in our case, an underlying ethical base for doing business), but also do so via a strategically integrated approach regarding the appropriate mix and timing of these micro-insertions. With this in mind, we propose a qualitative and example-based approach that endeavors to provide a versatile way for business teachers to incorporate ethics into their general business classes. We also present a conceptual and theoretical framework that underpins this method, and we further provide a set of specific examples and a practical table that show how business instructors might integrate ethics-oriented micro-insertions into their teaching.