Brands in the Basque gun making industry: The case of ASTRA-Unceta y Cía

Abstract

Basque gun making was an exception in early twentieth-century Spanish industry due to its high proportion of exports. The intense growth of handgun production during those years resulted from several factors such as Spanish patent law, the revolution in transport and communications, the electrification of manufacturing and the organisation of the sector as an industrial district. This article aims to analyse the role that brands played in this success, employing not only quantitative information but also the correspondence of one of the most important manufacturers of that time. Beyond counterfeiting, Basque gun making showed extraordinary marketing performance in which branding strategies were decisive for its success.     

Connecting Eastern and Western Perspectives on Management: Translation of Practices Across Organizations,Institution and Geographies

The exchange of academic knowledge increasingly flows in both directions, from West to East and East to West. The result is a rich and ever increasing development of theory and understanding of practice, which is expected only to gain further momentum in the future. This paper seeks to help establish a foundation for further development of this fertile exchange of ideas between East and West. We reflect on the research focus of the main theories in management studies in East and West. We discuss the topics of East and West in selected areas of management studies, including competitive strategy, strategic leadership, and the human resource management to offer avenues for future research. Translating practices between the two contexts creates institutional, leadership, strategy and organizational challenges while providing new promising research avenues and opportunities to integrate East and West perspectives. We also offer a more critical view on the relationship between West and East, focusing specifically on the role of power and power relations in making sense of how management and organization studies treat issues of cultural, institutional and philosophical divergence.     

Foreign IPO capital market choice: Understanding the institutional fit of corporate governance

While product market choices have been central to strategy formulation for firms in the past, the integration of financial markets makes the choice of capital markets an equally important strategic decision. We advance a comparative institutional perspective to explain capital market choice by firms making an IPO in a foreign market. We find that internal governance characteristics (founder‐CEO, executive incentives, and board independence) and external network characteristics (prestigious underwriters, degree of venture capitalist syndication, and board interlocks) are significant predictors of foreign capital market choice by foreign IPO firms. Our results suggest foreign IPO firms select a host market where the firms' governance characteristics and third party affiliations fit the host market's institutional environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Training Needs in Russian Industrial Companies: Assessment by CEOs

The article reports on the results of a recent survey of 740 Russian CEOs on their attitudes towards business education. It was found that the implied demand of Russian CEOs for managerial retraining is consistent, as retraining is seen as a remedy for current rather than fundamental problems in managerial efficiency, and it is insolvent as Russian companies currently are not ready for serious investment in human resources. In addition, there are low chances for dissemination of knowledge and skills within the company as Russian CEOs do not value coaching and mentoring. Some policy recommendations are provided.     

What drives intermediation costs? A case of tennis betting market

We demonstrate that there is a considerable variation in bookmaker margins across matches, time and bookmakers. Our results imply that using match, tournament and players’ characteristics explains the variations in margins hence, they can be helpful in managing intermediation cost in a market of state-contingent assets: fixed-odds betting markets. We also provide evidence that bookmakers protect themselves by increasing odds on the favourite player, thus attracting more bettors to the favourite player, while deterring bettors from betting on the underdog by reducing the odds. By that process, bookmakers are possibly sacrificing a portion of their margin.     

Shadow short rate and monetary policy in the Euro area

Empirical modelling of the monetary policy effects using conventional linear econometric models is put to a great test when interest rates approach the zero-lower bound. A possible remedy recently proposed in the literature is to introduce a shadow short rate (SSR) obtained from the yield curve model as an alternative monetary policy measure. This paper examines the usefulness of shadow rates as a policy stance measure for the Euro area. Moreover, the SSR can be used to study the country-specific monetary policy stance. We incorporate the shadow short rate in a standard vector autoregressive analysis to study the effects of monetary policy shocks both at the level of the Euro area and for two periphery EA countries, Italy and Spain, that endured significant financial stress during the crisis. Our analysis shows that monetary policy shocks identified form the SSR produce similar macro responses as shocks identified from the standard policy rate. The Euro area shocks can directly translate to a corresponding change in the country-specific financing conditions in the periphery, whereas the reverse effect is limited. The historical decomposition of the stochastic component of the SSR series shows that the unconventional policy measures were effective in stabilising the sovereign crisis in 2011, however, their relatively limited quantity provided only a weak stimulus to the economy.     

Legislative demands and economic realities: Company and group accounts compared

In many countries, not only one but several sets of accounts have to be prepared and disclosed by (holding) companies. This paper investigates the possibly different economic functions of these sets of accounts by looking at the German dual financial reporting system, in which company (single) and group (consolidated) accounts have to be published. Using a large number of accounting- and market-based metrics, we test whether single and group accounts display different properties and—if so—whether this finding can be explained by different economic roles played by both sets of accounts. Indeed, properties are found to differ. However, there is no evidence for single accounts being equally or more useful than group accounts in valuation and contracting. There is also no evidence that single accounts play a superior role in determining future dividend payouts or predicting default probabilities. Moreover, single accounts do not play an incremental role in fulfilling these functions either. Our results indicate that the factual role of single accounts is to provide the basis to compute taxable income. We do not consider this an economic function in its own right but, rather, as a legal requirement that can possibly be achieved by less costly means.     

EFA AND PRIVATE EDUCATION: SOME REGIONAL EXPERIENCES AND FINDINGS

Many developing and transitional countries do not have sufficient resources or capacities to meet the Education for All goals. Given that private education is a growing reality around the world, partnerships between governments and private providers may support attempts to meet the goals of EFA. This article uses recent empirical research from a variety of regions to examine the appropriate roles of the government and the private sector in the provision of primary, basic and secondary levels of instruction.     

Techno-economic case study on dedicated RAN for an intelligent transportation system: impact of the legislation-driven costs

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) aim at improving daily travel experience. There are many promising communication technologies that could provide some ITS services. So far they have been predominantly evaluated from the technical point of view. This paper contributes a techno-economic evaluation of a case study on dedicated Radio Access Network (RAN) for public ITS. We analyze, calculate and compare Capital (CapEx) and Operational Expenditures (OpEx) for four different ITS-enabling wireless technologies: Ultra High Frequency standard, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) 802.11p and LTE. This paper expands our results from Grigoryev et al. (2015). Here, we discuss in more details RAN planning and generalize legislation-driven cost influence on CapEx for DSRC and LTE deployments.