Elasticities of substitution and complementarity

This paper develops a classification scheme of the many different definitions of elasticities of substitution and complementarity in the production case based on primal and dual representations of technology and their related direct and inverse demand functions, gross and net substitution, elasticity type, and three different basic concepts of substitution and complementarity. The ten elasticities of substitution are derived from the cost, profit, input distance, and revenue functions. All the elasticities are equally valid for single and multi-output technologies. The classic Berndt-Wood dataset is used to show the considerable variation across the elasticities.     

Entrepreneurship training for new ventures

Several studies in the field of international entrepreneurship have indicated the inadequacy of public policy support for new ventures and called for more tailored training programs. This paper introduces a training program created for new ventures in Central Finland and analyzes its benefits and shortcomings using a qualitative case study. The findings reveal that the training program provided useful knowledge on how to develop a business further and how to make it understandable and attractive to a funder. However, the findings also indicate that there is a need for cultural adaptation: the training program developed originally for U.S. new ventures was not fully adapted for the needs of Finnish entrepreneurs. The program mainly focused on risk taking, raising funds from capital markets in the U.S., and entering into the U.S market soon after the establishment. This was in contrast to the Finnish entrepreneurs’ strategies: they preferred to grow their business in a more controlled and profitable manner. Thus, although knowledge-intensive new ventures operate in global environments, the training provided for them should take into account the cultural differences and the local way of doing business.     

Accounting als Teil der Management Forschung

PRAXIS | Magazin

Accounting als Teil der Management Forschung Konferenz-Review     

Continuous-time mean-variance portfolio optimization in a jump-diffusion market

In this paper, we take up an approach of (Lindberg, in Bernoulli, 15(2):464–474, 2009) who introduced a new parameterization of the Black–Scholes model that allows for an easy solution of the continuous-time Markowitz mean-variance problem. We generalize the results of (Lindberg, in Bernoulli, 15(2):464–474, 2009) to a jump-diffusion market setting and slightly correct the proof and the assertion of the main result. Further, we demonstrate the implications of the Lindberg parameterization for the stock price drift vector in different market settings, analyse the dependence of the optimal portfolio from jump and diffusion risk and finally indicate how to use the method. We particularly also show how the optimal strategy can be obtained with the restricted use of historical data.     

Default estimation,correlated defaults,and expert information

Capital allocation decisions are made on the basis of an assessment of creditworthiness. Default is a rare event for most segments of a bank's portfolio and data information can be minimal. Inference about default rates is essential for efficient capital allocation, for risk management and for compliance with the requirements of the Basel II rules on capital standards for banks. Expert information is crucial in inference about defaults. A Bayesian approach is proposed and illustrated using prior distributions assessed from industry experts. A maximum entropy approach is used to represent expert information. The binomial model, most common in applications, is extended to allow correlated defaults yet remain consistent with Basel II. The application shows that probabilistic information can be elicited from experts and econometric methods can be useful even when data information is sparse. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Enhance the evaluation quality of project performance based on fuzzy aggregation weight effect

The small and medium enterprises had played an important role during the economy development at Taiwan. Under the competitive environment, the managers or the decision-makers will frequently meet a scenario with the complicate decision-making problems, e.g. the importance tradeoffs between the multiple criteria or the multiple attributes. That is, the consensus and differences among evaluation-makers will be frequently met for most practitioners in multiple criterions decision-making (MCDM) consideration. How to incorporate those characteristics into analysis to enhance the evaluation quality of performance will be a meaningful issue to be addressed. In this study, a case about performance evaluation of the multiple projects owing to a small and medium enterprise at Taiwan will be applied to demonstrating the rationality and feasibility of proposed approach based on the fuzzy aggregation weight effect incorporating the consensus and differences among evaluation-makers.     

Estimation of poverty measures with auxiliary information in sample surveys

The analysis of poverty measures has been receiving increased attention in recent years. This paper contributes to the literature by developing percentile ratio estimators based on the pseudo empirical likelihood method. In practice, variances of poverty measures could be not expressible by simple formulae and consequently other techniques should be used in the variance estimation stage. Assuming percentile ratios, resampling techniques are investigated in this paper. A numerical example based on data from the Spanish Household Panel Survey is taken up to illustrate how suggested procedures can perform better than existing ones. The effect of a model-misspecification on the proposed estimators is also evaluated by using simulated populations.     

The measurement of pay discrimination between job assignments

The traditional Becker/Arrow model of taste discrimination in pay depicts majority and minority labour as perfectly substitutable, implying that all workers perform precisely the same job assignment and have the same qualifications. The model is thus only appropriate for determining whether ceteris paribus pay differences between white workers and non-white workers, for example, performing job assignment A are attributable to prejudice (‘within-assignment discrimination’). The model is inappropriate for determining whether ceteris paribus pay differences between white workers in assignment A and non-white workers in assignment B reflect prejudice (‘cross-assignment discrimination’). We extend the traditional model to allow for cross-assignment discrimination and we propose an empirical methodology for its estimation. In so doing we address two broad questions: (1) Do predictions about cross-assignment discrimination vary with the form of the production function?; and (2) How can one estimate such discrimination when there is no common measure of productivity? We address the first question by deriving a measure of cross-assignment discrimination for four different production functions—Generalized Leontief, Quadratic, CES, and Cobb-Douglas. The Generalized Leontief provides the most general results, although closed form solutions are not possible. Closed form solutions are obtainable from the other three functions, but only under restrictive assumptions. There are two main findings. First, most predictions are generally robust across functional forms. Second, cross-assignment discrimination depends upon productivity and labour supply differences between the two worker groups, labour market structure, and the interaction between relative group productivity and prejudice. We address the second question by outlining, for future exploration, a two-stage regression methodology in which a standardised (i.e. common) measure of productivity is estimated separately for each occupation. This measure is then incorporated as a right-hand-side explanatory variable in a second-stage, all-occupation regression designed to estimate cross-assignment discrimination. We discuss the proposed methodology with reference to a valuable and interesting test case: The market for professional sports players.     

Technical Efficiency of the Brazilian Municipalities: Correcting Nonparametric Frontier Measurements for Outliers

In this paper we estimate the DEA technical efficiency for 4796 Brazilian municipalities, by applying a recently proposed “Jackstrap” method, which combines Bootstrap and Jackknife resampling techniques, to reduce the effect of outliers and possible errors in the data set. We perform calculations to identify and eliminate high leverage municipalities, using different variants of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), as well as Free Disposal Hull (FDH). Corroborating previous results, efficiency results for the Brazilian municipalities show a clear relationship between the size of the municipality and its efficiency scores. Indeed, under both DEA variants, smaller cities tend to be less efficient than larger ones hence indicating that the quality of the frontier adjustment improves significantly as the size of the municipality increases. We present arguments that may explain to some extent these findings, such as economies of scale and the excess spending due to revenue from royalties. However, such effects require further, more careful examination.     

Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Actions and Job Satisfaction

Through the development and extension of theories and scholars’ subsequent empirical analyses of significant, theoretically grounded research questions, the knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and its successful use continues to advance. Moreover, the literature suggests important relationships between the corporate environment, managers’ entrepreneurial behavior and successful implementation of corporate entrepreneurship actions. In an attempt to test some of those relationships, we describe an empirical study of 523 managers that examines the relationships among the antecedents to managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, a decision to implement entrepreneurial actions, and resulting job satisfaction and reinforcement practices.