Creative Destruction, Investment Volatility, and the Average Age of Capital

In this article, a new numerical procedure is used to compute the equilibrium of a vintage capital growth model with nonlinear utility, where the scrapping time is nonconstant. We show that equilibrium investment and output converge nonmonotonically to the balanced growth path due to replacement echoes. We find that the average age of capital is inversely related to output, which is consistent with recent micro evidence reinforcing the importance of the embodied question. We also find that an unanticipated permanent increase in the rate of embodied technological progress causes labor productivity to slowdown in the short run.     

Choice and the Internet: From Clickstream to Research Stream

The authors discuss research progress and future opportunities for modeling consumer choice on the Internet using clickstream data (the electronic records of Internet usage recorded by company web servers and syndicated data services). The authors compare the nature of Internet choice (as captured by clickstream data) with supermarket choice (as captured by UPC scanner panel data), highlighting the differences relevant to choice modelers. Though the application of choice models to clickstream data is relatively new, the authors review existing early work and provide a two-by-two categorization of the applications studied to date (delineating search versus purchase on the one hand and within-site versus across-site choices on the other). The paper offers directions for further research in these areas and discusses additional opportunities afforded by clickstream information, including personalization, data mining, automation, and customer valuation. Notwithstanding the numerous challenges associated with clickstream data research, the authors conclude that the detailed nature of the information tracked about Internet usage and e-commerce transactions presents an enormous opportunity for empirical modelers to enhance the understanding and prediction of choice behavior.     

The upgrading effect of voluntary export restraints

Summary Given that a volume-defined VER is introduced on two differently priced varieties of a good,(i) the transfer of the VER-rent to the exporting country will cause imports of both varieties to fall,(ii) the relative price change in favour of the high cost variety counteracts this import fall and could in fact outweigh it,(iii) an ad valorem tariff restoring the original relative price of the two varieties would increase welfare and that welfare increase could in fact outweigh the welfare loss due to the VER-transfer to the exporting country.     

The Morality of “new” CEO Activism

Journal of Business Ethics - CEOs’ social and environmental activism attracts significant public and research interest. Positioned as an expression of personal morality, such activism is...     

How Have Restaurant Firms Responded to Food Safety Crises? Evidence From Media Coverage

Media communication has become a crucial part of crisis communications due to the rapid dissemination of information along with its immense impact on consumers and other stakeholders. Based on a structured content analysis of electronic media reports on restaurant-associated food safety crises from 1993 to 2015, this study examined media reporting patterns focusing on three elements: instructing information, crisis response strategies, and stakeholders. This study also identified the effect of situational factors (severity of risk and crisis type) on the media reporting patterns using Chi-square tests. The results indicated that restaurant firms were more likely to use proactive than passive response strategies, and identified primary stakeholders during a food safety crisis such as regulatory agencies, victims, and customers. Finally, two situational factors were found to influence the pattern of media reporting. The media reporting patterns were found to vary by risk severity and crisis type.     

Legal Origins,Corporate Governance,and Environmental Outcomes

Despite significant scholarly debate about knowledge production in the management discipline through the peer-review journal processes, there is minimal discussion about the ethical treatment of the research subject in these publication processes. In contrast, the ethical scrutiny of management research processes within research institutions is often highly formalized and very focused on the protection of research participants. Hence, the question arises of how management publication processes should best account for the interests of the research subject, both in the narrow sense of specific research participants and in the broader understanding of the subject of the research. This question is particularly pertinent in light of significant codification of research ethics within academic institutions, and increasing self-reflection within the management discipline about the “good” of management research and education. Findings from a survey and interviews with management journal editors (and others involved in journal publication) reveal a complex scenario; many editors believe that a formalized requirement within the journal publication process may have detrimental outcomes and, in fact, diminish the ethical integrity of management scholarship. Building on these findings, this paper argues that ethical concern for the research subject merely in terms of institutional rule compliance and avoidance of harm to individual participants is insufficient, and calls for explicitly positive engagement with both the individual and the collective subject of management research should receive due ethical consideration. An alternative model involving reflexive ethical consideration of research subjects across the publication process—with implications for role of authors, reviewers, editors, and research subjects—is outlined.     

Humility in Business: A Contextual Approach

The virtue of humility is often considered to be at odds with common business practice. In recent years, however, scholars within business ethics and leadership have shown an increasing interest in humility. Despite such attention, the argument for the relevance of humility in business could be expanded. Unlike extant research that focuses on humility as a character-building virtue or instrumentally useful leadership trait, this article argues that humility reflects the interdependent nature of business. Through such an approach, the article gives an extrinsic motivation of the relevance of humility in business, and, from a theoretical point of view, links the intra-personal and intra-organizational perspective on humility to an inter-organizational one. The article contextualizes the virtue of humility by relating it to the economic, cognitive, and moral aspects of business practice and managerial work. It claims that the assumption of self-sufficiency in business is a grave misrepresentation of what business is—a practice characterized by interdependency. Potential links between virtue ethics, leadership, and contextually oriented theories of business, such as stakeholder theory, network theories, and resource dependence theory, are also identified.     

Migrants’ Influence on Firm-level Exports

We examine the role of migrants in trade using a firm-level approach. We exploit a new employer–employee panel for Sweden, which encompasses close to 600,000 full-time employees, approximately 12,000 firms and data for 176 countries for the period 1998–2007. The resulting analysis provides novel firm-level evidence on the trade-migration relationship. Foreign-born workers have a positive association with firm exports. However, immigrants do not have an unconditional positive impact on firm trade. Mainly small firms gain from hiring foreign-born workers, and migrants need to be skilled and recently arrived to have a clear positive impact on firm export performance.     

Capital controls and the location of industry

This paper studies capital controls on the outflow of capital in a two-region new economic geography model. Capital controls are set in a non-cooperative or cooperative manner by social planners. Capital controls are relatively higher in the North in the non-cooperative equilibrium. This leads to relatively more firms located in the region where more consumers reside under the non-cooperative equilibrium. The locational bias towards the North in the non-cooperative equilibrium becomes larger as trade barriers are reduced. That is, firms locate to the North at a relatively higher rate in the non-cooperative equilibrium as trade is liberalised. Contrary to previous findings, it follows that global welfare is relatively higher in the non-cooperative equilibrium, although the social planner sets capital controls by maximising joint regional welfare in the cooperative equilibrium.