Marketing and the law

Marketing decisions are particularly vulnerable to legal rulings made in both the courts and teh legislatures. The effective management of those legal implications challenges the modern marketing professional. Grasping marketing’s overall legal environment, including its governing case law, regulatory statutes and future trends, is essential. These reviews will provide analysis of recent court cases and legislation with particular emphasis on creatively assisting the marketer’s management of the legal factor.     

MANAGEMENT CONTROL PRACTICES AND CLINICIAN MANAGERS: THE CASE OF THE NORWEGIAN HEALTH SECTOR

This paper provides an analysis of the relationship between different management control practices and the leadership of medical departments in Norway. There has been ongoing debate about how the medical profession absorbs accounting knowledge: some argue that there has been hybridization, while others consider it as polarization. The explanation provided in this paper details the management control practices that health care enterprises use. We draw on two of the control perspectives in Simons's model of ladders of control: namely, diagnostic and interactive controls. The study thus provides insights into the problem of influencing clinician managers to use management accounting practices.     

Discovering your authentic leadership

The ongoing problems in business leadership over the past five years have underscored the need for a new kind of leader in the twenty-first century: the authentic leader. Author Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor and the former chairman and CEO of Medtronic, and his colleagues, conducted the largest leadership development study ever undertaken. They interviewed 125 business leaders from different racial, religious, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds to understand how leaders become and remain authentic. Their interviews showed that you do not have to be born with any particular characteristics or traits to lead. You also do not have to be at the top of your organization. Anyone can learn to be an authentic leader. The journey begins with leaders understanding their life stories. Authentic leaders frame their stories in ways that allow them to see themselves not as passive observers but as individuals who learn from their experiences. These leaders make time to examine their experiences and to reflect on them, and in doing so they grow as individuals and as leaders. Authentic leaders also work hard at developing self-awareness through persistent and often courageous self-exploration. Denial can be the greatest hurdle that leaders face in becoming self-aware, but authentic leaders ask for, and listen to, honest feedback. They also use formal and informal support networks to help them stay grounded and lead integrated lives. The authors argue that achieving business results over a sustained period of time is the ultimate mark of authentic leadership. It may be possible to drive short-term outcomes without being authentic, but authentic leadership is the only way to create long-term results.     

What Drives Ireland’s Housing Market? A Bayesian DSGE Approach

We study the drivers of fluctuations in the Irish housing market by developing and estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of Ireland as a member of the European Economic Monetary Union (EMU). We estimate the model with Bayesian methods using time series for both Ireland and the rest of the EMU for the period from 1997:Q1 to 2008:Q2. We find that housing preference and technology shocks are the main drivers of fluctuations in house prices and residential investment. A standard regression analysis shows that a good part of the variation of housing preference shocks can be explained by unmodeled demand factors that have been considered in the empirical literature as important determinants of Irish house prices.     

How Should the Graduate Economics Core be Changed?

The authors present suggestions by graduate students from a range of economics departments for improving the first-year core sequence in economics. The students identified a number of elements that should be added to the core: more training in building microeconomic models, a discussion of the methodological foundations of model-building, more emphasis on institutions to motivate and contextualize macroeconomic models, and greater focus on econometric practice rather than theory. The authors hope that these suggestions will encourage departments to take a fresh look at the content of the first-year core.     

The Challenge of Market Power under Globalization

The legacy of Adam Smith leads to a false confidence on the optimality of laissez faire policies for the global market economy. Instead, the polarized character of current globalization deeply affects both developed and underdeveloped economies. Current globalization is characterized by factor exchange between economies of persistently unequal development. This implies the existence of persistent extraordinary market power in transnational corporations, reflected in their disproportionate participation in income and policy. These are shown to be steady‐state features of globalization in a convergence club model of development and underdevelopment including trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). Moreover, results in tax competition explain how the increased share of transnational profits under globalization leads to lower corporate taxes, more conservative policies, and weaker institutions for balancing market power. The increased level of market power under globalization poses a serious challenge for national and global governance that deeply impacts economic development, distribution, sustainability, and democracy everywhere.     

Credit Fluctuations and Lodging Firms: An Investigation of the Differing Capital Structures in the U.S. Lodging Industry

In the area of corporate finance, decisions regarding the constituents of overall capital structure are the most critical. These financing decisions are even more critical to lodging firms because of the unique nature of the industry. This study empirically investigates the effect of credit availability on the leverage of the lodging industry in the U.S. using multivariate analysis of variance. Three time points of differing credit availability (low, high, and average) were identified using the Case-Shiller home price index. Leverage, net leverage, and short-to-long-term debt ratios of large and small U.S. lodging firms were analyzed at these differing credit availability time points to assess any significant differences. Significant effects of credit availability were found on the leverage and net leverage of lodging firms, but no significant effect was found on the short- to long-term debt ratio of U.S. lodging firms. Interestingly, the leverage levels were found to be highest at the average availability of credit than when compared to the high and low availability of credit.