Digital Opportunities and the Missing Link for Developing Countries

The spread of digital information and communication technologiesis enabling firms to implement electronic commerce. Many expectthat the implementation of new means of trading internationally,especially using the Internet to support electronic commerce,will facilitate the entry of firms in developing countries intointernational markets. This paper assesses this claim. The analysisshows that the capacity to gain from the availability of thenew technologies involves more than a reduction of the technologicaldivide between (and within) countries. The institutional foundationsfor building capabilities that enable firms to absorb the newtechnological systems must also be in place. It is imperativethat measures to develop electronic commerce and to devise broadertechnological leap-frogging strategies are embedded within theframework of appropriate institutions and development goals.Failure to do so is likely to produce enclaves of developmentthat will persist.     

Return Dynamics when Persistence is Unobservable

This paper proposes a new theory of the sources of time-varying second (and higher) moments in financial time series. The key idea is that fully rational agents must infer the stochastic degree of persistence of fundamental shocks. Endogenous changes in their uncertainty determine the evolution of conditional moments of returns. The model accounts for the principal observed features of volatility dynamics and implies some new ones. Most strikingly, it implies a relationship between ex post trends, or momentum, and changes in volatility.     

Bootstrapping in small firms: An empirical analysis of change over time

While bootstrapping is widely utilized as a strategic practice of small firms and has been regarded in the entrepreneurship literature as an important topic of study, little has been done to link bootstrapping to organizational theory. This paper presents hypotheses and an empirical study regarding bootstrapping and organizational development for small firms. The results of the study indicate that different types of bootstrapping are utilized at different periods in the life of a small firm, and that the methods utilized coincide to some extent with organizational theory predictions.     

Labor Market Discrimination Against Men with Disabilities in the Year of the ADA

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provides civil rights protections to persons with disabilities, but the debate that preceded passage of the Act was not based on empirical estimates that could be used to measure its performance. This article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990, providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the ADA. The results show large productivity-standardized wage differentials between disabled and nondisabled men that are weakly correlated with the strength of prejudice against different impairments. Physical limitations explain part, but not all, of the wage differentials. The results also show that low employment rates are a more serious problem than wage discrimination for workers with disabilities.     

Debt Maturity and the Effects of Growth Opportunities and Liquidity Risk on Leverage

I test the hypothesis that short debt maturity attenuates thenegative effect of growth opportunities on leverage. Using simultaneousequations with leverage and maturity endogenous, I find strongsupport for an economically significant attenuation effect.The negative effect of growth opportunities on leverage forfirms with all shorter-term debt is less than one-sixth as largeas the effect for firms with all longer-term debt. Short maturityalso increases liquidity risk, however, which negatively affectsleverage. The results suggest that firms trade off the costof underinvestment problems against the cost of liquidity riskwhen choosing short maturity.     

AN ALTERNATIVE METHOD FOR PRICING PORK CARCASSES

Carcass pricing methods provide premium-discount systems which may aid producers to make better production and marketing decisions than will more traditional pricing methods. This paper presents an alternative carcass pricing method which is an extension of the Ikerd-Cramer method. The method appears to yield a more moderate set of price differentials than the current Canadian system. Further research is needed in order to more fully evaluate the two methods. In addition, future research effects might provide results which could be used as a basis to make adjustments in the current Canadian hog pricing system.
Les méthodes pour établir le prix des carcasses comportent des systèmes de prime-réfaction qui, espère-t-on, aideront les producteurs à prendre de meilleures decisions en matière de production et de commercialisation que ne le permettaient les anciennes méthodes. La présente étude porte sur une autre méthode d'établissemcnt du prix des carcasses qui est un prolongement de la méthode d'lkerd-Cramer. Cette méthode semble produire une série d'écarts de prix plus modérés que le système canadien actuel. II faudra pousser davantage les recherches pour évaluer plus complètement les deux méthodes. De plus, les résultats de recherches futures pourraient servir de base pour apporter des ajustements an système d'établissement des prix du pore actuellement en usage au Canada.     

Towards an Historical Model of Services Innovation: The Case of the Insurance Industry, 1700–1914

There has been a recent shift in the historiography of the modern British economy towards an emphasis on the success of the service sector. This article examines one criterion of success, namely innovation, in British insurance between 1700 and 1914. Factors determining innovation are surveyed and comparisons drawn with European insurance. The relevance of existing models of industrial innovation is challenged and a new model is constructed for insurance. This model suggests that insurance innovation ran broadly counter-cyclical to innovation in industry during this period, and was relatively undynamic. The article concludes by speculating about the relationship between industrial growth, liquidity constraints, and innovation in insurance.