Producing Environmentally Acceptable Cosmetics? The Impact of Environmentalism on the United Kingdom Cosmetics and Toiletries Industry

The Cardiff Business School, University of Wales, is currently undertaking a research programme on the influence of environ‐mentalism upon the United Kingdom cosmetics and toiletries market. This paper examines four main areas in relation to the environment and the development of environmentally acceptable products. The survey considers products and their environmentally acceptable attributes; the research of companies into the production of environmentally acceptable products; the production processes of companies and the environmentally conscious activities of companies.     

A Deliberative Case for Democracy in Firms

The increasing centrality of business firms in contemporary societies calls for a renewed attention to the democratization of these actors. This paper sheds new light on the possibility of democratizing business firms by bridging recent scholarship in two fields—deliberative democracy and business ethics. To date, deliberative democracy has largely neglected the role of business firms in democratic societies. While business ethics scholarship has given more attention to these issues, it has overlooked the possibility of deliberation within firms. As argued in the paper, a combination of reforms based on the ideas of workplace deliberation and business deliberation is necessary in order to promote the prospect of deliberation in different business contexts. The paper also discusses the importance of more democratic firms for deliberative democracy at large and, in particular, for the recent debate on deliberative systems. Finally, the paper suggests new areas of investigation to better understand the prospect of democratic deliberation in business firms.     

The market for borrowing corporate bonds

This paper describes the market for borrowing corporate bonds using a comprehensive data set from a major lender. The cost of borrowing corporate bonds is comparable to the cost of borrowing stock, between 10 and 20 basis points, and both have fallen over time. Factors that influence borrowing costs are loan size, percentage of inventory lent, rating, and borrower identity. There is no evidence that bond short sellers have private information. Bonds with Credit Default Swaps (CDS) contracts are more actively lent than those without. Finally, the 2007 Credit Crunch does not affect average borrowing costs or loan volume, but does increase borrowing cost variance.     

New strategic goals and organizational solutions in large R&D labs: lessons from Centro Ricerche Fiat and Telecom Italia Lab

The issue of corporate R&D management has become particularly relevant during the last decade, since many industrial sectors experienced growing complexity in their research areas and increasing constraints in budgets devoted to R&D activities. This paper discusses the cases of the ICT and automotive sectors, exploring the changes in managerial procedures and strategies that two of the largest corporate research centres in Italy (Telecom Italia Lab and Centro Ricerche Fiat) adopted during a delicate phase of transition.
Both cases are characterized by a growing pressure towards the effective integration of short-term and long-term perspectives, i.e. towards a balance between valorization of research results and competencies, and exploration of new technological trajectories. The solutions adopted by the two organizations are explored and discussed. Specifically, while TiLab focused on the promotion of controlled spin-off companies, CRF has been very active in local technology transfer, especially in favour of SMFs.     

Equivocations for transposition ciphers

In a transposition cipher the message sequence is subdivided into blocks of equal length and each block is shuffled according to a chosen key. To evaluate the performance of a transposition cipher we take a Shannon-theoretic standpoint and compute relevant equivocations. It is wellknown that transposition ciphers are strongly ideal for memoryless stationary sources (key and cryptogram are independent). We consider also message equivocation and key-appearance equivocation and do not assume that the length of the intercepted cryptogram is a multiple of the block-length. The index of coincidence of the source statistics is shown to be a relevant parameter, at least asymptotically.

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Riassunto Il principio della trasposizione è uno dei più antichi in crittografia, ma non è obsoleto: i cifrari a trasposizione vengono adoperati come blocchi costitutivi di alcuni dei più autorevoli cifrari attualmente in uso, come il DES dell'IBM che è stato adottato dal National Bureau of Standards americano. Il messaggio in chiaro che si vuol cifrare viene spezzato in blocchi di ugual lunghezza e ciascun blocco viene «trasposto» (anagrammato) secondo una permutazione fissa e segreta (la chiave del cifrario). In questo lavoro le prestazioni dei cifrari a trasposizione vengono valutate dal punto di vista della teoria di Shannon, calcolando certe «equivocazioni» pertinenti: tali equivocazioni quantificano l'incertezza di una spia che abbia intercettato il crittogramma; dopo l'intercettazione le equivocazioni a priori si trasformano in equivocazioni a posteriori secondo un meccanismo di tipo bayesiano. Se la sorgente dei messaggi è data da un processo stocastico stazionario senza memoria, è ben noto che per quanto concerne la chiave le equivocazioni a priori e a posteriori coincidono: i cifrari a trasposizione sono in questo caso «fortemente ideali».Noi consideriamo anche l'equivocazione sul messaggio e quella sulla «comparsa della chiave» (quest'ultima è significativa nel caso di «attacchi con testo in chiaro»). L'equivocazione sul messaggio si ottiene da quella sulla chiave, che è una costante indipendente dalla lunghezza del crittogramma intercettato, al modo seguente: si somma un contributo periodico che si annulla solo quando tale lunghezza è un multiplo della lunghezza di blocco, e si sottrae una correzione infinitesima (pari all'equivocazione sulla comparsa della chiave) la cui velocità di convergenza è asintoticamente determinata dall' «indice di coincidenza» della distribuzione di probabilità che regola la sorgente dei messaggi.

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Questo lavoro è parte del programma di ricerca del GNIM-CNR. È incluso nel programma dell'International Symposium of Information Theory, Brighton (Inghilterra), giugno 1985.     

Knowledge Capital and Venture Capital Investments: New Evidence from European Panel Data

Abstract. Countries with a high amount of knowledge capital are likely to have higher volumes of venture capital (VC) investments because more researchers come up with innovative business ideas that require venture capital finance. Using panel data techniques, the paper finds evidence that VC investments depend strongly on the countries' knowledge capital measured by the number of patents, or the number of R&D researchers, or gross domestic expenditures on R&D. In addition, the paper analyzes whether government-financed knowledge capital fulfills a special role for VC investments. It finds only weak evidence that VC investments depend, with a delay of several years, on government-financed knowledge capital.