International management of R&D: The Swedish Experience

This paper summarizes the results of in-depth case studies of international R&D management in four Swedish multinational corporations. The results suggest that foreign volumes and shares of R&D expenditures are rapidly increasing. Through a rapidly increasing number of foreign acquisitions, foreign R&D laboratories have been added. As part of international rationalization of production, foreign units have been given global product mandates with responsibility both for manufacturing and R&D. In maturing foreign subsidiaries, routine technical activities have often evolved into proper R&D. Tight labour market conditions for engineers in Sweden have made it increasingly necessary to exploit existing technical capacity, regardless of location.
Concurrently, companies face new pressures for international coordination and control of R&D. Coordination is required to reduce product differentiation, to facilitate technology transfer and to ensure the technical and market compatibility of products and components developed at different locations but sold as part of total systems. Drawing on the experience in the four investigated companies, the paper discusses how systems and procedures can be developed to meet the need for coordinated international R&D management.     

Environmental Goods and the Distribution of Income

The paper presents a (theoretical) investigation of the distributional impacts of environmental commodities. It introduces an appropriate framework, defines concepts for measuring benefits and examines the determinants of benefit incidence within this setup. Its emphasis is on methodology and on recognizing the relevant economic variables and information. It turns out that in an equal-preference model the magnitude of the income elasticity of marginal willingness to pay for an environmental good is the crucial variable determining progressivity. It is related to a number of other elasticities which are more easily accessible to an empirical estimation.     

The Effect of Industry, Region, and Time on New Business Survival – A Multi-Dimensional Analysis

We analyze the effect of industry, region, and time on new business survival rates by means of a multi-dimensional approach. The data relate to West German districts in the 1983–2000 period. The survival chances of start-ups tend to be relatively low in industries characterized by a high minimum efficient size and high numbers of entries. We find that regional characteristics play a rather important role and that introducing the regional dimension leads to considerable improvements of the estimation results. The significance of the regional dimension is also reflected in a remarkably high level of neighborhood effects.     

Proposal for Components of Method Design Theories

Gregor and Jones have proposed components for design theories, building on theory concepts from behavioural sciences and prior publications. Their design theory structure addresses IT artefacts in general, not specific to any type, such as constructs, models, methods or instantiations. Their work is an important contribution to the academic discussion of design theories. The authors are building on this and believe that specialised design theory structures for different types of artefacts further increases utility, usability and acceptance of the components for both academia and practise. They have analysed each of the components published by Gregor and Jones and proposed refinements specific to method design artefacts wherever applicable. For each component, they derive evaluation criteria and present examples of method publications fulfilling the criteria. They argue that by presenting method design theories according to this structure the contribution of method design artefacts to the body of knowledge will increase.     

FIRM HETEROGENEITY AND THE LABOR MARKET EFFECTS OF TRADE LIBERALIZATION*

This article develops a model that incorporates workers' fair wage preferences into a general equilibrium framework with heterogeneous firms. In a setting where the wage considered to be fair by workers depends on the productivity of the firm they are working in, we study the determinants of profits, involuntary unemployment and within‐group wage inequality. We use this model to investigate the effects of globalization, thereby pointing to distributional conflicts that have so far not been accounted for: a simultaneous increase of average profits and involuntary unemployment as well as a surge in within‐group wage inequality.     

HOW DO EUROPEANS EVALUATE INCOME DISTRIBUTIONS? AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON HAPPINESS SURVEYS

The purpose of this paper is to measure the evaluation of income inequality by European citizens. Starting from the concept of a social welfare function defined on income distributions the paper estimates the degree and nature of inequality aversion of Europeans. It uses subjective well-being (SWB) as an empirical measure of welfare and estimates how SWB is related to average income and measures of income inequality (from an appropriate class). The estimated relationship is used to determine those inequality measures which qualify as proper representations of people's inequality aversion.     

INTERNATIONAL PRODUCTION,INVESTMENT AND BORROWING WITH EXCHANGE RATE RISK AND FUTURES MARKETS

In this paper we consider a multinational firm under exchange rate and interest rate risks in a multiperiod model. We analyze the impact of exchange rate uncertainty and the use of currency futures on the risk-averse firm's decisions about home and foreign production. Without any hedging markets exchange rate risk lowers foreign investment and output. However, when futures markets exist, the separation property holds. Introducing another source of uncertainty, such as the interest rate, which is nondiversifiable, affects the production in both countries, i.e., the separation property does not hold. However, we show that the adverse effect of the missing financial market (to hedge against this additional risk) disappears when international borrowing is available.     

Antecedents and consequences of Franchisee satisfaction in the U.S. restaurant industry

This study surveyed 3,177 franchisees from 58 restaurant brands with the purpose of examining the antecedents and consequences of franchisee satisfaction in the U.S. food service sector. Findings indicate that a high level of franchisee income and franchisor care and trust are associated with a high level of franchisee satisfaction. Education had a negative impact on franchisees' satisfaction, suggesting that the higher the level of franchisee education, the less franchisees were satisfied with the franchise. Furthermore, the higher the franchisees' satisfaction was, the stronger the franchisees' intention to remain in the franchise system was, and the higher the likelihood of recommending the franchise to others.     

A wearable sales assistant: capturing dynamic nonverbal communication behaviors using sensor technology

Marketing Letters - Sales research has focused on enhancing selling effectiveness and performance, which largely depends on the abilities and capabilities of the sales force. Interpersonal skills...     

Market structure and multiperiod hedging

This paper develops a multiperiod hedging model for a competitive risk-averse international firm. We study the optimal sequential hedging strategy and analyze the impact of the structure of available risk sharing markets on the firm's export decision. As a main result, we find that the number of risk sharing markets critically affects the export level while the timing of these markets is inconsequential.