Humanitarian Negotiation to Protect: John Rabe and the Nanking International Safety Zone (1937–1938)

In the late months of 1937 and in the beginning of 1938, John Rabe, German CEO of Siemens China, engages in humanitarian negotiation with many actors, as the Japanese troops approach and then occupy Nanking, the capital city of Nationalist China. His responsibility as a leader and negotiator is guided by one purpose—the protection of the Chinese poorest of the poor. It motivates him in all his negotiation moves, whether he leverages principles, values, needs, interests, relationship and culture to persuade his interlocutors. The ten humanitarian negotiation situations that he faces suggest a three-step process: a planning stage to create a safety zone, an implementation stage to operationalize it and, finally, an exit stage to properly end the mission. Rabe’s ongoing questioning and doggedness, as well as that of the other twenty-one members of the International Safety Zone Committee, made a difference to protect 250,000 Chinese men, women and children. At the time, his heroism owed him the honored name of a living Buddha, and, sixty years later, of “The Schindler of China.” He was a pioneer of the responsibility to protect, and of corporate social responsibility.     

Transfers in Spanish State Retirement Pensions

A central issue in the recent reforms of state pensions in Spain has been to increase the proportionality between contributions and benefits along actuarially fair lines. The aim of this paper is to quantify the transfer component of social security retirement pensions, with transfer being understood as the difference between the pension effectively received and that which would be received under a system of actuarial fairness. The analysis is placed within a life-cycle framework, with particular reference to the distributive effects by income level. The results show that, in the past, there was a marked bias in favour of the objective of intergenerational and intragenerational redistribution, to the detriment of the objective of income insurance. This paper examines the factors that determine the final value of the transfer component within the entire Spanish pensions system.     

Building pragmatist theories of PM practice: Theorizing the act of project management

This article examines project management through the lens of practice. Drawing on the literature, we develop a typological model that brings together four distinct theoretical types of project management practice. Adopting a deliberately critical perspective, we show that the first three types propose a weak conception of the logical relationship between the theory and practice of project management. In contrast, the fourth type, anchored in a pragmatist conception of the theory‐practice link, provides the potential to build strong theories of project management practice. A specific objective is to elucidate the distinct features of the fourth type of theory.     

Using ad hoc measures for response styles: a cautionary note

This research note addresses the challenge of how to optimally measure acquiescence response style (ARS) and extreme response style (ERS). This is of crucial importance in assessing results from studies that have tried to identify antecedents of response styles (such as age, education level, national culture). Using survey data from the Netherlands, a comparison is made between the traditional method and a more recently proposed method of measuring ARS and ERS (i.e., the convergent validity across both methods is assessed). The traditional method is based on an ad hoc set of related items. The alternative method uses a set of randomly sampled items to optimize heterogeneity and representativeness of the items. It is found that the traditional method may lead to response style measures that are suboptimal for estimating levels of ARS and ERS as well as relations of ARS and ERS with other variables (like hypothesized antecedents). Recommendations on how to measure response styles are provided.     

Transmission of China's Shocks to the BRIS Countries

This paper investigates the effects of China on the BRIS countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa. We identify Chinese supply and demand shocks and assess their transmission to BRIS in a structural dynamic factor model framework estimated over the period 1995Q2‐2009Q4. The findings show that Chinese supply shocks are more important than its demand shocks. Supply shocks produce positive and significant output responses in all BRIS countries. And while these supply shocks have a permanent impact on the BRIS countries, the effects of demand shocks are short‐lived. Both supply and demand shocks are transmitted through trade rather than financial linkages. However, the responses of the BRIS countries are heterogeneous and therefore require country‐specific policy responses.     

The derivation of the NPV variance of a risky capital investment project with first-order autoregressive cash flows and autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic variances

In this article, the authors develop a closed-form solution for assessing the capital investment project NPV variance when cash flows obey a first-order autoregressive process. A distinction is established between static and dynamic solutions as the authors focus on the case involving partial positive dependence between cash flows. Under a Markovian process, the NPV solution is stationary in mean but not strictly in variance. Constraining the process to become fully stationary will overestimate the NPV variance. Finally, the authors show that the Markovian NPV variance closed-form solution is robust to the introduction of autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic variances complying with a GARCH(1,1) process; it will, however, have its value increased and consequently the riskiness of the capital investment project.     

Economists on Darwin's theory of social evolution and human behaviour

Abstract

This article analyses Darwin's image among economists with a specific focus on his theory of social evolution as presented in the Descent of Man (1871). We propose an analysis of the way and context in which economists refer to Darwin, mention his name and quote his writings. It then appears that Darwin is most of the time viewed as a biologist only, who never developed his own theory of social evolution. He is thus quoted as a biologist who either borrowed concepts from economists who developed a theory of social evolution, or laid the basis for biological theory of social evolution developed by others, Spencer, in particular. It is only recently that eventually the twofold dimensions—biological and social—of Darwin's general theory of evolution are considered together by bioeconomists.     

Robust adaptive rate-optimal testing for the white noise hypothesis

A new test is proposed for the weak white noise null hypothesis. The test is based on a new automatic selection of the order for a Box–Pierce (1970) test statistic or the test statistic of Hong (1996). The heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) critical values from Lee (2007) are used, allowing for estimation of the error term. The data-driven order selection is tailored to detect a new class of alternatives with autocorrelation coefficients which can be o(n^−1/2)$o\left(n^{-1/2}\right)$ provided there are sufficiently many of such coefficients. A simulation experiment illustrates the good statistical properties of the test both under the weak white noise null and the alternative.     

Role and impact of the environment on entrepreneurial learning

Abstract

This article is presenting an overview of the literature devoted to entrepreneurial learning and, more specifically, those research bringing environmental elements into the study of the entrepreneurial learning process. Then, it shows how each of the four Special Issue selected research papers contribute to enhancing our knowledge of the complexity of the learning process vis-à-vis entrepreneurial processes placed in context. By doing this, it makes an attempt to explain the specific context behind each contribution as well as presenting the wider context. Finally, the article is suggesting a set of key challenges and research pathways that might be explored in the future.