How to price the unbundled local loop in the transition from copper to fiber access networks?

In many countries worldwide access networks are in the transition from copper to fiber access. During the transition phase copper and fiber networks are operated in parallel. All regulators facing this situation of technological change have to decide how to price unbundled access to the copper loop in this transition phase. Should they keep the usual forward looking long-run incremental cost standard charge, or should they move to some different approach? The authors propose to price copper access based on the modern equivalent asset (MEA) of fiber access. Since fiber access is superior to copper access, the cost of fiber access (as a basis for pricing copper access) should, however, be corrected by the performance delta between copper and fiber access.     

Consciousness for fair consumption: conceptualization,scale development and empirical validation

Sustainable consumption means that consumers act in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. Compared with the vast amount of studies concerning environmentally conscious consumer behaviour, relatively little is known about socially conscious consumption. The present paper focuses on fair consumption as an important aspect of social consumption. In our study, consciousness for fair consumption (CFC) is defined as a latent disposition of consumers to prefer products that are produced and traded in compliance with fair labour and business practices. A scale to measure CFC was conceptualized and tested in three independent empirical studies. Two studies were conducted at European universities (2010 and 2012) and used 352 and 362 undergraduate business students respectively. The third study, conducted in 2011, used 141 employees at a European university. The results confirmed the reliability and validity of the new CFC scale across samples. While being moderately related to other aspects of sustainable consumption such as ecological concern and moral reasoning, CFC was significantly distinct from those concepts. Most importantly, it was established that the CFC, as measured by the new CFC scale, is a strong determinant of consumption of fair trade products that has been neglected in existing research.     

Winners and losers: a micro-level analysis of international outsourcing and wages

Abstract.  Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry-level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. This approach avoids problems such as aggregation bias, potential endogeneity bias, and poor skill definitions that commonly hamper industry-level studies. We find that outsourcing has had a marked impact on wages. Applying two alternative skill classifications, we find evidence that a 1 percentage point increase in outsourcing reduced the wage for workers in the lowest skill categories by up to 1.5%, while it increased wages for high-skilled workers by up to 2.6%. This result is robust to a number of different specifications.     

Trade diversion under selective preferential market access

Abstract .  The European Community (EC) operates a multi-layered GSP scheme in which different groups of developing countries are granted varying degrees of market access. This paper analyzes the question of trade diversion among different categories of beneficiary countries ensuing from the selectivity of preferential market access. Evidence from a disaggregated panel data analysis reveals sizable intra-developing country trade diversion. The losses for relatively disadvantaged countries in terms of forgone trade volume are estimated to range between about 2% to 20% of their total trade with the EC. The distortions are driven by highly substitutable, mostly labour-intensive commodities.     

Exploring managerial intentionality

To enable a better understanding of individual and, as a logical extension, organizational behavior, we set forth a theoretical framework of managerial intentionality. At its core are the concepts of desire and belief, which together form intentions. We argue that it is these intentions that may substantially affect strategic choices and, by that, organizational change. Exploring managerial intentionality, we acknowledge a central building block of cognitive science, which contrary to representations and computations has, by and large, been neglected in the management and organization literatures. We use the framework to explore the intrapersonal and interpersonal role of managerial intentionality as well as its effectiveness in an organizational context. We also clarify the differences to related concepts and discuss implications for future research. In doing so, we contribute to the overall objective of increasing our understanding of managerial action and organizational behavior.     

Book reviews

Journal of Consumer Policy -     

Hedge fund incentives,management commitment and survivorship

Management ownership in hedge funds sends conflicting signals—signals which reduce investors’ perception of survivorship risk. We document that decisions on management ownership are purposely self-selected. Such decisions are most likely motivated by unique incentive mechanisms imbedded in hedge funds. We examine the impact of managerial ownership decisions on fund survivorship risk by accounting for unobserved fund manager motivations that affect both ownership decisions and survivorship risk. Our findings suggest that the conventional argument that having management commitment can reduce survival risk (and therefore align the interests between managers and investors) is significantly overstated. These results are robust to using alternative ownership measures and controlling for different samples.