Investigating the use of design methods by capstone design students at Clemson University

The authors describe a preliminary study to understand the attitude of engineering students regarding the use of design methods in projects to identify the factors either affecting or influencing the use of these methods by novice engineers. A senior undergraduate capstone design course at Clemson University, consisting of approximately fifty students and nine graduate design coaches, was chosen as the unit of analysis. Results from a survey of the class suggest that, though these novice engineers were convinced that design methods they were eager to learn were of use in helping them make better products, they tended not to use them. The stated reasons for not using them were the effort required to implement the methods, to understand how and when to use the methods, and the pressure to deliver results in a short duration. Recommendations from this study can be useful in designing effective design education programs and to develop more designer-friendly design methods.     

Dilemmas and outcomes of professional identity construction among students of human resource management

Using a sample of final year undergraduates, this article examines how HRM students construct a sense of professional identity over the course of their degree. While students' original decision to enter HR rarely altered at university, their expectations of what ‘doing HRM’ constituted sometimes changed radically from the need to fit their core values with their occupational expectations and learning experiences. The emergence of different ways of achieving this fit yielded several types of HRM identity. The implications of this fragmenting of student identities for the HR profession and HRM teaching are evaluated.     

A destination VAT for CIS trade

This paper was originally produced as a co-operative study between the Fiscal Affairs Department and the European II Department of the International Monetary Fund. It is intended for inclusion in a special issue on fiscal policy of the journal MOCT-MOST, Economic Policy in Transitional Economies (Kluwer Academic Publishers). The authors would like to thank Henri Lorie, of the European II Department, and John Crotty and James Walsh, of the Fiscal Affairs Department, for their extensive contributions to the analysis. They also wish to thank the numerous staff members of the two departments who made factual contributions to this effort.     

An assessment of country of origin effects under alternative presentation formats

Empirical research concerning the effects of country of origin (COO) on consumers’ evaluative reactions to products has produced mixed and sometimes inconsistent results. Potential explanations for this situation include differences in the countries considered, populations sampled, products investigated, availability of product cues other than COO, the format in which the product cues were presented to the subjects, and the types of evaluative reactions considered. The authors present the results of three experiments designed to investigate the impact of three presentation formats (i.e., single cue, explicit multiple cues, and implicit multiple cues) on COO effects for four evaluative reactions (i.e., perceived quality, product evaluations other than quality, affect, and purchase intentions). COO effects were strongest for the single-cue format and weakest for the implicit multiple-cues condition. Perception of product quality was most strongly affected by COO, followed by product evaluations other than quality; COO had its smallest effect on purchase intention. Implications of these results and future research directions are discussed. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Indiana University. His work has appeared in many journals including theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, Industrial Marketing Management, International Marketing Review, Management International Review, Psychology and Marketing, andJournal of Health Care Marketing, as well as conference proceedings. His research interests include consumer inference and decision-making processes, research methods, export marketing, and competitive strategy. He received his MBA from Notre Dame and his Ph.D. from Indiana University. His research interests include consumer choice processes, consumer response to advertising, and marketing communications. His work has been published in theJournal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Affairs, Psychology and Marketing, and elsewhere. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Administration from Purdue University. His research interests include buyer-seller negotiations, channel relationships, and marketing strategy. His work has appeared in theJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, andJournal of Consumer Research.     

Optimal inflation policy

This paper considers the problem of optimal long-run monetary policy. It shows that optimal inflation policy involves trading off two quite different considerations. First, increases in the rate of inflation tax the holding of many balances, leading to a deadweight loss as excessive resources are devoted to economizing on cash balances. Second, increases in the rate of inflation raise capital intensity. As long as the economy has a capital stock short of the golden rule level, increases in capital intensity raise the level of consumption. Ignoring the second consideration leads to the common recommendation that the money growth rate be set so that the nominal interest rate is zero. Taking it into account can lead to significant modifications in the ‘full liquidity rule’. Interactions of inflation policy with financial intermediation and taxation are also considered. The results taken together suggest that inflation can have important welfare effects, and that optimal inflation policy is an empirical question, which depends on the structure of the economy.     

free the liverpool six!

Six monetarists are wrongly accused of maverick economics. Martin Summers, research associate at the Institute of Economic Affairs, investigates the case of the 'Liverpool Six' and reviews the history of their fight for sound monetary policy, concluding that the Chancellor should review their case.     

The engine of growth or its handmaiden?

This paper presents an analysis of time-series data for the countries in the Summers-Heston (1991) data set, in an attempt to ascertain the evidence for or against the export-led growth hypothesis. We find that standard methods of detecting export-led growth using Granger-causality tests may give misleading results if imports are not included in the system being analyzed. For this reason, our main statistical tool is the measure of conditional linear feedback developed by Geweke (1984), which allows us to examine the relationship between export growth and income growth while controlling for the growth of imports. These measures have two additional features which make them attractive for our work. First, they go beyond meredetection of evidence for export-led growth, to provide a measurement of itsstrength. Second, they enable us to determine the temporal pattern of the response of income to exports. In some cases export-led growth is a long-run phenomenon, in the sense that export promotion strategies adopted today have their strongest effect after eight to 16 years. In other cases the opposite is true; exports have their greatest influence in the short run (less than four years). We find modest support for the export-led growth hypothesis, if “support” is taken to mean a unidirectional causal ordering. Conditional on import growth, we find a causal ordering from export growth to income growth in 30 of the 126 countries analyzed; 25 have the reverse ordering. Using a weaker notion of “support”—stronger conditional feedback from exports to income than vice versa, 65 of the 126 countries support the export-led growth hypothesis, although the difference in strength is small. Finally, we find that for the “Asian Tiger” countries of the Pacific Rim, the relationship between export growth and output growth becomes clearer when conditioned on human capital and investment growth as well as import growth.     

DOES FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT PROMOTE ECONOMIC GROWTH? EVIDENCE FROM EAST ASIA AND LATIN AMERICA

Although there is considerable evidence on the link between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth in developing countries, causal patterns of the two variables has not been investigated yet with a reliable procedure. This article provides an empirical assessment of the issue by using data for 11 economies in East Asia and Latin America. Although FDI is expected to boost host economic growth, it is shown that the extent to which FDI is growth-enhancing appears to depend on country-specific characteristics. Particularly, FDI tends to be more likely to promote economic growth when host countries adopt liberalized trade regime, improve education and thereby human capital conditions, encourage export-oriented FDI, and maintain macroeconomic stability.