Challenges ahead E-innovation

This article systematically examines the recent efforts made by industry and academia in promoting E-innovation. It finds that industrial initiatives have been hindered by two limitations. One is a lack of an agreeable framework to accommodate the diversity of different usages. The other is a trend toward standardization in E-business applications. The academic efforts have been hindered by the lack of a mechanism to marry the distributed nature of E-innovation with the legacy of a traditional innovation. To overcome the barriers from both supply and demand sides, industrial efforts need to be more focused on figuring out how E-innovation emerges out of interconnectivity, while academic efforts should be more inclusive, so as to incorporate distributed innovation into enterprises’ shifting business operations. It is expected that this exploratory research will attract more systematic studies in establishing theories and developing techniques related to E-innovation.     

Retroactive Liability or the Public Purse?

The article addresses the question of whether responsibility for pollution created in the past should be retroactively applied to firms, or if the costs of cleaning up existing pollution should be financed by the public. We show that making firms liable for retrospective environmental costs can weaken the incentive to take precautions against future environmental costs. This follows since public financing of these costs can lead to greater prospective risk deterrence by allowing firms to more fully internalize the costs of future environmental risks. However, an analysis of existing public financing approaches highlights a set of dangers associated with their practical use.     

Monopoly Power and Stagflation

Post Keynesian economists have followed Joan Robinson's criticism of general equilibrium theory as abolishing history by allowing all contracts to be executed today for all future contingencies. This was the justification for the support of financial innovation to provide for the completeness of futures markets. The recent crisis has shown that force of history. Instead, many evolutionary and Keynesian economists have suggested the approach of cumulative causation as an approach that includes history and eschews equilibrium. This approach may provide a way to take history seriously in economic analysis.     

An Austrian business cycle parable: An educational note

This paper presents a short narrative example intended for use in teaching the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, meant to complement theoretical presentations by presenting an idealized account of an individual entrepreneur operating over time and responding to various possible evolutions of the interest rate. In particular, the similarity from the point of view of the entrepreneur between a reduction in the interest rate due to an increase in consumer saving and a similar reduction due to monetary policy is emphasized. Along with the narrative itself, we discuss the motivating version of the Austrian Business Cycle behind the narrative, as well as offer commentary as explanation for the particular choices made in its construction.     

The structure and management of dual purpose funds

Dual fund shares allow individuals to satisfy their divergent preferences for the ordinary income and the capital gains components of return. Institutional restrictions on short selling are shown to permit discounts on dual funds to fluctuate within wide bounds. However, these fluctuations are shown to be consistent with informational efficiency. The average discount is shown to have a contemporaneous association with net redemptions of diversified open-end funds. It is shown that the high turnover of dual fund portfolios is not warranted by their portfolio performance and causes redistributions of wealth between income and capital shareholders.