Chinese intellectual property rights? Know before you go

China's membership in the World Trade Organization further encourages foreign direct investment. Organizations establishing a multinational enterprise in China, and intending to utilize their intellectual property rights as a method of conducting their business enterprise, must be familiar with the current laws and developments regarding their protection and enforcement. This article focuses on Chinese intellectual property laws with examples of both infringements and enforcements. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Implications of the Russian Crisis

The financial crisis of August 1998 caused grave consequences for Russia. Although the mechanism of financial crises in emerging market economies has been thoroughly studied, the role of transition specificity is still underestimated. In the West, there is a widely accepted opinion that fiscal problems were the main driving force behind the crisis. The article contests this view and reveals a number of fundamental reasons that have brought a decade of market romanticism to a bitter end. In fact, the crisis disclosed serious misalignments in the strategy of reforms. Premature liberalisation and a far-fetched reliance on monetarist tools coupled with a lack of institutional, microeconomic and legal transformation hampered the development of market forces, provoked glaring macroeconomic discrepancies and, finally, led to a dramatic decline in production. Present Russian economic policy is aimed at reconciling market reforms with the Soviet economic heritage and the particular transition needs of the country.     

Employer-provided training,innovation and skills in post-Soviet countries

This paper analyzes the extent of employer-provided training in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine and investigates its relationship with innovation, having international business contacts, use of computers at work, reported skills shortages and other firm characteristics. It contributes to the literature by examining different types of training – initial on-the-job learning, more formal in-house training and external training, which is provided by firms to two categories of workers – white- and blue-collar workers. After controlling for a range of firm characteristics, we find a positive link between technological innovation and intensity of training of all types provided to white-collar workers that points to the technology-skills complementarity. Furthermore, the level of computer use at work is a significant determinant of the incidence and intensity of external training provided to white-collar and blue-collar workers.     

Wikipedia matters

We document a causal impact of online user-generated information on real-world economic outcomes. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists' choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia increases overnight stays in treated cities compared to nontreated cities. The impact is largely driven by improvements to shorter and relatively incomplete pages on Wikipedia. Our findings highlight the value of digital public goods for informing individual choices.     

Sustainable Purchasing in Food Retailing: Interorganizational Relationship Management to Green Product Supply

Stakeholders’ demands for product sustainability redefine the focus of corporate purchasing strategies from the traditional concern with financial performance to considerations of ‘triple bottom line’ viability. This adds to the complexity of managing interorganizational relationships and poses a question regarding corporate ability to effectively leverage suppliers over environmental and social performance of supplied goods. Since it is not clear what type of purchasing relationship is more favorable for greening a product supply, the current paper aims to investigate how food retailers manage their relationships with suppliers in order to influence the environmental and social performance of procured goods and improve the availability of sustainably produced supply. The research is based on two case studies of Swedish supermarkets and supplementary semi‐structured interviews with Swedish, British and Danish supermarkets. The results of the study contribute to the existing body of academic knowledge in the field of sustainable supply chain management by developing a typology of sustainable purchasing relationships with detailed insights into the nature of collaborative practices, structure of incentives, sustainability ambition, and approaches to verification of compliance. The study has also revealed the dependence of sustainable purchasing relationships on the characteristics of the procurement context, namely the presence of well‐established sustainability certification schemes, perceived by purchaser's situation with availability of sustainability certified supply and purchaser's interpretation of the state of power dependence in relationships with suppliers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

WHOLESALE PRICES AND COURNOT‐BERTRAND COMPETITION

This note considers the competing vertical structures framework with Cournot‐Bertrand competition downstream. It shows that the equilibrium wholesale price paid by a Cournot (Bertrand)‐type retailer is above (below) marginal costs of a corresponding manufacturer. This result contrasts with the one under pure competition downstream (i.e., Cournot or Bertrand), where the wholesale price is set below (above) marginal costs in case of a Cournot (Bertrand) game at the retail level.     

Employee Representation and Consultative Voice in Multinational Companies Operating in Britain

Multinational companies (MNCs) from different countries of origin are widely held to have distinct preferences regarding the presence of employee representative structures and the form that employee 'voice' over management decisions takes. Such preferences are said to derive from the national models that prevail in the different countries of origin in which MNCs are based. Findings from a large-scale survey of the UK operations of MNCs indicate that country-of-origin influences on patterns of employee representation and emphasis on direct or indirect channels of employee 'voice' are attenuated by other factors, notably sector and method of growth. They also reveal significant recent innovation in representation and voice arrangements by this key group of employers.     

Do investors actually value sustainability? New evidence from investor reactions to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI)

Research Summary: Research exploring investor reactions to sustainability has substantial empirical limitations, which we address with a large‐scale longitudinal financial event study of the first global sustainability index, DJSI World. We examine investor reactions to firms from 27 countries over 17 years that are added, deleted, or continue on the index. We find that once relevant controls and comparisons to observationally equivalent firms beyond the index are included, DJSI events have only limited significance and/or materiality. Nonetheless, investors' valuation of sustainability around the world has evolved over time, involving diminishing reactions to U.S. firms and increasing benefits, particularly of continuation on the index, over time. The study highlights the importance of careful analysis and longitudinal global samples in making inferences about the financial effects of social performance. Managerial Summary: The debate about how investors perceive corporate social responsibility (CSR) predates Milton Friedman's famous statement that the only social responsibility of business is to increase profits. Although extensive research has studied whether sustainability contributes to financial performance, we have yet to understand whether investors believe it pays off. This financial event study of reactions to the addition, continuation, and deletion from DJSI World, the first global sustainability index, shows that investors care little about DJSI announcements. Nonetheless, there is some evidence that global assessments of sustainability are converging and that investors may increasingly be valuing continuation on the DJSI, suggesting that firms may gain at least limited benefits from reliable sustainability activities.     

Freeport-McMoRan Copper &; Gold,Inc.: An Innovative Voluntary Code of Conduct to Protect Human Rights,Create Employment Opportunities,and Economic Development of the Indigenous People

Environmental degradation and extractive industry are inextricably linked, and the industry’s adverse impact on air, water, and ground resources has been exacerbated with increased demand for raw materials and their location in some of the more environmentally fragile areas of the world. Historically, companies have managed to control calls for regulation and improved, i.e., more expensive, mining technologies by (a) their importance in economic growth and job creation or (b) through adroit use of their economic power and bargaining leverage against weak national governments, regional and international regulatory bodies. More recently, the industry has had to contend with another set of challenges that involved treatment of indigenous people and their traditional land rights, fair treatment of workers, human rights abuses, and bribery and corruption involving local officials and political leaders. These challenges currently fall outside the traditional areas of regulation and control. Nevertheless, they pose serious threat to the industry’s business practices because of their global scope, threat to company’s reputation, and long-term risks of political instability leading to increasing cost of capital. Industry has responded to these challenges by creating voluntary codes of conduct that would signify their intent to comply with higher standards of conduct, and assuage public opinion that no further action is called for. These codes, however, lack any monitoring mechanism and reporting integrity to assure the public that the industry members are indeed meeting their commitments. Consequently, pressure on the industry continues unabated and with ever increasing calls for mandatory regulation and oversight. This article examines the activities of one mining company, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, Inc., which has taken a radically different approach in responding to these challenges at its mining operations in West Papua, Indonesia. While cooperating with industry-based efforts of voluntary codes of conduct, Freeport also initiated a radically different response through its own voluntary code that would directly focus on issues of human rights, treatment of indigenous people on whose traditional land its mine was located; economic development and job creation and, improvements in health, education, and housing facilities, to name a few. Additionally, the company earmarked large sums of money and involved representatives of the indigenous people in their management and disbursement. The company took an even more radical action when it committed itself to independent external audits of the company’s compliance with the code, and that these findings and company’s responses would be made public without prior censorship by the company. We analyze the nature of corporate culture, vision and risk-taking propensities of its management that would impel the company to embark on a high risk strategy whose outcomes could not be predicted with any degree of certainty before the fact. The parent company also had to confront discontent among the management ranks at the mine site because of cultural differences and management styles of expatriates and local (Indonesian) managers. Finally, we discuss in some detail the extensive and intensive character of a two phase audit conducted by the outside monitors, their findings, and the process by which they were implemented and reported to general public. We also evaluate the strengths and challenges posed by such audits, their importance to the company’s future, and how such projects might be undertaken by other companies.